Ignore your employees and they’ll go away. Just ask Elon Musk whose heavy-handed leadership as he took the helm at Twitter resulted in a mass exodus of employees — and not just the ones he asked to leave.
If you haven’t asked your employees what’s important to them lately, now is the time. We see a critical need for organizations to develop ongoing processes for gathering — and acting on — employee feedback.
It’s no longer simply a “nice to do” — if it ever was — it’s now a need to do. Employee feedback can help effectively shape HR strategy to drive employee engagement and retention. And when employee engagement rises, better business outcomes follow, like productivity and profitability.
Data holds the key to driving the kind of business decisions needed to excel in an ever-changing business environment. Accurately collecting data and using the intel gathered to identify actionable steps to make needed improvements can fuel retention, representing the difference between building a successful and sustainable business and mediocrity.
That’s not just a business cliché. It’s backed by research: companies that seek and act on feedback from their workforce see employee engagement rates of 80% — compared to employee engagement rates of only 40% when they fail to do this. Gallup reports that engaged employees are 18% more productive and that organizations with engaged employees are 23% more profitable.
Here are some fresh insights on how to incorporate and use employee feedback to shape your HR strategy.
Keep it timely and real
In the past, collecting feedback from employees was often a long and painful annual process. The once-a-year annual employee satisfaction survey was manually administered and managed. And highly ineffective. Why?
By the time the data was gathered and analyzed, the results were dated. The relevance of the data was largely skewed by what was top of mind for employees at the time they took the survey. So, even if organizations acted on the feedback, their implemented changes likely had no relevance to the current environment.
If you want to know what’s wrong in your organization, go right to the source — your people. Give them a voice to provide honest feedback and you’ll be able to keep your finger on the pulse of culture in real time, as it happens.
Connects, Inspirus’ employee engagement technology platform, provides organizations with a tool that can make collecting employee feedback a breeze. Employee Voice is integrated right into the Connects platform. Leaders can get real-time, anonymous feedback from employees 24/7 so they can address concerns before they become major issues and adjust their people strategy on the fly.
Focus on essential metrics
Sage polled 500 HR and C-suite leaders from global organizations and found that 94% of C-suite executives get 'people data' from HR functions, but only 38% say their HR teams use that data to provide insights and recommendations into people strategy. As a result, the C-suite is hesitant to use data to help make business decisions concerning company culture and the employee experience.
HR teams can increase their influence to leadership and the C-suite by collecting real, usable data via employee feedback. These insights can provide tremendous value in developing people strategies that will improve employee engagement, satisfaction and retention:
- Identifying areas for improvement
- Increasing employee engagement
- Improving retention rates
- Enhancing the employee experience
- Driving business outcomes
Capturing data points from the different stages of the employee journey and leveraging those metrics can power business decisions.
Using neuroscience
A strategy that is grounded in neuroscience focuses on both employee engagement and employee happiness:
- Employee engagement activities focus on the head: they involve the rational and reflective brain reactions that seek meaning and purpose, clarity and personal growth.
- Employee happiness focuses on the heart: the instinctive and emotional brain reactions that seek safety, freedom, knowledge and relationships.
By prioritizing both employee engagement and happiness as part of a holistic, people strategy, Gallup found organizations improved employee retention, increased productivity and were able to drive more positive business outcomes.
When neuroscience methodology is used, measurement of how your people are thinking and feeling becomes objective and quite useful. Inspirus is a trailblazer in this area, with our partnership with The Happiness Index.
Recognize the landscape is holistic
Typical employee engagement models fail to give a complete picture of workplace culture because they don’t measure the entire landscape. Too often, they focus on a limited set of metrics without considering other factors that contribute to workplace culture, such as leadership, communication and diversity.
A baseline survey to assess the cultural health of your company is a great starting point. The results will objectively show what’s going on in every corner of your organization and in every critical area of impact. Once you discover where your cultural strengths and weaknesses lie, you can set out to specifically craft initiatives to enhance those strengths and improve the areas of weakness.
When you understand what makes employees happy and engaged — what drives them — you can make the right adjustments to improve your organizations cultural health, which sends a signal to each employee that you hear them and are open to taking action.
One solution our clients love: the cultural assessment survey integrated within Connects, in tandem with human insight partner The Happiness Index. It is administered anonymously, boosting the odds that employees will participate and be truthful, without fear of repercussions.
Finally, did you know that there is one very simple thing you can do for your employees that will boost engagement as well as their likelihood of continuing to provide feedback regularly? Share survey results with them. That has been shown to increase participation rates for future surveys. And it’s a very tangible way to show them you heard them and you’re committed to improvement.
