Employee feedback is one of the most effective tools to assess the internal operations of an organization. The simple act of inviting feedback sends a message to employees that their voices are valued and that leaders are working to find ways to improve the employee experience. Encouraging feedback and taking it well are essential steps to ensure employees feel safe expressing their opinions. This result speaks to the importance of training people leaders to cultivate psychological safety in their teams. Psychological safety refers to a belief that one can voice their concerns, ask questions, speak up or make mistakes without the risk of punishment or humiliation. Projects with greater psychological safety have been shown to have a greater likelihood of success and innovation because employees are more comfortable speaking up and sharing their thoughts. Conversely, a lack of psychological safety in the workplace leads to disengagement, staff turnover, recruiting costs, and other adverse effects.

To get feedback from employees, organizations need to build avenues for employee feedback. One of the most common methods to collect feedback is through an employee engagement survey, which can be deployed on a regular basis to assess workforce sentiment and can be designed to create opportunities for employees to comment on open-ended questions. Annually, HEC members are invited to participate in our complimentary employee engagement survey program. This year, 31 member companies participated, resulting in 2,793 employees sharing their sentiments regarding various aspects of their experience working for their organization.

Listed below are key findings from HEC’s employee engagement survey specifically pertaining to feedback.

Organizations can also build other channels to collect employee feedback beyond employee engagement surveys. Some additional methods to gather feedback from employees include:

• Onboarding surveys: Ask new employees targeted questions that will identify the quality and length of the process, challenges employees face, relationships with colleagues and managers, and what may be missing from your onboarding program.
• Manager check-ins: Train managers to regularly check in with employees and escalate feedback wherever necessary to ensure each employee feels heard.
• HR contacts: Ensure employees are aware of a second person they can contact in case the reason for a complaint involves an interpersonal conflict with managerial staff.
• Anonymous feedback: Create a forum for employees to submit feedback anonymously (e.g., an employee suggestion box) so that fear of retaliation will not prevent them from speaking out.
• Stay interviews: Check in with employees who continue to stay with the company to clarify the reasons they are satisfied with their positions and any insights they have on what can be improved.

Collecting employee feedback is just the start of the process. What comes next is what will solidify the company’s commitment to its employees. This next step is to implement change around the feedback that has been provided.  If employees do not see their concerns and suggestions acted upon, they may conclude that submitting feedback is not worth the effort and stop utilizing the methods an organization has put in place. Because of this, it is essential that leaders regularly review the feedback that is generated from employees and use it to design targeted interventions after a pain point has been uncovered. Oftentimes, the feedback gathered can be overwhelming, and difficult to identify where to begin. A best practice to go about implementing the feedback is to first choose a clear area of focus and identify themes in the feedback provided to ensure you are implementing meaningful change. Then, identify the owners of the actions and those who will be responsible for carrying out the change. It is also important to align actions to business needs and goals. And lastly, clearly define the resources needed to make the change.