Find Out What Your Employees REALLY Think

April 21, 2011

Soliciting feedback from employees should be a part of every expansion stage company’s best practices processes. For companies at this stage who likely do not yet have an HR department, this responsibility usually falls directly on CEOs and their management teams. While it may be difficult to start eliciting honest and valuable information from your employees, a strategic plan should help you get the feedback you need to help your company grow. Jason Blais’ On Recruiting blog provided some great tips for soliciting real employee feedback, which I have expanded upon below.

Tips for Improving your Employee Survey Process:

1. Start Small. Make your next survey extremely short and easy to complete. Once you receive the results of each survey, provide immediate feedback, and be sure not to share data and comments that could be identifiable to a specific employee. Your employees will need to gain your trust that their responses will be both anonymous and acted upon.

2. Provide Anonymity. Provide a detailed explanation of the importance of the information you are asking from your employees and of how you will keep their responses anonymous and will not hold the information given to you in their surveys against them. You will need to build trust with your employees in order to get feedback that is truly helpful.

3. Include Every Employee. Particularly when your company is at this stage of growth, every single employee should be involved in the feedback process. Ideas on how you can improve your business may come from your VP of Sales, and an equally great idea may come from your Marketing Coordinator. Surveying all of your employees also shows how serious you are about getting genuine feedback.

4. Share Results ASAP. In order to develop and support the trust of your employees, ALWAYS share the results of your surveys. Your employee feedback will not always paint your company in a positive light, but hiding that fact will discourage your employees from sharing flaws they see within your organization, rather than help you address them. In order to share feedback in a timely matter, set a deadline for completing your surveys, and never miss it. If employees see that others are sharing helpful and honest feedback, they will be more inclined to do so as well.

5. Ask Both Open and Closed-Ended Questions. Although open-ended questions are helpful to generate qualitative data, they can be difficult to analyze. Closed-ended questions will allow you to analyze the data more efficiently and to look for patterns. For each piece of information that you are seeking feedback on, try to include one closed and one open-ended question.

If you follow these steps, the value and quality of your employee feedback should increase over time and help to grow your company and aid your employee retention. To get started, determine what feedback you wish to solicit feedback for, and how you plan to act on those results.

For additional resources, check out:
10 Mistakes in Employee Engagement Surveys
Soliciting Employee Feedback: Getting Results
Five Recommendations for Employee Satisfaction Surveys

VP, Human Capital

<strong>Diana Martz</strong> is Vice President, Human Capital at<a href="http://www.ta.com/">TA Associates</a>. She was previously the Director of Talent at OpenView.