So, you conducted an employee experience survey and you have your feedback. Now what? These steps and hints can help you discover the insight you need to help move your organization toward even more success in the future.
Here are some important Do’s and Don’ts to effectively utilize your employee feedback:
Do’s
- Focus on success. Celebrate what makes your organization unique and special.
- Take a broad perspective. Drilling down into data to determine if certain areas may need more focus than others is fine, but it is often unproductive. Taking a holistic approach to working on larger issues that impact the entire organization can be much more impactful.
- Take action. Employees don’t expect you to take action on every idea or complaint. Focus on those things you can change.
- Communicate sincere appreciation for the feedback. Explain that some things will be a focus for this year, and others may be longer-term Employees want transparent leaders who acknowledge their needs. They don’t expect leaders to be able to solve every problem.
Don’ts
- Resist the urge to be overly focused on the numbers. The scores are only part of the story. Read and listen to the comments and understand the information from a broad perspective. Slight shifts up and down in certain metrics are normal. Large shifts, however, are where you should focus precious time and energy.
- Don’t require too much work from your employees based on their responses. Constant tracking of issues and follow-up on every item in the survey will ensure employees will not bring forward ideas in the future if it means significant additions to their workload.
- Don’t go on a “witch hunt” to find out who made what comments and who may be responsible for the poor results. If you have an ineffective leader who receives a significant amount of negative feedback, work to coach the person privately and improve their leadership style.
- Never break confidentiality. If employees believe that anyone internally has access to their responses, you risk a loss of trust which is critical to organizational culture. No one should attempt to determine the identity of respondents or reprimand employees for sharing comments.
If you’d like some help putting your data to work in an effective plan, please reach out at (216-867-1165) I’m happy to help you.
