What we are about to say is not ground-breaking, earth-shattering information: employee engagement is critical to organizational success. Companies with high employee engagement are over 20% more profitable than their counterparts and experience far less turnover.
But here’s what might be a bit of a lightbulb moment for business leaders – you can and SHOULD gain feedback from your employees to drive engagement.
The hot topic of employee engagement has become more important than ever as companies realize the value of quality hires. Not only are quality hires integral to your business’ performance and results, but they also help to create a culture that attracts other top performers.
While some organizations are still primarily focusing on their bottom line, their profits, and revenue, those that have begun to see the value of their people are realizing there is a metric far more important than finances – employee engagement.
So before we dive in, let’s take a look at what employee engagement is all about.
What Does Employee Engagement Mean?
We all know it when we see it, but sometimes “employee engagement” is a little hard to define. While employee engagement and satisfaction are connected, they are not synonymous. Satisfaction is typically a prerequisite for engagement. You want your employees to be satisfied and content in the seat they’re in, feeling that their job is fulfilling to them, utilizing their skills and expertise, and providing them with sufficient growth opportunities.
However, satisfaction alone is not enough. You can be completely satisfied with your work, your company, and your role, without being engaged in any of it. Lack of engagement is a motivation issue. Engaged employees are dedicated to the success of their team and the entire organization and are willing to put in their very best to drive that success.
What Drives Employee Engagement
At the core, fostering employee engagement comes down to something rather simple – people want to feel like they (and their contributions) matter to their employer.
Employees want to be seen, heard, valued, and appreciated while simultaneously being poured into, pushed, stretched, and given increasing growth opportunities and responsibilities.
It’s both the “feel good” ideas of connection, meaning, and purpose paired with the feeling that someone believes in my current and future success. This is where feedback comes in.
- Feedback and Value. Your employees want to know that their contributions – whether it is the work they produce, their ideas, perspectives, or anything else they contribute to the team – matter. Providing your employees frequent opportunities to give YOU feedback can help make this happen. More on that later.
- Feedback and Appreciation. Not only do people want to feel valued, but they also want to be appreciated and recognized for their contributions. When you provide your employees with positive, celebratory feedback on their wins – now matter how big or small – you drive employee engagement. (We wrote a blog about this here.)
- Feedback and Growth. Top performers don’t just want to feel good about their accomplishments, they want to continue accomplishing. Giving constructive feedback may be challenging for managers to navigate, but it is critical to employee engagement.
While providing your employees with feedback is a pillar of great management, if you want your people to feel truly valued, you cannot omit receiving feedback from employees.
Tips to Improve Employee Engagement Through Feedback
In order to truly maximize your chances at obtaining authentic feedback from your employees, you may need to start with a mindset shift. This, like just about anything else in life, is not a one-size-fits-all, quick fix sort of thing. It will require a bit of mental agility, being open to new ideas and change while being committed to caring for your People. Finding the right balance of feedback techniques is key and these five ways to capture employee feedback put you on the right path.
- Employee Engagement Survey
This is by far the most popular method to obtain feedback from your employees as it’s relatively simple. There are many benefits to employee engagement surveys, including the ease of use for management mentioned above. They can quickly gather helpful information from the entire company with little effort required.
Additionally, it provides employees with a chance to anonymously share their thoughts. This can alleviate some of the pressure individuals may feel when it comes to sharing open and honest feedback. That being said, we believe that whenever possible, it’s best to know where the feedback is coming from, so you can fully address it and follow up.
The questions for an employee engagement survey can vary to elicit the information you need most at the moment. Perhaps you want to dig into your benefit offerings and what your employees would like to see changed, or maybe it’s as simple as the theme for an upcoming holiday party – whatever the case may be, by just asking questions, you demonstrate that you want to know what your people think.
One final note on surveys, leaders often fall short in obtaining feedback from their employees because they feel they’ve checked the box by simply sending out an annual survey. Be cautious to not fall into this trap as your employees will be able to see right through the lack of authentic care for their opinions. If you are planning to send a survey, ensure you follow through on it. Consider sharing the results in an upcoming meeting along with your plans to implement changes based on the feedback you received.
- A Feedback Loop
Feedback should go both ways. Managers tend to embrace the opportunity to provide face-to-face feedback to their employees without ever soliciting feedback from their employees.
Creating a feedback loop where both employees and managers can freely discuss work-related issues, challenges, or concerns is the goal. This may be as simple as having a standardized process for manager-employee one-on-one conversations, which can include questions for managers to ask, such as “How can I better support you in your role?”
This feedback loop will likely require a bit of prep work to establish a foundation of trust. If open and honest, two-way dialogue is the goal, both parties need to know they can trust one another, and that they have each other’s best interest at heart. Establishing trust starts with honest communication. If the end goal is transparency, you can foster a secure manager-employee relationship by simply being transparent now and providing your employees with ample opportunities to share their thoughts.
- Celebrate the Wins
While it’s easy to assume that employees primarily want to share constructive feedback with leadership, that is not always the case. In fact, oftentimes employees want to acknowledge, appreciate, and recognize the work of leaders, but do not feel they have the platform to do so.
Provide your employees with the opportunity to share what they feel is going well in addition to ways your organization can improve. What do they love about working for you? What is a strength of their direct manager? What is it about your organization that makes them want to come into the office (or step into their home office) every day?
The power of collecting this sort of information is that it can reinforce the good you already have going. If you want your employees to stick around, and if you want to continue to draw in more top performers, you’ll want to keep doing the things your people like.
- Focus Groups
When there’s a certain topic you’d like to take a deep dive into and get some granular, specific feedback from your employees, consider pulling together a focus group.
There are two approaches you can take to this. First, you can open it up to the entire company and see who wants to participate. Or, you can intentionally select individuals and invite them to be a part of the focus group.
Depending on the topic at hand, there are benefits to both. However, what matters more than how you pull people together is that they all are able to share.
Appoint a notetaker in the group, determine questions in advance, and then be prepared to take action based on the feedback you receive.
- Utilize a Feedback Tracking Application
All of this feedback is great, but if it does not live somewhere, it is much harder to do anything about it. And that’s one of the keys to truly driving engagement by gaining feedback from employees – you have to take action and do something about it.
Our Etho platform gives leaders a way to deliver and track feedback going both directions, from managers to employees and vice versa. It’s the ultimate tool to develop team engagement because it turns ideas and goals into tangible objectives. Not only can managers and leadership give and see this feedback, but employees can too. This allows employees to voice their thoughts, concerns, and ideas at the moment. All they have to do is log in!
Additionally, it gives both parties the opportunity to hold one another accountable. If employees shared feedback with their manager months ago and still nothing has been addressed or changed, there’s clear documentation of that, making it much easier to follow up.
To succeed in business today, employee engagement needs to find its way into your company culture and the fabric of who you are as a business. To do that, there needs to be open and honest feedback that runs both ways. While establishing that level of trust and respect takes time and effort, that’s not the end of the story.
For your feedback to have actual value and to be a perpetual cycle of great results and engagement, management needs to act upon the feedback and that’s where true success lies. Learn more about how Etho can help you create the culture of feedback you (and your people) crave by clicking the button below.
