Giving employees a voice and, crucially, acting on their feedback is a fundamental enabler of engagement.

Employees feel more valued, more involved, more listened to when leaders actively seek their opinion and report back on the action that was taken in response to their feedback (the ‘you said, we did’ approach). The best leaders understand that people matter and that employees have experience, expertise and ideas to contribute.

Create an employee feedback strategy for your organisation

You need a strategy for continuous employee listening that will help you to maximise the quality and quantity of responses you receive, and avoid ‘survey fatigue’ (usually a symptom of poorly-designed surveys and a lack of action by leaders in response to previous surveys).

Here are ten ways you can improve your employee survey response rates.

  1. Send feedback invitations from a named individual within the organisation – a senior leader is ideal.
  2. Explain why you would like employees to provide feedback– what do you want to know and what will you do with the information?
  3. Stress that employee feedback is confidential; “we will never ever share individual employee responses”.
  4. Do not ask too many questions; employees are busy and have a finite attention span.
  5. Do not ask for feedback too often.
  6. Appoint local champions who can promote feedback opportunities and provide support to employees.
  7. Track and manage response rates during the feedback process. Create competition by sharing response rates across business units/locations.
  8. Thank employees who provide feedback; they are more likely to do so again.
  9. Share feedback with employees. Be open and honest, acknowledge where progress has been made and where more needs to be done.
  10. Commit to and take action: employees will not provide feedback if they think nothing will be done about it.

If you would like to find out more about our next-generation employee feedback surveys contact the team@peachymondays.com