For any organization to work better and constantly improve its culture, it’s crucial for them to collect employee feedback. It is an effective method to pinpoint the problems an employee is facing and an organization can correct its path as they grow by solving these problems. It also increases employee retention by keeping them happy and builds trust that promotes a great culture in the organization.
Many employees avoid giving feedback because they think they won’t be heard or it will negatively affect their image in the organization. So to make sure an organization gets honest feedback from all its employees, it’s important to choose the correct method for collecting feedback and encouraging it in the organization.
In this article, we have discussed some of the ways you can collect feedback and what are their pros and cons of collecting feedback from employees.
Traditional Ways to Collect Employee Feedback(and Their Problems)
These are some of the common ways that were used to get feedback for the longest time, but as we shifted towards a remote culture, these methods proved insufficient because of differences in the remote and office culture. Let’s discuss some of them
Regular 1-on-1s
For feedback through regular 1-on-1s, an employee hops on a meeting with the manager to discuss their problems. A manager asks the relevant questions to understand the blockers and work on them later on. This method is interactive and effective for giving feedback to employees but is ineffective for feedback collection due to the following issues:
- Not Anonymous
As the feedback process is not anonymous, employees may not feel comfortable sharing their honest opinion or answering the questions correctly. It makes the feedback irrelevant and is damaging to the culture of an organization in the long run as the company won’t have a clear idea of what to work upon.
- Time-Consuming Process
Regular 1-on-1s are time intensive and as the number of employees increases in an organization, it becomes impossible to conduct an appropriate amount of 1-on-1s. In such a case, an employee will feel uninterested in sharing their feedback, affecting the employee’s trust in the organization. It will also decrease employee retention as they may feel that they are not heard enough.
Feedback Meetings
To solve the problem of time-intensive 1-on-1s, a feedback meeting can be an excellent option to collect employee feedback. It is better because employees get support from each other regarding certain issues which makes it easy to convey problems. Even though it is an excellent way to build a feedback-oriented culture, there are problems with feedback meetings as well.
- Can get biased
As a lot of employees are facing the same issue, employees’ feedback may get skewed towards certain problems. It keeps the small issues unnoticed that can pile up later on to create further problems.
- Matching Everyone’s Time
During remote work or even in an office, it can be difficult for a lot of employees to join the meeting at the same time as others. In that case, their feedback won’t be considered and the employees will feel unheard and isolated from the decision-making.
- Employees Do Not Feel Heard
Some employees may not be able to voice their concerns in a meeting as they might be a little shy in group meetings or have a contradictory opinion. An organization will miss out on a diverse set of opinions on the same problem in such a situation.
Suggestions Box
Suggestions Box can be a great way to collect employee feedback from those who are not very outspoken. Due to its anonymous nature, many employees will give diverse feedback and speak about smaller problems as well to avoid piling them up.
As great as this method is, there is a lot of friction because an employee has to first write down the whole feedback and then post it on a relevant URL or in person in the office. Also, an employee is not sure whether his opinions are even seen or not by anyone through this method.
EngageWith Pulse Surveys
EngageWith is a Slack and Microsoft teams app that increases employee engagement and retention through its various features. This tool is oriented toward building a people-first culture and creates a sense of belonging among employees.
EngageWith Pulse Surveys is one of the features to get employee feedback. It is designed while aiming to build a feedback culture and solve the issues that you usually encounter while relying on traditional methods.
How Does It Work?
Pulse Surveys is an anonymous feedback tool that works in three steps:
- Send A Pulse
You can send a pulse to all your employees or specific members with questions to answer.
- Collect Feedback
It collects all the answers and compiles them to show the results on a dashboard.
- Better Decisions
A decision is taken based on all the data collected so that everyone’s opinion is considered while making the decision and to collectively come up with the best solution.
Click here to add EngageWith and send a pulse right away
Why Is It Better?
- Less Friction
As EngageWith can be used right within your workspace on Slack or MS teams, it reduces friction for employees to make it easier for them to voice their opinions. They are much more involved in the decision-making and become a part of the feedback culture. It makes it ever better than annual surveys for employee engagement.
- Get Effective Feedback
As friction reduces, engagement from employees increases. They are not supposed to write long answers, instead, they just have to click the right options and their opinion will be taken into account automatically. Even if they have to write they don’t have to write long explanations that increase engagement by 10 times.
- Incognito For Better Anonymous Feedback
You can even run anonymous feedback for sensitive topics and get unbiased feedback. It not only contributes to building a good feedback system but employees feel much more comfortable sharing their honest opinions. Read to know more about the importance of anonymous feedback.
- Template For Effective Responses
Pulse Surveys allow you to choose from 50+ pre-built templates to ask better questions. It leads to better responses and better feedback to work upon. It also makes it easy for employees to respond as the questions are designed to bring better responses without much hassle.
Add EngageWith to collect employee feedback and increase employee engagement by 10 times here.
Benefits Of Pulse Surveys
Trust is fuel to any organization as it makes collaboration smoother for efficient work. By giving employees a way to voice their opinion, you make them a part of a decision and show that you trust them to make a huge cultural difference in the organization. It creates a culture where employees feel like they belong instead of just doing their job.
- Open Feedback Culture
An open feedback culture improves the organization at each level as everyone gets comfortable with listening to and working on the feedback. It gives employees room for growth and an organization also gets to know the exact pain points to work upon.
Employee feedback is crucial to the growth of any organization, but it is even more important to get honest feedback on time. For that, it is preferred to use a method that’s convenient for employees and makes them feel they are heard. Only then the end goal of employee feedback is accomplished. By working on employee feedback, an organization can create the best environment for employees to retain their talent for a long time.
To collect feedback from employees for better growth of the organization, install EngageWith in your workplace now.
To collect anonymous feedback, you can use EngageWith Pulse Surveys. It is helpful in collecting opinions on sensitive issues and getting unbiased feedback. In this way, everyone gets to voice their honest opinion and feel heard.
For the growth of any organization, working on the problems that employees might be facing is the first step. And to have a clear idea of what to work upon, honest feedback from employees is important.
To collect continuous feedback, you can run EngageWith Pulse Surveys from time to time. It has a higher response rate than feedback forms and comes with templates to ask the right questions for better feedback.
