TLDR? Employee feedback is useless if you don't know how to learn from it. Start by promoting a "feedback culture", and using data to make meaningful changes.
Introduction
As businesses face unprecedented challenges in 2023 and beyond, employee feedback will continue to be a valuable resource that can fuel organizational growth, innovation, and employee engagement... if handled right.
In today's blog post, we'll be discussing good habits for analyzing employee engagement data, and how your organization can benefit from developing a "feedback culture".
Are you fumbling employee feedback?
After surveying over 4,000 employees in 11 countries, The Workforce Institute noted that companies are failing to properly assess and act on employee feedback: 86% of employees reported that they do not feel all people within the organization are equally heard.
It should go without saying that simply collecting feedback is not enough. To truly benefit from employees' insights, your organization should encourage active feedback, uncover reasons why employees may hold back from sharing, analyze responses thoughtfully, and most importantly, implement meaningful changes.
Nurturing a "feedback culture"
Before even looking at the data, it is crucial that your organization has spent the necessary time promoting a culture where people feel safe to open up about the problems they are facing at work.
Ineffective feedback strategies can make disengagement spiral out of control:
If your employees don't feel heard, they may give up on trying to improve anything, and you'll be left wondering why your employees don't care about the company. But what if your employees cared all along, and you just didn't listen properly?
A feedback culture is the foundation of meaningful organizational change, because it places value in honesty, respect, and collaborative problem-solving.
Here's how to start prioritizing a feeback culture:
Offer regular or permanently open opportunities for feedback
Send out surveys to expand insight on a specific topic
Spend focused time in one-on-one conversations
Ensure diverse opinions are heard
Demonstrate inclusivity in your approach and follow-through
Ensure you always follow through with meaningful action
When employees understand that their feedback is valued, they are more likely to provide honest and constructive insights.
Now it's time to collect the data
We recommend collecting real-time employee engagement data, to see exactly when and where disengagement is starting to grow.
Companies can employ a variety of tools, such as online surveys or dedicated employee feedback platforms (Like the Blaze Digital Compass), to streamline the data collection process.
These tools not only simplify data gathering but also provide the necessary features to segment and categorize feedback based on various parameters like departments, job roles, or demographics.
Organizing feedback data in a systematic manner ensures that the information is easily accessible for analysis.
Using data in meaningful ways
Data analysis plays a pivotal role in deriving actionable insights from employee feedback. However, if you aren't using data to solve the right problems, you may be wasting your efforts.
Don't worry though. Once you have identified which problems are worth tackling first, the rest becomes much easier, especially if you are using an employee platform: it likely has plenty of tools that can identify patterns, trends, and correlations within the feedback data.
For instance, if your employee survey responses reveal that most feedback instances relate to low energy, you can then filter through data to uncover which department, role, or demographic segment faced the biggest challenges with motivation.
Answers like these will help you create change that actually has an impact, because you will know exactly where to focus your attention (and budget).
Conclusion
Overall, it could all come down to whether your organization truly values learning and changing based on experience. Does leadership value listening to all employees equally? Maybe the problem starts at this foundational level.
Or, maybe your organization needs help uncovering the right problems at the right times. Employee engagement tools can help you collect and analyze feedback so that you don't waste money, time, and effort in the wrong places.
Collecting real-time employee engagement data through a dedicated feedback platform might be the missing link to identifying areas of disengagement and deriving actionable insights.
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