How to Collect Employee Feedback

Picture this: A recent reorg has placed more responsibilities on a small team. Although everyone is optimistic about the long-term change, team members feel overburdened without enough time or manpower to complete tasks in the time allotted. Morale and engagement drops, and production soon follows. A valuable employee or two leaves, and now the entire department is in a tailspin. 

What went wrong here? One fatal mistake was neglecting to collect feedback from the employees. Had the leader known the cause for the low morale, they could have addressed it directly by shifting responsibilities, hiring an additional employee or advocating for more reasonable timetables. But sometimes introduced to improve employee satisfaction actually end up aggravating the source of dissatisfaction by putting another expectation and time burden on a team that was already spread thin and strapped for time.

There is real danger in that too-true saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” So how can leaders know if their workers are happy and engaged, or why they’re not? You ask them.

This sounds straightforward, but unfortunately, sincere employee feedback can be hard to get. Take surveys, for example. Surveys are a go-to method for collecting feedback, but many employees are not crazy about filling them out and a whopping 80% of them don’t think their manager would act on the results. So how can leaders best solicit honest employee feedback they so urgently need to ensure worker satisfaction? Here are some tips for developing a comprehensive strategy for effective feedback collection.

Examine Your Feedback Track Record

Sometimes, looking back is the critical first step to moving forward and this is, of course, one of those times. Before diving headfirst into a new round of feedback collection, examine your past efforts. How frequently have you asked for feedback in the past and if so, through what methods? What was your response rate? What was done with the responses?

Analyzing the effort put into the collection, quality and quantity of responses and the resulting changes made (if you make any at all) puts you in a position to make informed decisions on how to be more effective in the future.

Identify Your Successes and Roadblocks

Once you’ve got a clear view of your past feedback collections, identify where efforts paid off and where they fell short. Then ask the all-important question: Why?

For example, why has no one utilized the designated open-door office hours? It’s possible the leader hasn’t established relationships built on trust and employees fear they will be seen as needy and high-maintenance.

Why did your most recent survey have only a 20% response rate? Perhaps employees weren’t given enough time to complete it or it was too long. It may not have been promoted well enough, either.

Why were the survey responses vague and frivolous? Maybe employees were under the impression responses wouldn’t be taken seriously, or were worried about retaliation or confrontation if they made complaints known.

Taking the time to determine all these whys can allow you to make steps to mitigate them in the future. Conversely, knowing your successful efforts to leverage feedback into change paid off can be leveraged for future efforts. If leaders can point to positive action taken due to their previous feedback, employees will feel more motivated to be earnest and honest.

Check Your Attitude and Atmosphere

How leaders approach soliciting and receiving feedback will impact how employees approach giving it. If leaders put feedback in their “they’re-making-me-do-this-so-quick-just-get-it-done” side work bucket, guess which bucket employees will put it in? The same one.

Leaders must have the humility to assume there is room for improvement, and the willingness to hear about it from peers and subordinates. This isn’t just sentiment—it's a fact. A study published in the Journal of Management found humility in CEOs results in high-performance within their teams. A humble leader knows how to care, listen to their employees and discern without their ego getting in the way. A humble leader invites feedback.

This logic translates to the workplace at large. Atmospheres that allow for open and honest communication—whether in meetings, performance reviews or even about the company’s health and trajectory—will struggle to solicit the kind of valuable feedback that moves organizations forward. It makes sense. Even with the best feedback strategy, you’ll have a hard time drawing honest feedback out of employees if they’re accustomed to keeping their opinions and ideas to themselves.

Lay the groundwork for fruitful feedback by ensuring leadership’s attitude and your workplace atmosphere are conducive to open and honest conversation as the norm.

Determine Which Feedback Collection Channel is Best

There are a number of ways to collect feedback that can be effective—and loads of good advice on the subject. Surveys, performance reviews, suggestion boxes, office hours, and one-on-ones with leaders are all common methods. Beyond that, the possibilities for creating effective feedback channels are quite literally endless. Which methods and what frequency make sense for your company will depend on a variety of factors—like the size of your organization, whether or not workers are in one location or dispersed across multiple offices, employees’ current relationship with leadership and state of company culture, to name just a few.

A small company with centrally-located employees may try lunches with leaders at which the explicit goal is finding areas of improvement. Large global organizations looking to get a snapshot of employee satisfaction on the whole may choose to create an anonymous online survey.

The method options are many, but the starting point is the same: an earnest desire and drive to know what's going on.

Know the status of employee satisfaction. Know where there is struggle and why. Know where your employees need leaders to do better.

Again, "you don’t know what you don’t know" is a very risk-laden reality. Collecting feedback is the business of finding out those things. 

Final Thoughts: Follow Through

We do the work of employee feedback collection to avoid disengagement, to prioritize employee satisfaction by proactively finding out where we can improvement. A surefire way to enter the taco Tuesday tailspin is to develop your feedback strategy, execute the plan, have employees spend their time and effort and then end up do nothing. Collecting feedback will only make a difference if leaders act on it. Feedback brings awareness, but only follow through can bring improvement.