Listen to Learn: Creating a Space for Feedback

Listen to Learn: Creating a Space for Feedback

Human-centric culture is key to attracting and retaining top talent. It helps your staff feel valued and is critical for job satisfaction and employee engagement. In a survey by Hubspot, 69% of employees mentioned they would work harder if they felt better appreciated. Opening a channel for employees to contribute to building a better business and a more enjoyable workplace through idea generation is an excellent employee engagement strategy.

Sourcing ideas from your team members can highlight aspects of your business that you lack visibility or time to address. Alternately, sourcing feedback from your employees gives you access to ideas created within a broad range of unique employee perspectives that differ from yours. Instead of hiring innovation consultants, ask your team to push the boundaries of their creativity and see what happens!

 Check out these employee engagement strategies to create a better human-centric culture within your company: 

1. Create a space and a channel for feedback: 

 A human-centric culture acknowledges different levels of employees' comfort and trust in sharing ideas and feedback. We suggest your leaders provide in-person feedback. Alternately, we suggest video calls or phone calls. E-mails and text messages are an acceptable last resort for more casual, positive feedback. Software solutions that provide 2-way feedback between employees and employers provide great frameworks to integrate feedback at a grander scale and compliment and even guide more personal feedback and recognition activities. 

Leaders alone can affect up to 70% of employee engagement levels. Feedback must come across as genuine and not as prefabricated content. We suggest leaders use different mediums to provide feedback.

If you are about to start giving feedback a try, we suggest setting SMART goals and identifying when and/or where you want to provide, request, or receive feedback. As a leader, you always want to harvest constructive feedback. Remember, feedback can be positive- be proactive in giving both positive and constructive feedback to those around you. 

2. Highlight decisions made on feedback 

One common complaint from our client's employees is that feedback and ideas often fall into a "black hole" - nothing happens! By highlighting feedback-inspired decisions, you embrace the importance of feedback in your organization to other leaders and employees alike. You also showcase the potential benefits and impact these have within your organization.

In a human-centric culture, employees should have a space to voice ideas and feedback. Leaders should set expectations for how these are expressed and addressed. Putting employee feedback and ideas into action strengthens your human-centric culture.

 3. Foster collaboration

 A human-centric culture will most likely improve workplace collaboration. When you provide well-intentioned, clear, and constructive feedback, you build trust between employees and leaders alike. Unlike organizations where individuals and teams work in silos, a human-centric culture provides an environment conducive to collaboration. Collaborative environments can result in great and sometimes unusual synergies that make your organization better and stronger.

4. Get the ball rolling

Remember, good intentions, ideas, and feedback do not have much merit unless they are acted upon. As in most cases, starting small is a great way to get the ball rolling. Identify an area of opportunity to gather or provide intentional feedback to develop employee potential and create more effective teams.

When setting up your feedback/idea plan, consider:

• What is the goal of my feedback?
• What is the action/constructive portion of my feedback?
• Who provides feedback? Who receives feedback?
• How often does it occur?
• What channel/vehicle will I use to offer and gather feedback? 

If you cannot take action on a specific idea or topic, make sure you communicate it to your team members. This is better than letting their input fall into the black hole we referenced earlier.

We suggest you consider receiving or providing feedback as a gift! Consider an appropriate time to provide or receive it and avoid doing it when you or the other party involved are troubled. Let us know what other things you consider when providing, requesting, or receiving feedback in the comment section below!