Creating a great company culture is vital for employee happiness and productivity, and therefore business growth. And a truly healthy workplace culture will stem from addressing and actioning feedback from employees at all levels in an organization.
A culture of listening has always been so much more than a nice-to-have. But in a post-pandemic world, where organizations are transitioning to a different way of getting work done, there’s never been a better time to ramp up your approach to tuning in and keeping a pulse on the employee voice.
What are the benefits of regular employee listening?
Regular employee listening just makes better business sense. Overall, it helps organizations to get to know staff better, which lends itself to many other benefits. For example, issues and tensions will be easier to deal with and understand as and when they arise, before getting out of control. This will aid idea sharing and will put a spotlight on the areas where your business can make improvements.
Embedding an employee listening tool into your organization will also make staff feel more valued. This will encourage employee retention, stronger teams, and most importantly, a stronger work culture.
How to make regular employee listening a priority:
1. Invest in tools and technology
To start improving your workplace culture, it’s key to invest in the relevant tools and technology. Using the right listening tool will enable your organization to better understand your people at scale in a confidential way, uncovering issues and the root cause of them. As well as creating a structured process, the right listening tool will help to keep a record of your progress. Here at WorkBuzz, we have a range of different plans to suit your employee listening needs, whether you’re just starting out or are looking to move away from your existing platform.
Once you have decided upon your listening tool, ensure to explain to employees why it is you’re utilising an employee listening tool. If they know the reasons why you are requesting feedback, staff will be more open to responding, and responding in the right way. And, it goes without saying, but encourage your people to be honest with their feedback. This will harvest more reliable data, which will provide valuable learning opportunities.
2. Don’t limit your listening
Be mindful to not limit your listening to just what’s been fed back through your employee listening tool. Pay close attention to what people are communicating in-person too and tune in to what you can see physically. This could be done by simply visiting the office, chatting with different teams, having 1:1 discussions, or getting out of the office environment to leverage more casual conversations.
3. Listen regularly
Asking employees for their feedback is all well and good. But it’s not an accurate representation of how they’re feeling if you don’t ask very often. Capturing real-time feedback by surveying your employees at least every 3 months will be insightful of their differing views, behaviours, and attitudes. This will allow you to improve the workplace in a considered manner.
4. Embrace criticism
Bad feedback is just as important as good feedback. And you should actively be encouraging staff to share both. But don’t get discouraged when you do receive criticism. Instead, recognise that employees are providing you with valuable information that you can use to your advantage. The most successful businesses will embrace criticism and use it as an opportunity to improve and rectify current practices.
5. Act on this feedback
Employee trust can very quickly be lost if the insights gained aren’t acted upon – and within good time. Instead, take what you have learnt and use it to make real, positive changes. Beneficial for the long-term, acting upon feedback will only make employees more inclined to provide honest feedback in the future.
The WorkBuzz platform can help your organization take its culture to new levels and be something that everyone wants to get involved with, through gathering real-time, confidential feedback from your teams.
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