Gather Better Workforce Feedback to Improve Workplace Culture

A key component of any successful employee engagement strategy is understanding your employees’ needs and delivering what you can to address them. This requires leadership to actively ask for workforce feedback on the workplace. The best leaders stay attuned to their employees’ needs with frequent check-ins to improve workplace culture.

With these ideas in mind, what are some employee engagement strategies, and how can leadership best leverage them to gather workforce feedback and improve organizational culture?

Management Tip #1: Create Open Communication with Your Workforce on How to Improve Workplace Culture

There are several ways feedback plays a significant role within an organization, especially one that is working towards fostering a high performance and how to improve workplace culture. Successful managers spend the time to ask employees how things are going: with their work efforts, with their life, and with their progression to their desired next professional steps.

Understanding your employees roadblocks to their current goals helps you support them to be successful and productive with their work efforts. Employees that are continuously facing red tape, bureaucracy, and adversity, without any support, can easily feel demotivated.

Knowing your employees as people, what they want in life, and their aspirations, helps you best identify opportunities that can move them towards it. Employees will feel more engaged if they feel as they are growing and have a chance to progress towards their greater career goals.

Management Tip #2: Techniques for Obtaining Employee Feedback

When looking at collecting valuable information on your employees’ experience in the workplace, there are many techniques you can deploy. Using employee feedback surveys with tailored questions is one way to collect more structured workforce feedback around topics that you may need specific insights about. Having a communication tool that employees can access and navigate quickly, frequently, and at their convenience, allows them to:

• Submit short-term feedback or thoughts (feedback on a specific event or day, for example).
• Give long term feedback (ideas for improvement about processes, tools, or larger concerns).

Having a digital communication tool that aggregates theses insights for management will help best action it, and also drive more meaningful conversations.

Management Tip #3: Employ Digital Tools to Enhance Regular In-Person Check-ins

It is also worth mentioning that there are a variety of effective ways to comb the data that exists in your workplace ecosystem. Digital tools bring us a wealth of useful data. For example, we gain insights on when processes break, how long projects are taking, or topics and themes from various chat channels. All provide valuable insights as to how you can make your employees more productive and feel more engaged.

Using this intelligence, we can use very disparate data sets to identify what is top of mind and what will have the biggest impact. We can also combine data sets so that we can take organizational, group, team, and individual views about the workplace to the various insights.

Having studied high-performance workplace cultures in great depth, it’s evident that human connection and knowing your workforce as people is critical as it drives a trusting, and open, environment.

Of course, while data and digital tools are great to bring forward insights, they are best when they support better, more meaningful conversations and interactions between managers and employees. It’s important to view employee feedback mechanisms as essential complements to, but not as a substitution for, sustained interpersonal interaction.

Download our Real-time Employee Feedback Checklist to craft an effective, data-driven workforce feedback strategy.