Collecting employee feedback: why it’s important and how to do it

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Employee communication hasn’t been a one-way street for some time now, which is a great development. Because of this, many organizations are looking for communication channels that enable social interaction and allow organizations to collect employee feedback. An employee communication platform is an amazing tool for collecting employee feedback and staying up to date on your employees’ opinions. In this blog, we explain why you should use your communication channels for collecting employee feedback.

Your employees undoubtedly have thoughts and emotions about their experiences within your organization. It’s important to listen to those and for your organization to gather feedback on them for a number of reasons:

• Listening to your employees goes hand in hand with creating a positive employee experience. In turn, a positive employee experience positively impacts your employees’ productivity and your organization’s bottom line.
• Collecting employee feedback and listening to your staff leads to a better understanding of what is happening within a workforce. As a result, you can intercept potential problems early on and act to prevent them from forming.
• Listening to your employees and collecting feedback helps organizations to make more data-driven decisions about staff and the course of events within your company.
• Ultimately, by listening to your staff, you create a culture that will attract and retain top talents.
  Did we convince you to start collecting employee feedback? Great! These are the tools we offer that you can use to do it.

Collecting employee feedback

The most important thing when you collect employee feedback is that you keep doing it. People and opinions change, and your organization’s pulse will always be dynamic. You will need tools that can easily give actionable insights into results and will help you to improve the employee experience. An employee communication platform can help you do this.

Polls

Our polls will give you the answers you need. Effective tools such as eNPS, emoji ratings, star ratings, or number polls will get to the bottom of your staff’s sentiment. By listening to your employees, you will get a better view of how they feel, how they develop, and how they react to daily situations or sudden changes.

Simple questions such as ‘Would you like more office plants?’ or more in-depth questions like ‘Do you feel well within our organization?’ will give an overview of how employees think of certain topics.

Pulse surveys

Pulse surveys are short, regularly recurring employee surveys. They are administered every week, month, or quarter, for example. They usually contain the same or nearly the same questions every time so that you can keep track of your organization’s pulse and track trends over time.

The great thing about pulse surveys is, as you can with our polls, you can send them to the entire organization but also to specific teams, departments, or locations. This enables you to make them relevant for every employee and will give you great insights into certain audience groups’ status, as you can adapt your questions to your audience group’s situation. This will also help you detect any differences between various departments or locations.

The following questions are examples of questions you can ask to get your employees’ opinions on topics like well-being, culture, morale, and motivation.

• Are you satisfied with your work-life balance?
• Do you feel like you belong in this organization?
• Do you get enough opportunities to develop and grow?
• Do you feel supported by your manager?
• Do you often get recognition for your work from the right people?

Social interaction

By ‘social interaction’, we mean employee interaction and engagement with the messages you post on your employee communication platform. For example, employees can comment on messages in our Desktop App and Mobile App. They can also respond to each other and like each other’s comments.

By monitoring this social interaction, you can also collect employee feedback, even when you’re not specifically asking for input. Comments, reactions, and the tone of voice in comments will help you determine employee opinions. After all, their reactions and tone of voice will tell you a lot. If you notice a lot of negativity in the comment section below one of your messages; if colleagues are commenting negatively on each other’s comments; if people are making suggestions for improvement; or if they are making the same comment over and over again, you know that it’s time to do something.

You could even follow up comments with a poll or a pulse survey to make sure employees have a certain opinion. This way, you’re collecting feedback without your colleagues noticing that you are.

Statistics

Statistics can also tell you some things, mainly about your internal communications. For example, you can use them to find out what subjects people find important (your message will probably be more popular if the topic matters to your staff), at what times it is best to send a message, and what kind of content your employees like. You can adjust your internal communication strategy accordingly so that your messages reach as many employees as possible and important information always reaches the right target group.

We are happy to help you take the necessary steps when you start collecting employee feedback. Get in touch with one of our consultants or schedule a free 30-minute demo to learn how you can collect employee feedback with Netpresenter. Or download the free self assessment to measure the levels of engagement in your organization.