How to create and act on employee feedback surveys

While brands are always attempting to capture an accurate understanding of how customers perceive their products and services, some of the most relevant data for improvement can be collected via internal survey programs.

Employees can help unlock answers to vital issues facing organizations in any industry, because they are the ones on the frontline experiencing how the strategies theorized by leadership are performing in reality. Additionally, employee feedback surveys help to inspire high levels of engagement, which can serve as a huge positive within any organizational structure.

Actively listening to the voice of your employees will help influence a culture that encourages this level of engagement and grant you vital insights that can improve the overall Customer Experience.

The goal of any employee feedback program is to find quantifiable data about how daily operations are being executed on an individual level. Often, these surveys will focus on creating an accurate depiction of a company’s culture.

Understanding your brand’s existing culture can have a huge influence on engagement levels among your staff, and highly-engaged employees will have a direct impact on the way customers wind up perceiving your brand.

Building a successful employee feedback program

When building a program of this manner, it is important to understand the unique features of your brand.

Every successful organization is attempting to enact its own unique company culture, and an employee feedback program is an important pillar of that process. Thus, the construction phase of these survey initiatives can be influential to overall culture you wind up producing. Beyond the unique identifiers of the industry your brand encompasses, there are several typical styles of these employee feedback surveys.

Anonymous surveys are the most common form of employee engagement practices, but it is important to make sure that leadership has the knowledge to ask the right questions and be able to make legitimate changes from the information provided by your employees. Not asking for the identity of each participant will help inspire less biased responses, but it does make it much more challenging to act on this feedback.

Understanding this trade-off when building these programs is important, because your brand needs to craft questions that will yield actionable information. Simply listening to the voice of your employee can help inspire employees to be 4.6 times more likely to be confident in their performance, but if leadership does not make any adjustments based on this information it will wind up causing higher rates of disengagement, because employees will not feel as though their feedback is being heard.

Not asking for the identity of each participant will help inspire less biased responses, but it does make it much more challenging to act on this feedback.

One growing trend in the employee feedback survey space is implementing the net promoter score philosophy within this survey structure. This is a popular methodology that asks customers to rank their likelihood to recommend a product or service on a scale of 0-10, and segments customers into different categories according to their score.

Brands can apply this philosophy to employees, by asking them to rank how likely they would recommend your workplace to family or friends. In doing so, you will be able to categorize employees on a quantifiable system that will help to direct the appropriate line of questioning and necessary actions.

If an employee marked a score lower than 7, leadership can build more specific feedback programs to specifically identify what areas are causing this level of dissatisfaction. This approach to building employee feedback programs is especially helpful because of the simple, quantifiable nature of the data provided, ultimately making it easier for leadership to act on the information provided.

In addition to improving company culture, many of these employee feedback programs are designed with the goal of improving specific aspects of the customer journey that may be underperforming. If you have completed Customer Experience measurement programs that reveal these issues, employee surveys can serve as a foil to the information you have already captured, helping leadership correctly prescribe the right course of action.

Pairing customer and employee feedback

Pairing customer and employee feedback as a way to get a clearer picture of your existing Customer Experience is a great way to ensure that you are making the correct decisions based off the data provided.

This partnership can help pin down exact areas along the customer journey where mishaps may be occurring and identify which areas your team is excelling at creating satisfied customers.

Every brand will have its own unique set of questions that uncovers the best information, but it is important that leadership stays engaged with the information provided instead of getting into a routine of collecting data and letting it become stale. While listening to employee concerns is important, if nothing is being done in response to their feedback, it could result in a completely disengaged staff, which overall has been estimated to cost organizations between $450-$550 billion dollars annually.

Ultimately, to provide a great Customer Experience you need to have great employees turning these ideas into a reality. Applying employee feedback surveys in tandem with Customer Experience measurement programs you already have in place will help brand leadership find the right questions to ask.

Once you have figured out what information you are attempting to uncover, it is vital that you follow the data-collection process with established action priorities, to ensure that employees know that their voices are being heard and acted upon.