When your entire organization fits in a small office, feedback is easy to come by. An all-hands meeting is small enough that anyone can ask the CEO a direct question, team meetings have enough time for everyone to give their feedback, and modifying an initiative can be done quickly and efficiently.
But as you grow, you’ll struggle to give everyone an equal opportunity to share feedback. Leaders lose visibility into employee sentiment, and the disconnect between strategy and the employee experience grows.
Collecting employee feedback at scale means working through these challenges and building new feedback channels. It means transitioning from relying exclusively on all-hands meetings and occasional surveys towards a planned, proactive strategy. This gives you more reliable data, leading to better HR initiatives and a more positive employee experience.
In this article, we’ll cover the clear link between feedback and employee engagement, practical guidance on collecting employee feedback effectively, and the systems you can use to do this.
Key Takeaways:
Employee feedback accomplishes multiple objectives. First, it contributes to employee engagement. When employees feel heard and like their feedback actually contributes to an organization they believe in, they’ll be more motivated to go above and beyond.
A concrete feedback strategy also shows leadership’s commitment to making employees feel heard. That strengthens trust between leadership and teams, as they believe that if any serious issue pops up, leaders will listen to feedback and act on it.
Collecting feedback and acting on it also improves performance for teams and the organization at large. Problems are identified earlier, meaning that inefficiencies and culture gaps don’t have the chance to grow into larger issues—especially if you build the expectation that you’ll take action based on that feedback.
Employees are more productive because they give you tactile feedback on what they need to do their best work, and the organization is more productive overall as you solve problems more quickly.
So what about organizations that don’t collect this sort of feedback in any meaningful way? They tend to run into the same problems repeatedly:
Collecting employee feedback at scale means you have a strategy for efficiently sourcing and acting on feedback as your organization grows. The goal is to build a culture of continuous feedback, meaning you go beyond infrequent surveys to get that feedback.
You create more opportunities for employees to share their feedback through 1-on-1 meetings, employee engagement surveys, and more. Consistency is essential, as you collect this feedback in the same way across departments, locations, and roles.
Doing this at scale requires commitment, represented by:
In smaller organizations, information communications and all-hands meetings are enough to get the feedback you need. But as your organization grows, you need clear guidelines, tools, and processes to get that feedback.
Collecting feedback depends on a few factors: using the right methods, asking at the right cadence, and acting on the feedback you get. Importantly, a single approach won’t apply to all kinds of feedback, meaning you need to tailor your strategy to account for the feedback you need.
“Employee feedback survey” is a broad category that includes several types of surveys:
Structured surveys allow you to focus the feedback you get on specific topics, finely control the cadence at which it comes, and fine-tune your approach over time. Just make sure you carefully design questions and improve them over time.
Pulse surveys are more frequent than annual engagement surveys, usually only having between three and 10 questions. They’re designed to get feedback on specific initiatives, problems, or topics over a certain period, tracking changes as you make improvements.
Real-time check-ins might involve automated reminders in chat apps or other communication channels that prompt leaders to reach out and get feedback from their teams.
1-on-1 conversations are one of your most powerful feedback tools. They turn managers into direct lines of communication organization-wide, data points that contribute to broader trends and give you insight into everything from employee engagement to company culture.
Combined with more frequent, casual check-ins, these conversations give you the pulse of each team across a range of priorities.
“Lifecycle-based feedback” refers to surveys and interviews you take at various stages of an employee’s tenure, including:
These touchpoints tie feedback directly to some of the most important moments in an employee’s tenure, allowing you to better plan initiatives that improve the employee experience.
Having the right tools and surveys is just part of scaling the way you collect feedback. You also need a strategy that accounts for your organization’s size.
Setting the right cadence is one of the most important factors in your feedback strategy. Ask for feedback too often, and you’re more likely to fatigue your employees than to get anything useful.
Annual engagement surveys, for example, would be particularly exhausting if they were sent out quarterly or monthly, since they usually have quite a few questions. Build specific guidelines around how often you ask for feedback and review these guidelines over time.
The surveys and interviews you use should be relatively standard across teams and departments, with specific modifications to enhance the information you get. This basic framework usually suits most organizations:
To actually get insights from the feedback you collect, you need to segment the data you receive and analyze it carefully. Segment data by department, tenure, location, and leadership level, and you should already start to see patterns emerge.
Quantitative feedback is best for tracking trends at a high-level, while qualitative feedback allows you to drill down and get more context. A combination of the two is ideal for getting a full picture of any issue you need feedback for.
Having a scalable strategy is crucial, but using the right tools makes implementing it completely seamless. When evaluating an employee feedback tool, make sure it has the following:
As your organization grows, you start adding tools that let you streamline important processes, automate work, and improve data analysis. Collecting employee feedback is no different.
Want to see what a dedicated performance management tool can do for your feedback strategy? Here’s what 15Five Engage can do:
Find out more here.
Employee feedback can tell you everything you need to know about how your company culture resonates on the ground, how engaged employees are, and more. But when your organization reaches a certain size, getting feedback goes beyond booking meetings individually and calling for feedback at an all-hands meeting.
You need systems, processes, and tools that source feedback consistently and fairly, as well as the capacity to analyze it. Organizations that master this create stronger company cultures, better managers, and higher retention rates.
Ready to see how a dedicated performance management tool makes this easier? Book your 15Five demo here.