Your business has always listened to your customers’ opinions, whether through reviews, social media comments, or surveys. Yet it’s likely that your business has rarely been listening to your staff’s opinions.
Poor employee satisfaction can cause high staff turnover, costing you dearly in recruitment and onboarding.
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Gone are the days when you only heard employees’ thoughts during annual performance reviews.
You must now listen to your staff all year round as they can offer insightful suggestions on improving workflows at every stage, such as how to create an electronic signature in Word in the quickest possible way.
But how do you build a continuous feedback model that works for everyone? How can you ensure that your staff’s opinions are always heard?
What is continuous employee feedback?
Continuous employee feedback involves creating a two-way system where your management and supervisors can receive regular feedback from your employees and provide employees with feedback on their performance.
Employee feedback can cover staff views on everything from working conditions to remuneration to implementing new tools and processes.
By implementing a continuous feedback system, you can give employees the recognition they deserve, provide feedback on areas where they could improve, and make them feel more valued. This improves morale and increases employee retention rates.
Listening to what your staff thinks and feels can mean that you remain “in touch” with all your workforce and can often gain insights into improving productivity and efficiency that you may otherwise miss.
How to build a continuous employee feedback model in 9 steps
1. Communicate your plans
Let everyone know what you’re planning. That starts with all management and C-suite executives and extends to frontline workers. Having everyone invested is a crucial first step; use company communication platforms, hold workshops and presentations, and ensure everyone knows what’s involved.
2. Identify the tech and systems you’ll use
The last thing you want is for any feedback model to be labor-intensive. You want it to be easy for everyone to provide feedback, and you want it to be easy for you to collect and analyze data, both quantitative and qualitative.
Automate where possible. You could automatically send a survey each month to collect feedback and comments. With the right tools, staff will increasingly want to send you their thoughts.
3. Train the relevant people
You don’t just want to create a feedback model. You want to create a feedback loop where ideas and constructive criticism move in all directions.
So you may need to train some of your managers in delivering constructive criticism to workers empathically. The last thing you want is to build something that’s designed to help improve morale, only to see it demotivate some of your staff.
4. Provide omnidirectional feedback
Good feedback should go in every direction. This includes elements of peer feedback. Managers should be able to give feedback to other managers, frontline staff their fellow workers, etc.
Having a 360-degree overview of every aspect of your business means it’s easier to improve anything that falls short. Consider holding workshops that feature open and frank discussions.
5. Decide on feedback schedules
The regularity of feedback opportunities depends on your business size and model. However, setting a fixed schedule that your workforce knows means they know what to expect and when to expect it.
There can be different factors to your scheduling. A survey could be fortnightly, and meetings/workshops could be monthly. If your business model allows, consider formal or informal one-to-ones by department managers.
6. Leave no stone unturned
For your continuous feedback model to succeed, include every member of your workforce. While your initial focus may be on full-time, onsite employees, you should also look at part-time employees and remote workers if you have any.
This latter group often feels isolated working from the “home base,” so if you have any staff who solely do remote work, they may need special attention. You may also need to customize some aspects of how you collect feedback.
7. Link feedback to the development
Good feedback should lead to development, both for your company and your employees. By identifying areas where improvements could be made, you should be encouraging development and progress.
For example, a worker may provide feedback saying that they don’t feel prepared for the new tech you’re implementing. You could then offer them training that enhances their career by making them ready to use that tech.
8. Record and share
There’s little point in collecting feedback and keeping it to yourself. You want to share the best feedback, particularly if it leads to improvements in how you do things. You also need to consider that the next great idea may come from one of your frontline staff.
Record everything and share the most notable ideas, comments, suggestions, and changes online. This could be on the company intranet or in a monthly newsletter.
9. Ensure the feedback cycle is continuous
A feedback model should never be a one-off. Ensure that feedback is collected on an ongoing basis. This lets you tweak and improve the process as you move forward, ensuring that the quality of data collected improves with time.
By having a continuous and omnidirectional model, you can keep every staff member happy that their voices are heard.
The takeaway
There are two main benefits of building a good continuous feedback model. First, it can offer opportunities to improve current processes and systems and increase productivity and efficiency. Even having someone suggest small steps, like using a PandaDoc convertible note template, can achieve progress and save costs.
The second benefit is that job satisfaction will likely increase if your workforce feels listened to. Those increased satisfaction levels can mean you experience higher staff retention rates, saving you significant recruitment and onboarding costs while ensuring you keep staff that you’ve invested heavily in.
