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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
Some forms of feedback are naturally more appropriate in certain situations. Creating a feedback culture involves consistently utilizing various types of feedback.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Employees can give and receive feedback whenever they want by using multiple feedback channels.
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.
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
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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