6 Ways to Leverage Employee Feedback Loops and Promote Development
Publié le 6 May 2024
Improve your workforce and support their professional growth with 6 ways to leverage employee feedback loops and promote development.
It’s easy enough to say you want to promote development in your company and its employees, but another matter altogether is to make that happen in practice. How can you translate that goal into reality?
That may sound like a rhetorical question, but we’ve got a pretty straightforward answer ready in the form of an employee feedback loop.
We’ll explore what exactly these loops are, and why they help you boost your internal development. After that, we’ll share some best practices to help you start making the most out of employee feedback loops for yourself.
What is an Employee Feedback Loop?
If you’ve ever collected employee feedback, thoughts, or opinions, you’ve already taken the first step toward setting up an employee feedback loop.
That’s because these loops rely on gathering constructive feedback from your employees–on an ongoing basis.
The term ‘loop’ applies because you’re doing more than just collecting real-time feedback. Rather, effective feedback loops rely on creating a continuous feedback cycle, in which employees can voice their thoughts on a regular basis and have those thoughts heard.
These cycles often take the form of positive feedback loops, though a negative feedback loop is also possible. Positive or negative, you should always remain open to honest feedback from your employees regarding the state of your organization.
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How Does a Feedback Loop Promote Development?
A continuous feedback loop is just the tool you need to help your employees and business grow, and we’re going to discuss the main reasons why right here.
Flagging Up Issues
In the same way that being open to customer-reported issues lets you solve any problems your customers encounter in a very direct way, collecting regular employee feedback helps you address any unpleasant issues before they have a chance to grow.
The nature of these issues can also vary greatly. From product issues, such as bugs in your AI for call centers, to conflicts between team members, feedback loops let you catch on when something isn’t going well.
After all, it’s much easier to achieve a quick issue resolution if you know exactly what it is you’re trying to address in the first place. That’s why feedback loops help you flag up and resolve issues of all kinds within your business, which drives growth and development.
Improving Staff Retention
Employee retention is a key factor in company competitiveness. But much like customer retention, long-term talent retention rarely happens incidentally.
When your staff members are able to talk about the things that bother them, as well as the things they love about their work, they’ll be more likely to stay with your company. This goes doubly for companies that work to address employee feedback they’re given.
In particular, employees who want to aim for career transitions or other major changes to their careers will be more inclined to stay with a company that makes the effort to listen to them. This lets you improve your high-value talent retention and helps boost their personal development.
Valuing Employees
When your employees feel that they’re being listened to, they tend to care more about their work–because their work is showing it returns that sentiment.
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It’s a lot like practicing active listening; showing your employees that you hear their words lets them know that you want them to speak up. It also reminds them that employee happiness is very important to you.
This increases job satisfaction, further lowering rates of employee resignation and helping talent stay engaged. That, in turn, creates an environment that supports professional development.
Creating Actionable Insights
A major advantage of collecting feedback is, according to a 2022 research paper, the fact that it ‘can help yield useful insights that can lead to further improvements down the line’ – meaning that employee insights pave the way for improvements in your business and strategies.
This is especially important in the context of feedback loops.
Regular feedback sessions secure fresh insights into the thoughts and feelings of your employees. Those empower you to ensure you’re always acting in your employees’ interests, while also highlighting the areas that demand your focus now.
In other words, employee feedback loops contain the information you need to develop and evolve your business.
How Can You Leverage Employee Feedback Loops?
Next, we’re going to explore 6 ways to leverage employee feedback loops and promote development so you can start reaping the benefits we’ve already discussed.
Follow these best practices to start making the most of your employee feedback loops.
- Schedule Regular Feedback Sessions
More and more companies are shifting from yearly (or one-off) reviews to continuous feedback, as the former has less potential for fostering learning and performance improvement than regular feedback sessions do.
This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to gather in-depth feedback on a daily basis. Instead, consider monthly or fortnightly sessions in which your employees can share their feedback with you.
By shortening the length of your feedback loops, you can ensure you’re always working with fresh and relevant data. You can also show employees you care what they think at all times, not just right when their yearly reviews are coming up.
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
- Take Action
The best insights in the world mean precious little if they don’t lead to future action.
For context, we’ll look at an example. Let’s say you’re in the process of creating a technology roadmap, and you want to know what your employees would consider a desirable versus undesirable action when it comes to this process.
By gathering feedback and then using it to plan targeted actions, you can ensure that your tech roadmap looks great from its first iteration. You’ll have to do far less corrective action later on, because you started out with a list of action items derived directly from employee feedback.
In short: always act on the back of your employee feedback.
- Opt for Anonymity
When it’s time for a reduction in force, or RIF for short, no one wants to feel like their job is in jeopardy because of negative feedback they might have shared in the past.
In fact, feeling worried about confidentiality is a major reason why people don’t share feedback with their employers in the first place:
Image sourced from haiilo.com
In order to avoid missing out on meaningful feedback, make sure your employees have the opportunity to share their thoughts in total privacy. You can do this by collecting all feedback anonymously and never asking for identifying details in the process.
- Listen Closely
Whether it’s about explaining how to transfer landline to cell phone, discussing an employee’s performance, or talking through someone’s feelings on their team, listening is always crucial. Someone is taking the time to talk about something–so it’s only right to respect their effort by paying close attention while they’re speaking.
The same principle applies here.
Through careful planning, you can ensure that you’re always open to the feedback you get and ready to accept it in good faith. This way, you’ll be more receptive to feedback that touches on any potential blind spots–or worse, sore spots.
Remember that transparent communication is a two-way street. Your employees should give you clear feedback, but in turn, you need to show them you’re listening.
- Make it Easy
Communication can be tough, whether that’s communication between employees, communication between managers, or even communication between teams. And feedback is just a specific type of communication.
To alleviate the difficulty, be sure you’re making things as easy as possible for your employees.
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
One way you can do this is by providing plenty of communication channels for your employees to give feedback through. It also helps to practice regular communication, so the feedback sessions don’t feel like an uncomfortable one-off occurrence.
It’s also well worth noting that direct communication is not always the answer, particularly where anonymity is concerned. Instead, consider applying the principles of automated customer services to your feedback collection process by allowing employees to give feedback through an automated portal that anonymizes their responses.
- Foster an Open Work Culture
If your company culture doesn’t support open communication, it can be very challenging to encourage your employees to be transparent with you in their feedback.
That’s why it’s absolutely crucial to promote a culture of transparency where everyone feels comfortable enough to share what they’re thinking.
To make this kind of healthy work culture an achievable business goal for your company, ensure that no topics are taboo. This helps show employees that they’re welcome to voice any thoughts, even ones that might not make managers happy to hear.
After all, a truly welcoming culture doesn’t turn away people who have negative observations to share.
In addition to these aspects, it’s crucial to consider ongoing learning and development in the realm of data governance. Incorporating microlearning into your training programs can significantly enhance the understanding and implementation of data governance practices across your organization, amplifying the effectiveness of your feedback loops and fostering continuous improvement.
Final Thoughts
An employee feedback loop relies on having an ongoing process of collecting feedback from within your company. That means you’ve got to be able to gather feedback continuously–and then act on it.
Only by ensuring both of these things happen can you make the absolute most of your employee feedback loop to promote development within your company. You can accomplish this with 6 ways to leverage employee feedback loops and promote development.
These feedback loops are an invaluable source of data that lets you address and improve just about any aspect of your company. That’s why it’s so worth the while to remain open to employee feedback, and to actively work to collect it.
