How to develop the culture of the organization for receiving employee feedback?

The behavior of many managers of organizations shows that they understand the importance of the customers and their feedback in the development of the business. They try to prepare their process, technology, and human resources for customer satisfaction and to ensure their loyalty. On the other hand, when you examine the ideas and experience of leading institutions and businesses in the world, you will find that their point of view is based on the fact that customer experience management without employee experience management and without receiving employee feedback is only a waste of time, effort, and money. So this huge gap in the mentality of senior managers of companies must be filled.

Recently, there have been various attempts in this direction. For example, the suggestion system can be an effective example of receiving employees’ feedback to improve the company’s procedures and results, but this is not enough. Behavioral change must be created in the organizations that seek employee experience management and not just seek to control employees through annual performance evaluation by the managers or through checking the arrival and departure times and vacations of employees.

From this perspective, employee experience management during the cycle of their presence in the organization needs to create and develop a culture that considers the feedback of employees as equal as the feedback of customers. In this post, we mention strategies and solutions for developing and reinforcing a culture of receiving employee feedback and interacting with them. Due to the nature of organizational culture, some solutions are behavioral and intangible, while others are objective.

Strategies for building a culture of receiving employee feedback

In the following, we present seven strategies and solutions in order to build a culture of receiving employee feedback in the organization and benefiting from it with the aim of improving organizational work.

Build confidence

Employees need to feel safe and confident in order to give and receive feedback positively. An article in the Harvard Business Review recommends these actions:

• Getting to know each other: There is no need to spend a lot of time getting to know each other in-depth. It is enough to spend some time talking to the employees about the weekends or about some events and stories in your life.
• Talk about your feelings: When you talk about your frustrations, upsets, and anger about things that happen to you in life, it means that the culture of the organization is safe and strong enough to exchange real thoughts.
• Allow employees to say “NO” to your question “Can I give you feedback?” Let employees prepare to receive feedback and have conversations with them.

Show that you care about employee feedback and comments

Perhaps no employee cares to complain or criticize his/her manager or boss. As a manager, you must show that you think a good employee is one who gives you honest and heartfelt feedback.

Create and publish an employee feedback-receiving guide

In the guide for receiving employee feedback, you must explain to the employees how to provide feedback and what the appropriate methods and literature are. Then, provide them with examples of effective feedback and comments, and you must explain to them in this guide how effective employees’ feedback will be for the company, its future, and other employees.

Use appropriate technology for employee feedback management

Employee feedback management technology not only automates and facilitates receiving the employees’ feedback, but also helps in analyzing it. Choosing an appropriate technology will help you in the effective connection between customer-related data with employee feedback-related data in addition to making decisions and defining corrective actions effectively. In other words, the presence of technology helps you view and manage employee feedback as part of ongoing business operations rather than just a once-a-year procedure in the HR department. The employed technology must provide facilities to protect the confidentiality and privacy of the employees so that its use is widely spread among employees.

Keep the balance

Start with small actions in order to build an organizational culture in which employee feedback is exchanged and their impact on business decisions is demonstrated. For example, if you do not already have such a procedure, do not suddenly move to hold weekly meetings to receive feedback. Instead, take advantage of some small opportunities to encourage a culture of interaction and expressing opinions and feedback.

Employ different channels for receiving employee feedback

Each employee has a different personality. So you should not rely on obtaining employee feedback on the online forms that you send to them only. In addition to these forms, in which you usually collect feedback anonymously, you should also hold individual or group meetings with people. Because combining channels helps reinforcement of mutual trust and an atmosphere of interaction and dialogue in the organization.

Inform employees of decisions based on receiving employee feedback

If you make decisions and actions based on receiving employee feedback, you must inform the employees of this. If an action is not taken according to the feedback and expectations of the employees, you must explain why. In other words, the feedback loop must be taken out of the black box state in order to maintain its function in the long term.

Changing culture and attitude is not something that happens overnight once a technological or management change is made. But technology can facilitate change. Using Porsline‘s organizational solution can open a new window of interaction between employees and the organization in order to receive employee feedback and manage employee experience so that you can easily monitor the health indicators of the organizational culture and take necessary actions to improve it. Contact us to learn about the organizational solution in the field of human resources.