How feedback can help to improve your Employee Experience design journey
Employee Experience (and its parent, Employee Engagement) can be an expensive journey. In today’s dynamic workplaces EX and EE are constant ongoing “processes” that consume large amounts of time. Using feedback the right way can accelerate this build-measure-learn cycle.
When we speak about “feedback” in the context of work, it is often to refer to manager-employee or peer-to-peer feedback. However, there’s another aspect to the word: the employee-to-company feedback, more commonly associated with employee satisfaction scores and engagement surveys. In this view, getting feedback from others is a bit like knowing how well we are doing something to the eyes of someone else. One could say that feedback allows us to know if we are meeting someone else’s expectations. While this is not always relevant (I’m a big proponent of always be yourself and not someone else’s image of you), in the context of employee experience this interpretation of feedback is key to harness its power.
Employee experience programs roulette
It is all too easy to use a boiler plate solution or roll an EX program that worked at, say, Google. But remember, every company is different, culture is unique as it is the set of people working there. While you can learn from others, a copy-and-paste solution won’t do the trick (that’s one of the reasons why we see so many companies failing with their engagement programs).
In order to know how to create a better employee experience for your culture (and ultimately to engage your people better), first you need to know what to act on. You need to start by finding what, from the point of view of your employees, is not working well. What could be improved. In other words, you need to find out where is that the company is not meeting their expectations. Otherwise, without their feedback, all your engagement attempts are like a shot in the dark (or like playing roulette, something better to avoid when it comes to business).
The exhausting journey to a possible solution
But feedback is only the starting point: Once you have identified and prioritized your action points, the next step is answering the big question: How can we achieve/change/fix that? Say you have identified that most of employees feel the company’s strategy is not clear. What do you do next?
Now you need to come up with a solution to try tackle the issue. The problem is that between you and that solution there is a long journey of meetings, emails, consultants, focus group, reports, data-analysis and more meetings. If you are lucky, three to six months later you may have some sort of proposal for a solution (that may or may not work out at the end). Although sometimes unavoidable, in many cases this time consuming process can be accelerated. How? The key is on gathering more than just feedback.
Quick note: Although in an ideal world we may want to meet everyone’s expectations, in the real world we need to choose and prioritize what to act on. How to do that is a complex topic on its own, and I’ll write about it on a dedicated article.
Better than just feedback: constructive feedback
Since we are trying to come up with a solution to better meet someone’s expectations, a good source for that possible solution would be that someone. If our strategy is not clear, how could we communicate it better? Your employees will know better than anyone. So if you provide them the right tools to give you not just feedback but also to propose solutions you are tapping into their knowledge and involving them in the design of the solution. This type of feedback is what we call constructive feedback.
Constructive feedback goes a long way
When feedback becomes constructive feedback, you get not only insights on what to change, but also ideas on how to do it. These ideas can point you in the right direction to tackle an issue, give you fresh perspectives and save you lots of time. You still need to go through a process of analysis and validation, but you are getting a head start that will accelerate the whole process.
And perhaps not so obvious but still important is the effect that constructive feedback can have on the levels of engagement: When people are involved in the solution (by proposing one or even by contributing a tiny bit by, say, voting), they can feel a sense of ownership, pride, belonging. It is no longer about saying what is not working, now it’s about finding a solution together, a major mindset shift that can get people more engaged.
Remember: In the context of employee experience, feedback allows companies to know if they are meeting employees’ expectations, and when they are not, constructive feedback gives these companies a clear hint on how to improve that. Most importantly, constructive feedback can accelerate the solution-finding process, leading to a faster feedback cycle.
At Ideos.App we are always interested in hearing from people who put employees first. If you want to have a chat, reach out!
