Creating an effective employee feedback culture
Discover the power of an employee feedback culture and the core strategies you can deploy to create one in your organization without any hassle.
Worker happiness and regular feedback go hand-in-hand. Recent SurveyMonkey research suggests that 82% of employees are happier when they feel recognized at work. By regularly offering feedback to employees, you can create a happier, more productive workplace.
Fostering a feedback culture goes beyond just giving feedback from time to time. Your business should endeavor to make feedback a central part of your organization.
In this article, we’ll explore feedback culture and outline how to create a successful employee feedback program.
What is feedback culture?
A feedback culture encourages regular feedback to help employees grow and improve. A healthy feedback culture supports regular interactions between employees and managers for insight and advice.
A feedback culture isn’t only about giving and receiving feedback. It also includes delivering, receiving, and incorporating that feedback into actionable improvement strategies.
Why does feedback culture matter?
A feedback culture encourages employees to improve while supporting them in their roles. Without feedback, employees may not know how to improve in a role. Equally, positive feedback can help motivate employees, keeping employee satisfaction high and workplace motivation strong.
A company’s workplace culture directly impacts how employees feel about receiving feedback. Feedback culture makes giving and receiving feedback a normal process, with employees reacting as positively as possible.
What are the benefits of feedback culture?
Creating a feedback culture allows a business to interact directly with employees and offer continual support throughout their role. You can access the following benefits once you have established a feedback culture in your organization:
Improved employee engagement
A feedback culture ensures that your employees remain highly engaged with their work. Positive feedback can motivate employees to continue working hard. By delivering this positive feedback, the employee understands that you have been watching and appreciating their hard work.
Conversely, constructive feedback can help employees identify areas where they may struggle. Effective employee feedback, combined with actionable improvements, shapes more productive employees.
All kinds of employee feedback can work together to improve employee engagement.
Increased job satisfaction
SurveyMonkey research suggests that around 85% of workers are satisfied with their jobs. One of the most important factors in keeping job satisfaction rates high is providing a constant stream of feedback. SurveyMonkey data shows that 82% of workers are happier when recognized at work.
Creating a feedback culture ensures that employees feel seen and valued. Over time, this can contribute to higher rates of job satisfaction.
Improve communication and collaboration
A feedback culture focuses on transparency and clear communication. By establishing a feedback culture, you lead by example and show the power of communication and collaboration.
Creating a feedback culture in your organization will help employees feel more comfortable communicating openly with others. Transparency is vital for a healthy workplace culture, helping all employees feel more comfortable at work.
Better employee performance management
Some organizations lock feedback behind yearly performance management reviews. While these can give employees a direction for the coming year, they’re often too infrequent to promote real change.
On the contrary, a feedback culture ensures that employees get constant advice, insight, and positive redirection. This employee performance management approach will give employees more chances to grow and advance in their roles.
More professional development opportunities
According to SurveyMonkey research, around 68% of employees believe that recognition in their role impacts their ability to get a raise or promotion. When managers give employees feedback regularly, it can help them find areas to improve at work.
When it comes time for a promotion, the apparent improvement of core skills related to the job will set employees up well for rising the ranks.
How to create a feedback culture at work
Creating a feedback culture at work starts with positive intentions. While you won’t create a widespread culture overnight, a few smaller changes can begin to build up over time.
By using the following strategies, you can easily create a feedback culture in your workplace:
Use all feedback types
Unfortunately, not all feedback is going to be positive. On the other end of the spectrum, not all of your feedback should be constructive criticism. All types of feedback are beneficial to a feedback culture.
Here are the main types of feedback you use and what they look like:
- Positive feedback highlights when someone has gone above and beyond or performed well in their job role. Use positive feedback to motivate and congratulate employees on their hard work.
- Negative feedback outlines where an employee has gone wrong. Please note that you should only use negative input if necessary, such as when an employee has severely underperformed. Use negative feedback to help employees identify their mistakes and where to improve.
- Constructive feedback pinpoints a weak area of employee performance and outlines how to improve. This form of feedback isn’t critical but lightly redirects an employee on their path toward improvement.
- Formal feedback is a structured method of feedback that occurs at regular intervals. It could stem from monthly performance reviews or project recaps.
