Business growth is built on a foundation of continuous improvement. That means building processes that encourage improvement, from giving employees the agency to find problems and test solutions to providing professional development opportunities to expand your employees’ skillsets. Both employees and employers need data to make the right decisions in allocating resources to improvement. One of the best ways to get that data is by soliciting employee feedback.

The benefits of collecting employee feedback go further than helping improve processes. If you know how to solicit and use employee feedback, you can build trust, instill a sense of community, develop plans of action, and keep everyone working toward the same goal.

Give Everyone a Voice

Employee engagement is a concern of many employers today. One of the best ways to foster engagement is to make everyone feel important and to give everyone a say in company policies. Soliciting feedback from employees is one of the simplest ways to make everyone feel heard and valued, especially if they end up seeing real changes arise as a result of their feedback.

Giving everyone the confidence to speak, and respecting what they have to say, also leads to innovation. Good ideas often come from unlikely places and from people who deal with a particular aspect of the business every day but don’t have the confidence to speak.

With a framework in place for collecting feedback, and with the confidence and mutual respect that arises from such a workplace culture, you’ll see improved job satisfaction and retention. The employees who quit are the ones who can see no path to improvement. They feel unsatisfied, and they feel like things will never get better. Create a culture of feedback and action, and fewer employees will find themselves in that hopeless position.

Identify Problems You Can’t See

As much as you try to check in with your employees and keep tabs on projects, you can’t be everywhere at once. There could be problems brewing that you aren’t aware of, or issues that seem small to the employees on the ground that, were you aware of them, you could see turning into big problems if not addressed.

Some employees might not be comfortable bringing up these issues. They might feel like they should be able to handle them on their own. But in a business where feedback is encouraged and respected, where employees feel safe raising issues, asking for feedback is the best way to spot these ground-level issues before they can grow into something unmanageable. 

Build Trust

A workplace can’t function without trust. We have to collaborate, share knowledge, give credit, take responsibility. We have to treat everyone with the same respect no matter their job title. Taking even critical feedback seriously and acting on it without reprisal builds trust and an atmosphere of openness and honesty. Fearing reprisal for negative feedback is one of the main reasons employees are hesitant to raise issues. Demonstrating that you can turn negative feedback into positive action builds trust that reverberates throughout the organization.

Collecting Feedback

Marketing today is omnichannel. It used to be that everyone read the newspaper, so buying a single newspaper ad was all you needed to build brand awareness. Now that customers are dispersed across a number of channels—print, television, websites, email, messaging apps, social media platforms—and different customers prefer different channels, marketers have to engage customers across all channels.

Collecting customer feedback should also be done across a number of channels to maximize engagement. Some employees would prefer to fill out an anonymous online form, others want to drop a piece of paper into a suggestion box, some would rather participate in a focus group. Team meetings or informal conversations might provide a more relaxed venue for self-expression. Take advantage of all of these to paint the broadest picture possible of what your business looks like to the people who work there.

Using Feedback

Collecting feedback is only the first step. Until employees see results, they can only assume their feedback is being stored in the circular file. Take steps to demonstrate that anonymous feedback is truly anonymous, build trust by accepting criticism without retaliation, and report results of surveys and focus groups transparently.

From there, analyze the results to determine their accuracy and develop a plan of action alongside relevant stakeholders. Collecting feedback helps build a positive work atmosphere, but involving employees in solutions goes even further.

Your Business Under a Microscope

It’s not always easy to see what’s right in front of you. Challenges that often seem to be the result of people performing poorly are often actually the result of flawed processes. If you fix the processes, you don’t have to fix the people. Collecting employee feedback is one of the best ways to identify the issues affecting day-to-day productivity, even ones you didn’t know existed, and to come up with a plan for improvement.