Employees are often not the most talkative ones when it comes to giving feedback about their workplace. There is often a fear that saying something negative can result in bad treatment, poor promotion opportunities or even being shown the door.
This can sometimes be frustrating for business owners and leaders. Without the opinions of your front-line workers, you can’t make effective plans to improve the business. So, how can you collect this information? The first step is to understand the barriers of getting the information you need from your employees.
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The Barriers To Not Getting Information From Employees
There are several reasons why you can’t get accurate feedback from employees. Here is a list of several of the most common reasons:
1. Fear Of Being Identified
One of the most common is that employees fear that they are going to be identified while providing information. This makes it easier for others in the business to target them and make their working life harder. This could be because they’ve identified people who aren’t helping with projects, or that leaders feel that the comments are unjustified, or that they will reflect badly on them.
If this does happen, employees can face bullying, or worse, in the workplace. So, to avoid it, employees refrain from telling you anything.
2. Too Little Time
Busy offices have high demands on staff, and this means that they prioritize tasks based on what they perceive the highest value to their work will be. Giving you feedback probably isn’t their highest priority. Therefore, you need to persuade your staff about why it is important for them to complete surveys for you.
3. They Don’t Feel That Their Opinion Counts
Another common problem with unresponsive staff members is that they think their opinion doesn’t matter. This is a problem with communication from leaders to staff. Therefore, you need to find a way to express the fact, that their opinion makes a difference and improves business.
This takes a lot of work, but when you can link responses to actions, your staff is going to see that you care about what they say and see the value in taking action.
The Simple Solution
If you want success with getting information from your employees, then you need to find a way to collect feedback from them that overcomes the barriers we’ve mentioned above. One of the simplest and best methods is a survey. There are several reasons for this, and these are detailed below.
1. Surveys Can Be Anonymous
One of the main reasons why feedback isn’t given is because workers are scared of being identified. However, a survey can be written and collected without any information about the respondent being collected.
This doesn’t restrict the value of the information. If anything, it can help improve the quality of the data collected as people are more open to providing insightful information.
2. Surveys Can Help You Collect Information When The Team Is Free
Another concern is that people don’t have enough time to complete feedback requests. This is extremely important, as people need to feel that they have enough time to complete the survey. A survey can display how much time it will take to complete, and you can also send the request to complete the feedback form and the team member can do it when they have that time available.
You can also add in information on why the information is important to you as a leader and to the business as a whole. This can be done at the beginning of the survey through a written letter from you and other leaders.
3. You Can Link Feedback To Results
Another key aspect is that you can link feedback given by your employees directly to results and actions taken. For instance, if staff state that they think the processing time is too long because the office design isn’t suitable, you can link changes to the office design to that feedback. You can also state how many people have given a certain feedback and in what areas of business they work, making it much more of a feedback loop.
4. You Can Improve Collection Of Responses
Last but not least, because of the additional benefits of the above, you can be sure that you’ll get more employees responding to your survey. This is important because the more responses you can get, the higher the quality of the data you will generate. This allows you to make better decisions with your business improving it for the better.
Conclusion
When your business is looking to collect feedback from your employees, you should look at conducting a survey. They will help you reach more employees, collect information that is more relevant and of a better quality. This will result in improvements when it comes to your business as you’re trying to expand your business.
More about surveys:
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5 Strategies For Writing Surveys People Will Want To Respond To, click here
Read the french version:
Questionnaire RH : 3 astuces pour que vos collaborateurs s’expriment librement, click here