- Informal feedback is spontaneous feedback a manager gives to an employee based on their recent performance. The feedback isn’t pre-planned but motivates employees or recognizes their hard work.
Some forms of feedback are naturally more appropriate in certain situations. Creating a feedback culture involves consistently utilizing various types of feedback.
Set clear goals and expectations
Establish your objectives and goals when launching the program to create an influential feedback culture. First, determine who your feedback culture includes. Is peer-to-peer feedback okay, or would you prefer a manager-team member structure?
Next, emphasize the importance of multi-direction feedback. While managers giving employees feedback is a more typical structure, a multi-directional structure allows everyone to share their thoughts and opinions.
To engage stakeholders, clarify the significance of feedback and offer several examples of your planned actions.
Provide feedback training
Feedback can come across as rude, unwanted, and even hurtful when delivered poorly. Empathy, understanding, and feedback training are key to delivering good feedback. Developing a feedback training program will help show your employees what positive and negative feedback should look like.
You can include feedback training as part of onboarding to ensure everyone knows how to give and receive feedback. These training sessions can also explain why feedback is important and outline why you create a feedback culture.
Create a safe and transparent environment
A feedback culture needs a positive and transparent environment to thrive. Lead by example and create a safe and welcoming workplace for your employees. Communicate the importance of feedback and why you create a feedback culture, and then outline your expectations around delivering and receiving feedback.
Leading from the top down will create a gold standard in your organization. When executives treat managers respectfully, they’ll do the same to their team members. Where possible, forge a safe and transparent workplace environment where your feedback culture can thrive.
Provide timely and specific feedback
A major part of creating a feedback culture is ensuring that your employees regularly receive feedback. One way to make this happen is to emphasize the importance of informal feedback. These impromptu forms of feedback help employees understand how they’re doing and get recognition for their hard work.
Whenever you conclude a project or task, offer feedback as soon as possible. Giving feedback right after a project has ended will allow you to be as specific as possible, which will benefit your employees the most.
Use multiple feedback channels
Always provide accessible feedback for your employees. If you require a specific feedback system, some employees may miss out.
Where possible, use multiple feedback channels to enhance the accessibility and visibility of feedback. Here are a few different types of feedback channels you can use:
- 360-degree performance surveys: 360-degree employee evaluation surveys help employees understand how they’re doing in every area of their roles.
- Employee pulse surveys: Employee pulse surveys are regular forms of feedback that help to rapidly gather feedback on employee performance or a broader aspect of workplace feedback.
- Employee performance survey: A general employee performance survey will help managers give structured feedback to their team members.
- Performance reviews are semi-regular meetings where managers can review an employee’s work over a certain period and give positive feedback and constructive insights to improve.
- 1:1s: One-on-one meetings offer employees a supportive way of receiving feedback, with regular meetings letting employees discuss how they’re feeling and whether there is anything they need help with.
- Suggestion boxes: Suggestion boxes are an anonymous way of collecting employee feedback. This is a valuable way to gather honest feedback if someone is uncomfortable using other channels.
Employees can give and receive feedback whenever they want by using multiple feedback channels.
Act on feedback
Ensuring employees act on feedback is an important part of creating a feedback culture. In employee feedback training, emphasize the importance of finding actionable steps from received feedback.
Be sure to prioritize the latter in your business to ensure your employees grow and improve based on the feedback they receive.
Improve your feedback programs continuously
You should improve your employee feedback program, especially if it's your first time creating a feedback culture.
Over time, you should measure and track the impact of your employee feedback strategies. By measuring your impact, you can see whether or not the program is having the intended effect. Tracking key performance indicators related to engagement and productivity is an excellent place to start.
You can also ask employees for feedback on your feedback culture to understand what’s working well and where you can improve.
Related: Employee feedback survey templates
Improve employee feedback culture with SurveyMonkey
Creating an employee feedback culture is one of the most impactful changes you can make in your organization. Regular feedback will help with everything from boosting employee engagement rates to supercharging productivity. Significant bottom-line gains lay behind a structured and effective employee feedback program.
Learn how SurveyMonkey can improve your employee performance management process. Start today to improve your employee experience and foster a healthier workplace.
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