Feedback is a critical resource for any organization, but company culture typically defines just how valuable that feedback is considered. A strong company culture solicits and encourages feedback, recognizing it as a tool to promote personal, team, and corporate growth. However, companies that discourage employee feedback often exploit and waste the knowledge their employees have gained.
Organizational feedback can be negative or positive, but it is all beneficial when utilized correctly.
Integrating Organizational Feedback Into the Business Workflow
Incorporating feedback into your company culture significantly impacts retention and productivity by directly influencing employee engagement. But constructive feedback doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires conscious intention and implementing processes incorporating your employees’ thoughts and ideas into your standard workflow. Here are some tips to help the business establish a culture of real-time feedback.
- Cultivate a growth mindset: Leaders in a robust feedback culture understand that learning and development are desirable and that feedback represents an excellent opportunity to improve. Companies who embrace this mindset begin by asking the right questions during the hiring process and capture feedback at every point in the business process. They may provide training and educational opportunities, encourage and sponsor their employee’s certification and licensing efforts, and offer recognition for personal development. Interwoven through all these initiatives is reciprocal feedback about required skills and management support of individual career paths.
- Establish a feedback culture and cadence: Organizational feedback is encouraged and accepted most readily when managers are actively engaged. Feedback is interactive and should be encouraged between employee and their manager at all times. Organizations that proactively embrace it will establish a culture of transparency, contribution, sharing, and feedback. Once done, a feedback cadence is developed – meaning that management establishes a plan for regular feedback on specific and scheduled topics.
- Establish a feedback-safe environment: A strong feedback culture is impossible if employees are afraid to provide their honest thoughts and ideas. The team must feel secure knowing that if they honestly offer productive feedback, they won’t have to endure adverse or angry reactions – and that speaking up will not affect their job status. A safe environment begins with building trust and is strengthened over time as feedback is received positively. Individual employees will have different capacities regarding both providing and accepting feedback, so it is essential to refrain from compelling them to participate in a way that makes them uncomfortable. Providing various means of feedback, such as face-to-face meetings, virtual “suggestion boxes,” and online surveys and forums will allow the maximum number of employees to provide honest feedback regarding their job.
- Normalize and facilitate feedback: The best way to encourage effective feedback is to make it routine – and the best way to ensure systematic feedback is to make it effortless. Employees become comfortable with the process when feedback is incorporated into everyday workflows. Corporate culture is comprised of shared knowledge, language, and traditions, as well as best practice processes. By creating a space for shared experiences, companies encourage the give-and-take of feedback and ensure ideas keep flowing.
A company knowledge-sharing portal provides a strategic way to collect, aggregate, and disseminate corporate-wide feedback that supports growth and initiative at all levels of the organization. By setting access levels, leadership can facilitate any feedback channel, whether one-to-one or individual-to-group. Management can also decide if feedback should be anonymous or accredited based on sensitivity or preference.
The right technology can effectively power the feedback process by providing an easy way to record and save notes, conduct two-way conversations, seek 360 feedback, offer recognition, or collect surveys. The KLONE Organizer removes the administrative tedium from feedback collection, empowering your team to focus on the growth, revenue, and future initiatives fueled by that information.