How to build a culture of feedback in your organization

In many organizations, leadership, HR and communication teams find themselves at a roadblock when it comes to building a feedback culture in their workplace.

How do you encourage employees to share honest and healthy feedback with others? How do you build trust in all layers of the organization and keep employees more engaged?

In this blog post, I’ll share our top tips for maximizing feedback in your organization.

But first, let me elaborate on why feedback is so important in the workplace.

A healthy feedback culture is extremely important for an organization to succeed and thrive. It has been proved an essential factor for:

• Boosting employee engagement

When your employees feel free and comfortable to share honest feedback, to share their own opinions, they are more likely to be happy and engaged with their work and the organization. Despite this fact, many leaders still overlook the importance of employees’ feedback. In fact, according to global research, the vast majority of employees (86%) feel that people at their workplace are not heard fairly or equally.

• Strengthening workplace relationships

Having candid conversations with colleagues, receiving recognitions from supervisors and team members and engaging in open dialogues with the management will help create trust and strengthen relationships at work. Encouraging these types of healthy communication among employees is a huge driver of employee morale and retention.

• Improving employee productivity

A Salesforce report shows that employees who feel heard are 4.6x more likely to feel empowered to do their best work. Another study finds that 69% of employees would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized. It is no secret that recognition and feedback are some of the most powerful ways to drive employee productivity and efficiency.

• Preventing “brain drain” and high turnover rate

65% of employees said they wanted more feedback (Forbes). Employees, especially high-skilled employees want to know how well they’re performing, as well as how they can do their jobs better. The traditional performance review that happens once or twice a year doesn’t provide that kind of constant feedback employees need. As a result, they become less and less engaged and more likely to leave the company.

📑 Read also: 7 ways to acknowledge and recognize employees

The benefits of having a healthy feedback culture in the organization have been well documented. Now, how can yóu foster more constructive conversations in your workplace?

Here are some top tips to get started on creating a strong feedback culture.

To establish a new practice, everyone in the organization needs to know the why behind it. It’s important to tell employees the real purpose of feedback. Make sure everyone understands that the goal of feedback, both positive and negative, is to improve performance. As a leader, you should focus on explaining the connection between advice and how it will improve employee performance.

Feedback can be positive or negative. That’s why most organizations don’t do it. But everyone can learn how to make it right. Take the time to train all your employees, regardless of title and rank, on how to deliver and getting feedback. Provide them with resources and guidelines. Help them to practice asking questions, seeking examples and clarifying meaning.

It goes without saying; organizational culture starts from the top, so management must become ambassadors of the feedback culture. Niamh Graham, vice president of global HR at Workhuman shared in HRDive;“To truly engage employees in a way that won’t overload them, a culture of constructive, helpful, and enabling feedback is necessary. And this starts at the top of the organization.” In other words, every level of management needs to uphold these values. People often follow their leader’s example – not their words.

Often, employees are afraid of sharing their honest opinions, especially negative feedback because they fear losing their job or being retaliated against. For a feedback culture to flourish in your organization, you need to create an environment where everyone, regardless of their title, feels comfortable to speak their mind, and that they won’t face negative consequences for doing so.

It’s necessary to respond and take action on employees’ feedback. Let employees know when a decision or change is made based on their feedback. Also tell them the reason for feedback you can’t act upon.

People should be able to choose their preferred way to share their thoughts and ideas. Make sure that you provide a variety of feedback channels so that both givers and receivers find the way that works best for them. There are multiple ways to share feedback, including:

• Attributed vs. anonymous
• Individual vs. group
• 1-on-1 vs. 360 feedback
• Face-to-face vs. written

An intranet can help organizations to encourage two-way communication and embrace a culture of feedback in many ways:

– Recognize employees: Managers can use the intranet as a shared place to recognize and appreciate employees for their great job.

– Encourage employee voice: When reading company news on the intranet, employees are able to show their meaning or feelings using likes, comments or mentioning @colleagues.

– Collect employee feedback: Forms and workflows makes it easy for organizations to automate collecting employee feedback and evaluate answers with built-in analysis.

– Gather employee ideas: With Involv intranet, we have a dedicated ideation tool designed to help organizations easily generate and process ideas from employees.

If you’re looking to improve internal communication by launching a modern intranet, schedule a free demo with us. Our intranet experts will show you how other organizations use Involv intranet to ensure effective communication and foster their corporate culture.

(image: unsplash)