Encourage staff feedback and ideas
Methods employers can employ to encourage staff feedback, opinions, and ideas.
Encouraging feedback, opinions, and ideas from your employees can help you to make improvements to your business and discover growth opportunities.
How to encourage staff feedback
There are a number of methods you can use to encourage staff to give their feedback including:
Online feedback form
Provide an online platform perhaps on your company intranet where employees can conveniently post feedback or ideas. To maintain awareness and encourage regular use you could promote the online feedback form in internal email communications or every so often you could request staff feedback or ideas on a specific issue or area of the business.
It is important that you make sure you assign someone to take responsibility for collecting the feedback and reporting on how the business plans to act on it. You should also outline the reasons for ideas that have not been taken forward. See evaluate staff feedback and ideas.
Staff suggestions box
You could encourage staff feedback by having a suggestions box in the workplace where staff can easily submit anonymous feedback. This is particularly useful for staff that don't readily have access to internal email or the company intranet.
Discussions that focus on specific business issues
By posing a question around a particular business theme, issue, or problem you can invite staff views, stimulate discussions, and identify solutions from the feedback. You could do this on a regular basis or as and when a specific issue has been identified and needs to be addressed.
Team briefings
By giving managers a standing agenda for team briefings you can invite questions and feedback from employees within these sessions.
Training for managers
You could provide training and guidance to help managers develop the skills needed to seek and handle feedback from staff.
Staff focus groups
You could hold regular employee focus groups that seek feedback from a cross-section of staff across your business - download guidance on running employee focus groups (DOC, 184K).
Senior management forums
You could create specific sessions during which employees can come and talk to senior managers and express their views or raise issues.
Regular staff surveys
You should conduct regular surveys with your employees, using a core set of questions each time so that you can track responses, measure success, identify trends, and compare data.
Rewarding ideas
Create a spot prize that gives managers the freedom to recognise a particularly innovative idea or suggestion for business improvement.
Recognise staff contribution
By celebrating all productive ideas that employees have suggested, however small, you show that everyone can help shape the way your business is run.
Anonymised feedback
To prevent discussions aren't dominated by the same strong personalities ensure there are enough opportunities for staff to give anonymous feedback. This gives those who may be reluctant to come forward in front of others the chance to voice more meaningful and honest feedback.