Many leaders don’t know what to do with employee feedback – how to translate inputs into outputs. A gap between collecting information and taking action can diminish the value of this feedback over time.
Earlier this month, Harvard Business Review published a series of articles on “What Companies Get Wrong About the Employee Experience”, which included an article on “Turning Employee Feedback into Action”. The writers of the article – Ethan Burris, Benjamin Thomas, Ketaki Sodhi, and Dawn Klinghoffer – have done research into how organisations move from feedback to action. This research identified common challenges and how to overcome them – there were three of these that we found particularly relevant to the work we do at ENGAGE.
1. Making sense of all that data
At present, it’s easy to acquire vast amounts of data – from multiple sources, in multiple formats, across different locations, time and groups, qualitative and quantitative. This can be overwhelming and make it hard to understand what all the data is telling you. The growth of tech-only survey solutions is adding to this problem of data overload.
There are a couple of proposed solutions to this problem in the article.
1. Constraining the variety of data collections methods – quality over quantity, simplifying things down. For example, using a survey with a narrow focus can set clear expectations about how the data will be used and is more focused and thus easy to action.
2. Assigning someone as a champion of each team/department in the company who feeds back centrally – this reduces duplication of efforts, and data is straight from the source from a single line of inquiry that reflects the feedback of the team/department as a whole.
By strategically planning the employee insights programme before beginning the work, you can avoid becoming overwhelmed by data. At ENGAGE, we use smart analytics on the data we gather which can also prevent overload. Techniques such as strategic priority analysis, key driver analysis and segmentation can all condense data down to a few, key actionable points for leaders and managers.
Furthermore, prioritising the use of a mix of appropriate insight tools at the right points in the business cycle will also help. For example, once we get to know an organisation and its current situation, it may be appropriate to use a full engagement survey, or perhaps spotlight research which goes into a deep-dive on particular topics. We may also choose to co-ordinate and integrate various data sources including harder business outcome data into the analysis, to identify correlations and provide context in order to understand what’s going on in the business.
2. Identifying the actual underlying problems
After acquiring employee feedback, leaders can struggle to identify what lies behind the data.
If there are certain groups of employees in the data that stand out in some way, the article authors’ suggestion is to hold a focus group with these employees to investigate, as often the underlying problem is different from the one raised by employees.
At ENGAGE we use internal best practice approaches to help in this situation – by identifying top performing groups within an organisation, we can use their expertise and skills to share best practice with lower performing groups. Similarly, by identifying lower performing groups of employees within an organisation, we can identify their particular struggles and get one step closer to understanding the actual underlying problems. In practice, you can run workshops with managers who are both getting higher engagement ratings and delivering top-quartile business performance to identify what they are doing differently with their employees; equally, workshops with managers in lower scoring areas can assess what’s missing from their approach and what the root causes are.
Additionally, at ENGAGE we use smart analytics to identify key drivers of your outcomes; identifying the aspects of the employee experience which are having the biggest impact on things like employee engagement, retention, productivity, etc.
3. Providing meaningful follow-up
It can be hard to find the time and effort to implement change as a leader when you’re already working at full capacity. Also, to address issues, other initiatives get shifted down the priority list or let go.
You can conquer this by having a an effective action planning strategy. For example the 1-2-3 rule – select one topic, do two things about it and check in at least three times on the progress. Leaders could post a dashboard for the actions and initiatives created as a result of employee feedback for people to view, as well as the progress being made on these – this creates accountability and reassures employees. Leaders could also delegate actions by assigning these to stakeholders in order to maximise action.
Our use of smart analytics (strategic priority analysis, key driver analysis and segmentation techniques) can help to focus actions down to a few key areas for leaders and managers – simply looking at high volumes of descriptive data will not help. Using these approaches can simplify, focus and speed up action planning processes.
With one organisation we recently worked with where leaders and managers were going through a major business transformation, a “less is more” approach was used and they were asked to each create an action plan for their engagement survey which only tackled one significant issue. This helped create focus, aided in getting employees involved and 96% of leaders and managers achieved their action planning goals.
Additionally, internal best practice sharing via action planning tools can also help leaders and managers who are struggling on a certain topic to learn from their peers who have already tackled it successfully, thereby speeding up the action process.
If you need help with or would like to discuss how to meaningfully convert employee feedback into action, don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected]