Employee feedback: Definition, questions and tips

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What do you mean by employee feedback?

In an organization, mostly a customer centric one, you might think that driving all your focus to the customer will just do the trick for you. When in reality, the trick lies with your employee. If your employees are dedicated and engaged enough with your organization, so that they carry forward their energy while dealing with the customers.

Happy employees lead to happy customers. This is a reason enough to pay attention to employee feedback in your organization. Employee feedback will help you understand what the employees think about their workplace, job profiles, responsibilities, and teammates they work with. Along with that, employee feedback also refers to giving suggestions and advice to the employees by their immediate supervisors or managers. 

Employee feedback, when done both ways, can be an important medium to have a transparent relationship between the higher ups in an organization and all the employees.

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Employee feedback survey questions

Let us take a look at some commonly used employee feedback questions that are used in the surveys that go around the organization.

Self-reflection 

  • How can the organization help you grow on your career path?
  • What job roles have you performed that were out of your way?
  • What responsibilities do you consider to be important?

Leadership qualities 

  • Do your team members communicate to you on a regular basis?
  • Do your teammates feel satisfied while working under you?
  • Do you communicate your feedback to your employees often?

Organizational perspective 

  • What things would you suggest us as an organization do differently?
  • On the scale of 1-10, how likely are you to refer us to your family and friends?
  • Are we as an organization able to live up to your career goals?

Employee satisfaction

  • Are you able to maintain a healthy work-life balance while working with us?
  • Are you able to work remotely when time comes?
  • What would you like to change about the way we work things?

How to efficiently carry out employee feedback

  • Trust – employee feedback turns out to be the best way to have a trustworthy relationship with an organization with its employees. As feedback is a given take of communication it develops a level of trust that eventually grows when each and every feedback is rendered.
  • Agenda – any employee feedback has to be sent with some purpose and agenda. A vague feedback will only lead to both the parties being totally clueless and blind sided. To avoid this confusion both the parties should share the same agenda even before the feedback is being rendered. It is safe to share the agenda a couple of days in advance so that both sides take their time to understand and answer the questions accordingly.
  • Transparency – to keep employees engaged, it is important that you build a culture that promotes transparency, honesty, and straightforwardness. Let your employees follow an open door policy wherein they can come and give reviews and suggestions whenever they want. Make sure you are always available to help and review feedback at the same time.
  • Be focused – employee feedback can get as long as you want them to. In such cases, where the topic seems to go deep, you can choose to break it down to several smaller topics. Make sure you stay focused on that particular topic and give the following a question.
  • No leading questions – the way you frame your questions have high chances of influencing the answer. For example, “ how much do you like working with us ?” can be a leading question. Here, you are assuming that the employee already likes working with you. This can lead to skewed results and incorrect conclusions. The above question can be written as, “do you like to work with us?”
  • Results – make sure that you are upfront to your employees about the results about the feedback. It is important to communicate the results to the employees, irrespective of how the result turned out to be. If the results show a serious issue,  it is more likely that the employees already know about it and are discussing it within themselves. They would appreciate it if you came forward and discussed it with them openly.

See Voxco survey software in action with a Free demo.

See Voxco survey software in action with a Free demo.

Employee feedback survey tips

  • Let your employees have enough time to complete their feedback activity. Understand that they are caught up with their jobs and might need timely reminders of the activity.
  • If you can, offer rewards or perks to be employees on completing the activity. Your employees should feel confident about completing the survey in a fun way.
  • Make sure the employee feedback surveys are 100% anonymous. This will help you gain more responses without affecting your insights.
  • The employee feedback needs to be analyzed and acted upon by the management. Your employees need to feel that they have been heard. Once you have the feedback responses, make sure to pay attention to the matters that need to be solved as soon as possible. These practices can make a big difference between a happy and an unhappy employee.

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