Five Tips for Gathering Better Employee Feedback

August 4, 2011

Startup and expansion stage companies spend a lot of time focusing on customer development and engagement, soliciting feedback from their early clients to make adjustments that will strengthen their business and its products.

That’s a good thing. But how many of those companies execute the same kind of initiatives with their employees?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a perfect world, all expansion stage businesses would.

Companies at that point in their development are usually operating without an HR department, making employee feedback and engagement the responsibility of CEOs and their management teams. And while they have a lot on their plates already, soliciting employee feedback needs to be part of every company’s best practices processes.

Why? As Tim Donnelly pointed out in an article for Inc. last year, no matter how big or small your organization is, employees who don’t feel like they have a voice can drain the oxygen out of other employees, lower productivity rates, and cause increased turnover. Encouraging employee feedback gives them a voice and makes them feel more invested in the company.

Of course, it’s not always easy to elicit honest and valuable information from your employees. That’s why you need a strategic plan in place to acquire the kind of feedback that will help your company grow.

Jason Blais’ On Recruiting blog provides some great tips that will help companies encourage real employee feedback. Below, I’ve included Blais’ tips and expanded on them with my own suggestions.

Here are five ways to improve your employee survey process:

1. Start small

Make your next survey extremely short and easy to complete. Once you receive the results of each survey, provide immediate feedback, and be sure not to share data and comments that might identify a specific employee. Your employees need to trust that their responses will be both anonymous and acted upon.

That last point is particularly critical, writes Morehead director of research services Sara Baker Stokes. If you don’t act on employee suggestions, then you’ve done very little to actually improve engagement or build trust.

2. Provide anonymity

It’s critical to explain the importance of the information that you’re asking your employees to share. And they need to be assured that you’ll keep their responses anonymous and won’t hold feedback against them. If you want truly helpful information, your employees need to have absolute trust in your discretion and receptiveness to potentially negative feedback.

 

3. Include every employee

Particularly when your company is in its early stages of growth, every single employee should be involved in the feedback process. Excluding a particular group of employees, says National Business Research Institute, may mean you miss out on fertile sources of information. After all, you never know where your best ideas will come from. Sometimes, they’re as likely to come from your Marketing Coordinator as your VP of Sales.

Including everyone in the survey process will foster a team mentality and indicate that you value everyone’s opinions, regardless of seniority. That sort of inclusivity will show how serious you are about soliciting genuine employee feedback.

4. Share results ASAP

In order to develop and support trust with your employees, always share the results of your surveys. Your employee feedback will not always paint your company in a positive light, but hiding those facts will discourage your employees from sharing flaws they see within your organization. That’s one of the 10 biggest mistakes companies make with employee engagement surveys, suggests Becker’s Leigh Page.

In order to share feedback in a timely matter, set a deadline for completing your surveys, and never miss it. If employees see that others are sharing helpful and honest feedback, they will be more inclined to do so as well.

5. Ask both open and closed-ended questions

Although open-ended questions are helpful in generating qualitative data, they can be difficult to analyze. Closed-ended questions will allow you to analyze the data more efficiently and look for patterns. For each piece of information that you’re seeking feedback on, try to include one closed and one open-ended question.

Feedback management company Vovici offers up some great tips for designing and implementing both open and closed-ended questions, discussing when and how to use both.

Each of those five tips should help you improve your employee feedback programs and find out what your employees really think about your company.

If you follow the steps above, the value and quality of your employee feedback should increase, allowing your company to grow over time and improve employee retention. Not sure where to start? Begin by determining the types of feedback that are most important to you right now and formulate a strategy for acting on them.

Diana Martz is a Recruiting Associate at OpenView Labs, where she is responsible for recruitment for the firm and its portfolio companies. For more from Diana, you can check out her blog, Happy Hiring, and follow her on Twitter @dianawmartz.

VP, Human Capital

<strong>Diana Martz</strong> is Vice President, Human Capital at<a href="http://www.ta.com/">TA Associates</a>. She was previously the Director of Talent at OpenView.