Last week I teamed up with the folks at ClearPicture to
present a webinar on “Using Employee Feedback for Business Improvement.” As we were speaking to an HR audience we
focused on what many in human resources are familiar with – gathering employee
feedback as part of an employee engagement survey.
We who work in the HR sphere can scarcely turn around
without hearing, reading and talking about employee engagement yet even though
we discuss this topic ad nauseum we still struggle to come up with a common
definition ourselves; for purposes of the webinar we opted to use a definition
from author Kevin Kruse “Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the
employee has to the organization and its goals.”
While we used the employee engagement survey as an example
our webinar was not about engagement. Rather we talked about how HR
professionals should approach any feedback process with a goal of gaining
insight that can lead to business breakthroughs. Desired results are
organization specific of course and will depend upon one’s industry, customers
and organizational strategies.
Organizational goals often include revenue growth or cost-savings but
could just as easily be superior project performance, better decisions or even,
for government entities or non-profits, how to solve problems that concern
citizens/constituents.
Our goal as presenters was to ensure that HR professionals
view an employee feedback process in a holistic and enterprise-wide way – whether
they have 200, 2,000 or 20,000 employees.
Five Step Process
Clarifying the
purpose – At this stage it’s important to set the context and clarify the
purpose for gathering feedback. Answer
the when, why and for what reason questions at the outset; include the
compelling needs for gathering the data and explain how those needs are tied to
organizational goals.
Gathering feedback
– Determining the manner in which feedback will be gathered is critical in
order to meet the needs of the audience. Several things come into play at this
stage including determining the mix/types of questions (i.e., open-ended vs.
closed-ended) as well as encouraging employee participation by thinking ‘like a
marketer’ – crafting the right message and going to where the employee audience
gathers which may include mobile, social or via some sort of gamified
technology.
Analyzing the data
– For the most part HR practitioners are not trained statisticians but they
must put on their statistician hat (or work with someone who can assist them)
at this stage in order to accurately review quantitiave vs. qualitative data
and also to ensure they don’t fall into traps around causation or correlation
or making invalid comparisons between seemingly related pieces of information.
Correlating the data
– Remember how we talked about this feedback process having an enterprise-wide
focus? This is the stage where it truly
becomes one. HR professionals should look beyond their traditional sources of
HR data (HRIS, ATS, LMS, etc.) and link not just HR data and the feedback data
but also see how data gathered from other parts of the business fits into the
whole. Questions to ask may be: What are
the sales numbers for the company and how does that match up to the
organizational hierarchy? What about customer or service trends? How is shipping of product handled? Do we have a call center where number of
calls per day, customer satisfaction and time-spent-on-calls is tracked? HR practitioners know that in those
functional areas the leaders are tracking it all and now is the perfect
opportunity to dive into the human/people elements related to these business
operations.
Taking action –
The biggest complaint from employees is that whenever feedback is asked for
nothing is ever done so this final step is where communication should go into
hyper drive. While taking action
includes setting goals, monitoring progress and holding people accountable it
also includes ensuring that employees get answers to:
·
“what do we (leaders) know now that we didn’t know
before” and, most importantly
·
“Who will be responsible? When will it happen? How will we monitor it? WHO will do
‘WHAT by WHEN?”
Three Key Items
Throughout any feedback process (such as an employee
engagement survey) it’s important to:
·
Have a purpose that is aligned with
organizational strategy
·
Communicate and clarify
·
Take action by following through and following
up
You can check out the presentation slides here. As an HR
professional you can guide and influence organizational leaders in meaningful
ways that can lead to successful business outcomes, improvements and
breakthroughs.
Source: HR
SchoolHouse
No comments:
Post a Comment