Sometimes it’s hard having friends. They get themselves into conundrums, they don’t know what to do, and they come to you for advice. With the sagacity of Solomon, you consider their situation and provide them with the best possible course of action…and then they go and do what they were going to do anyway. It’s one of life’s most frustrating moments, when you can see someone with a problem, see how easily they can solve it, and see them continue to make the same mistakes. You provided great feedback, but it fell on deaf ears. Eventually, you just start telling people to solve their own problems.
We’ve written before about the importance of employee feedback (read that article here). While you evaluate employee performance every year, honest critique should be a two-way street, and sometimes it’s the people closest to the problem that will notice it first and know the best way to solve it. So you’ve read the article linked above, you’ve solicited feedback, and you’ve received responses. Now it’s time to do something with those responses. But what? Here are the steps to follow to let employees know that they’re being heard and that you’re using their feedback to improve both business processes and the employee experience.
Analyze the Results
The data you collect from a survey doesn’t tell you anything on its own. It has to be analyzed. You’ll have to consider response rate, margin of error, and confidence level (that is, how sure are you that if you administered the survey again, you’d get the same answers?). You’ll have to make sure that your responses are from a representative cross-section of employees. If your company is 54% women, 44% men, and 2% others, but 75% of your respondents are women, you might not be able to draw accurate conclusions from the results. The same goes for other demographic categories as well as categories like job title and function. A data analyst will help you draw the right conclusions from the results. How do you know that answers collected point to the problems they seem to point to and aren’t symptoms of a different, unidentified problem?
Share the Results
Some businesses skip straight from analysis of the results to acting on the results. There is an important step missing here, one that builds trust between workers and management: sharing the results. When you share the results of a survey, employees will know that you’re listening. If you haven’t acted on feedback before, it might take some time to earn employees’ trust.
Align Action With Strategy
Even if your survey is well-designed and narrow in scope, answers might still suggest widely divergent courses of action. How do you know the right path to take? By staying focused on your strategy and your goals.
Align action with strategy. Some answers might be beyond the scope of what you’re trying to accomplish. But if you have a roadmap or set of goals to compare feedback to, you will get better results more aligned with what you’re trying to accomplish.
Include Stakeholders
Any decisions made based on employee feedback should include affected employees. Before deciding on a course of action, make sure the teams that will be implementing the changes are on board with the suggested changes. Feedback isn’t always one-and-done; sometimes, it’s an ongoing conversation. Employee buy-in can make or break any change in the way you work, so be sure not to skip this step or assume employees will instantly adapt to any proposed change.
Trust Is the Key
Collecting and acting on feedback can be a frustrating experience for all involved, just like it is with your friends who ask for advice and then ignore your advice. For feedback to be useful, employees have to feel like their feedback is actually considered and isn’t ignored or used against them. As long as the process is an open and honest two-way street, you can build that all-important trust that leads to employee buy-in, job satisfaction, and increased productivity.
