The Feedback Work Value Method-The five proven steps to organisational feedback success
People want to be heard, but few companies are truly listening
There are many of groups of people in the world, creating conflict between themselves, because they don't feel heard. So wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a world where more groups of people could talk to each other? And felt heard? That sounds great, doesn't it?
That's the philosophy of Feedback Works, not just to help employees and organisations get better with feedback, but to help different parts of society connect and feel heard.
So how is that relevant to work? Well, people who feel heard at work are nearly five times more likely to feel empowered to get on and do a great job. It's all about making human connections and enabling people to do their best.
So what is the simple solution? We’ll it’s to run a survey, right? Well unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. That’s because surveying people without feedback and action is worse than not surveying them at all. Gathering people's opinions and then not letting them feel heard is one of the worse things you can really do with feedback. We see this issue played out time and time again in organisations.
The issue is what we call the experience gap. We can see an overwhelming need to feel heard at work, and most organsiations are disappointing people in their inability to listen, feed back and action.
92% of people in organisations say they want to feel heard, but only 7% of people feel that they are really listened to well.
So we've got a general experience gap of 85%, that's the difference between the 92% needing to be heard and the 7% of people who feel it’s happening. Recent stats show about 90% of companies run some form of employee experience survey. But we can see that they’re just not making the best use of the time, effort and investment in survey technology.
They may be measuring sentiment and using some of the latest AI to develop insights, but they're not letting people feel heard. So we've got a problem then. Surveys aren’t working.
So what can we do? Well, working through a simple but powerful improvement process is a good start. We'll talk about the process in terms of five solutionsin a moment, but first let’s look at 5 key things that can go wrong in any employee survey process and can derail a feedback culture.
The five fundamental feedback flaws.
Uncoupled
The first is all about a lack of alignment between survey intention and strategy. Many surveys are still being run, and with the introduction of improved survey technology, often multiple times a year across key employee touch-points. However, it’s still unusual to see the design and insights from these surveys grounded in, and providing key improvements for, both HR and organisational strategy.
Undesigned
There are often competing and conflicting feedback initiatives internally. Often when we’re beginning to work with organisations, it’s not unusual to see 30 key feedback touchpoints in an organisation, from 1-2-1’s, to performance reviews, to town-halls, various surveys, 360’s and beyond. This creates confusion in terms of the best insights and tangible actions to really move organsations forward in terms of employee experience and performance.
Unhearing
We’ve already looked at the ‘experience gap’, and the third key issue with many listening programmes is that there is a lack of action from surveys and little feedback at the team level. This leaves employees feeling unheard and untrusting of feedback initiatives more generally.
Uninsightful
The fourth element that often does not work well is the delivery of tangible insight from survey data. We may be in a world of AI driven analytics but without a survey or feedback process firmly embedded in strategy of an organisation, the insight and planned journey for the organsiation may be completely misaligned.
Unevolving
The final potential flaw is all about manager empowerment. There is a danger in over-looking managers, and their needs, to help them deliver real change in organisations. We work with hundreds of companies and many of them who are at the beginning of their feedback journey tell us, that what is lacking, are those simple but powerful messages at a local level that can lead to tangible change. This is often coupled with local managers needing some help in being enabled to have positive conversations with their teams, in the context of some of the feedback often feeling quite personal.
Get better with feedback.
So, we’ve seen a lot can go wrong. However, help is at hand with a process that we’ve see time and time again work for organisations who are embarking with new survey technology and / or wanting to improve their feedback culture, to help lessen that experience gap.
We developed and refined the solution over several years and it is called the Feedback Works Value method. It’s simple, powerful and is an overarching framework with which to organise feedback activities to ensure improvement is made.
These are the five key steps to success and we’ll review them in some more detail below.
VISION
A clear vision statement linked to
the purpose of your EX initiative
allows you to frame your programme and
make the right decisions.
It forms the basis of clear
communications to all stakeholders.
So the first thing is to think about, when planning to run a survey or develop a feedback culture is to think about a vision for feedback and employee experience. There are so many design decisions to make in terms of what survey questions to ask, how many pulse surveys to run and how to plug in AI technology, that if you don't have a vision, it's very easy to get lost.
It’s really important to have a road map, understand your stakeholders and know what ultimately you're trying to achieve. Many organisations are looking to improve their feedback culture. To help them get there we often encourage a conversation about feedback maturity. We ask questions like ‘Where are you on the journey?’, ‘How enabled are managers to have great conversations’ and ‘What are the quick wins to help you mature right now?’.
In having these conversations, we know that internal stakeholders are an important part of having an actionable vision for a feedback culture. Through our workshop processes we help Human Resources colleagues think about who the stakeholders are and what they need from improvedf eedback processes. Often everyone from the CEO right down to front-line colleagues will have a need, and will benefit from, improved feedback processes. So, in our experience, it’s really important to think about stakeholders, some of the problems that they might have at work in terms of delivering their jobs, and then how employee feedback can help.
ARCHITECTURE
A great architecture acts as the
roadmap for your project, helping
you understand the moments
that matter in your organisation.
It helps identify the most effective
ways to capture feedback and
which technology is best suited
to your needs.
A solid vision will then help to drive key design decisions around architecture, who to survey, how and when. A really common question we get asked is ‘how many pulse surveys should we run this year? The answer of course is to think about your vision for employee experience and what you're trying to get to. Don’t try and plan any journey without a clear viewpoint about your final destination.
LISTENING
Launch your EX listening programme.
Clear communication to employees
to encourage participation.
Make it easy to access and take part.
Give feedback to people!
Listening is the component of the VALUE method that many organisations are doing, with varying degrees of success as we’ve seen in the experience gaps statistic. With new survey technologies, we are seeing many more employee touch-points through theyear in terms of measuring lifecycle, joiner experience, leavers and candidate experience. As this list of ‘momentst hat matter’ increases it’s important that they are aligned under one vision and strategy that ultimately aligns to improving the feedback culture
UNDERSTANDING
Meaningful analysis and actionable insight for all stakeholders.
Make it accessible and meaningful for everyone
Empower managers to understand and use the insight to drive improvement.
Involve managers in the feedback and action planning process.
Understanding is all about empowering managers with the right sorts of insights. An understanding of employee feedback should really lead to positive change. But, often enablement activities need to happen to help managers understand the basics of the importance of employee experience, and how theycan really improve their team in simple, easy steps using survey insights.
EVOLUTION
Action planning is just the start!
Empower managers with the skills and capabilities to have great conversations.
Identify areas of improvement that will make the biggest difference to people in your organisation.
Every organisation using employee feedback is onsome kind of accidental or chosen journey to improve their feedback culture. Much of the ability to make positive change is underpinned by developing manager capability to use feedback to improve, and to develop this as part of ‘business as usual’. In the world of feedback and surveys there is lots of talk about action planning. There's not much conversation after that around continuous improvement. We see lots of activity around results roll-out and action planning, and less around improvements becoming embedded in a culture of feedback.
So, in conclusion there are many potential pitfalls in starting out to embed a culture of listening and feedback. However, if you stick to the tried and tested principles of the Feedback Works Value Method you are much more likely to see success.
Have a vision, develop out your plans, listen in the right way, understand and feedback your insights, and most importantly, activate your manager population to make change. Do those things, trust the process, and you’ll be on the path to feedback success.
