How you can use an employee communications platform to collect employee feedback

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

In most organizations, employees receive formal feedback several times a year. Informal feedback moments are even more frequent – probably almost daily. However, it’s important to flip the feedback process now and then. How often do your employees get a chance to voice their opinions and give feedback on issues within the organization? The best way to get to know and understand how your employees are feeling at work is by collecting employee feedback continuously. But how do you collect employee feedback? We explain it all in this blog!

Did you know that 75% of employees say they would stay with an organization longer if it listens to and addresses their concerns and feedback? Some organizations never ask for their employees’ feedback: they only give feedback, during performance reviews, for example.

Luckily, many organizations do make an effort to listen to their employees, mostly through the well-known (but time-consuming) annual employee engagement survey. And while that certainly is a way to gain insights into your employees’ thoughts and feelings, the annual engagement survey is also a snapshot of your organization’s sentiment. It only goes out once a year (what’s in a name?), and a lot can happen and change in a year.

Sentiment changes over time

How your employees feel about certain topics may change based on their day-to-day experiences at work. More often than not, annual employee engagement surveys result in ineffective, delayed feedback. And by the time the results are processed, you may already need a new survey to get real insights into your workforce’s thoughts and feelings and the ins and outs of your organization. Not having a regular survey sends a message: you don’t care about people’s opinions.

Additionally, many organizations rely on the corporate intranet or an org-wide email to send out the annual engagement survey. This way, they may exclude employees without access to the intranet or email from participating in the survey, even if they wanted to make this time-consuming effort.

In short: the annual employee engagement survey isn’t your holy grail to real-time and actionable insights into your organization’s sentiment and mood.

Check-in regularly for actionable insights

Do you want employee feedback to provide significant benefits? Then, checking in more than once a year with your employees is crucial. Only regularly collecting feedback from your employees will provide actionable insights and benefits. Additionally, conducting regular surveys gives employees a specific channel for expressing voice.

Regularly checking in with their employees will allow organizations to:

• Identify small issues before they become big problems.
• Measure continuous employee satisfaction.
• Ask for opinions on (possible) changes or specific topics.
• Monitor employee morale throughout the year or during specific events.
• Make employees feel heard.
• Improve employee experience.

But how do you (easily) collect this day-to-day employee feedback that results in insights that help you shape future strategies? How do you collect results that allow you to make small changes to improve the employee experience for your employees and keep them all aboard?

We’re glad you asked!

The trend in collecting employee feedback has shifted from time-consuming annual surveys towards polls and pulse surveys: short and more regular snapshots of your organization’s general state of mind. They can be sent out quickly and survey the organization’s opinions and feelings about any topic to provide managers and employees with real-time insights. This can help improve overall performance and form new strategies or make necessary changes. Employees can participate anonymously in polls and pulse surveys, which will result in the most honest feedback.

An employee communications platform like Netpresenter can be used to send polls and pulse surveys to everyone in your organization – yes, including those hard-to-reach front-line employees without access to the intranet or email. Just send a poll or pulse survey directly to the channels they are already using to consume information: their laptops or smartphone. Netpresenter will help you to track your organization’s pulse.

Polls: get all the answers you need

Polls help you to find out what drives your workforce. Do you want to know what your employees think of your new logo design? Ask them in a poll! Want to find out if they want pizza or burgers for corporate lunch on casual Friday? Ask them in a poll! Wondering how they feel about hygiene in the office? You know the drill…

When you have a large workforce, collecting feedback may feel like a dreadful task. However, with polls, collecting feedback is short and straightforward, and the whole process can be completed within hours or days (depending on voting duration).

With various types of polls, such as multiple-choice questions, number polls, or emoji and star ratings, you will always have the right type of poll to find out exactly what you want to know – right now. Not in weeks or months, when you’re done processing survey results, but in real-time. Simply send it to your employees, schedule the voting period and collect results when the voting period is over to turn your poll into employee feedback that can drive actions immediately.

Pulse Surveys: track your organization’s pulse  

Pulse surveys enable you to track your organization’s sentiment. They help you boost employee experience, as they will give you insights into how sentiment changes over time. And creating a better employee experience is easier when you know how your employees are feeling.  

While pulse surveys are also snapshots of your employees’ thoughts and feelings (like the annual engagement survey is), they allow you to follow trends within your organization. The more snapshots you take – at the same time or day or during the same events – the more accurate and complete your understanding of your workforce’s mood will be.

Pulse surveys can target individual employees. But what if they don’t participate in your survey? No point in sending out your survey, right? That is why we designed attention boosters. Attention boosters will automatically (zero effort!) send multiple attempts to reach your audience with notifications or pop-ups that are impossible to miss. The campaign won’t stop until your goal is reached.

You can use various recurrence options to publish your pulse surveys automatically on specific days, weeks, or months, for example. This way, you will collect feedback even when you actively forget to. Share the insights with stakeholders and inform changes to start transforming your business and driving the employee experience.

We would love to help you take the steps to track your organization’s sentiment and build an actionable feedback loop. Reach out to one of our consultants or schedule a free 30-minute demo to experience how you can collect employee feedback with Netpresenter! Or download the free self assessment to measure the levels of engagement in your organization.