10 Ideas for Gathering Employee Engagement Feedback

10 Ideas for Gathering Employee Engagement Feedback

It’s important to get your employee’s feedback about life on the job, thoughts, suggestions, and ideas if you want to build an engaged team and retain your best employees. Traditionally, employee engagement surveys have been a popular way to get feedback from team members. Unfortunately, it may not be the best way to listen to your employees and get their true thoughts.

When you communicate verbally, you are really sending two messages. One is the actual verbal message and the second is the messages you send with non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and the tone of voice. You can see how much information you may lose with the use of a written or digital survey.

In order to get a better picture of your employee’s engagement in the workplace, try some of the practical methods listed below:

1. Online Suggestion Box: Encourage your employees to write suggestions, ideas, comments, and notes about the work and workplace environment. Have them leave their suggestions in a modern online suggestion box. Devote a few minutes to review and talk about notes at staff meetings.
2. One-on-One Conversations: Instead of running an employee survey, set up quick one-on-one conversations with any employee who wants to sign up. Sit down with your team members and just listen to what they have to say. You’ll be surprised by the suggestions that you receive and you can take action on what you deem to be the most important.
3. Confidential phone hotline: To allow employees to speak up about harassment, discrimination, and other difficult topics, set up a confidential telephone line where employees can come forward.
4. Encourage Networking: Community events in your workplace are the perfect opportunity to introduce employees to other departments or leaders that they don’t know. Conversations from these introductions can lead to a feedback exchange. For example, an employee in marketing can ask a sales representative “What can we in Marketing do to make your life easier?”
5. Listen during meetings: Take advantage of work gatherings such as staff meetings or employee training to listen to team members. Dedicate 10 minutes of every meeting to ask: “How are we doing as a company?”
6. Create a team: Choose a select few employees that are knowledgeable about your company to speak with team members and new employees to allow their concerns and suggestions to be heard.
7. Use a poll: Send a one-time poll with an open question with information that would benefit from a vote. For example, one question could be “We’ve discussed that we need to shorten our list of suppliers for the third quarter. Please rate the 12 suppliers below from best to worse, in your opinion. We’ll send the results of this poll for next week’s meeting.”
8. Organize a Town Hall Meeting: If you have a large team that wouldn’t fit at a conference table, set up a Town Hall meeting to get group feedback. If you’re not comfortable with answering questions from the team on the spot, ask members to submit questions beforehand so you can prepare.
9. Set up an open-door policy: Let your employees know that they are encouraged to reach out to their managers or any other leaders at the company at any time. You may have people who may contact you unnecessarily but this is better than missing out on hearing about any key issues at your company.
10. Lunchtime listening: Encourage managers, supervisors, HR, and other leaders to sit in the breakroom with employees on a specific day of the week. Anyone who wants to chat with these leaders can join in the conversation during lunchtime. It’s a great way to get true feedback from employees about life on the job, thoughts, and ideas.

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