How To Take Advantage Of The Current Trends In Employee Feedback

To reap the absolute benefits of the goal-setting process, feedback must be integral to the process. If your employees are not even aware of how are they performing, how can they possibly up their game to perform better and drive your organization towards success? 

We’re living in a fast-paced world where trends change in the blink of an eye. A practice that is working perfectly fine today might not be pertinent tomorrow. The same goes for employee feedback. With every new generation in the workforce, employee feedback undergoes a tremendous change. Add to that the remote working culture and the trends only intensify. Future and success-oriented leaders and organizations have to keep themselves on their toes in order to take the advantage of the trends to drive their organization ahead of its peers. 

As we’ve been experiencing for quite some time now, employee feedback management has been undergoing a tremendous change. How well is your organization keeping up with the changing approach? Not much while back, the employees made their opinion heard by slipping unsigned mem into the suggestion box of the organization. Fast forward to today, the high-performing organizations that have been swiftly gliding towards success have replaced the outdated feedback approach with persistent feedback into which peer-to-peer feedback has added another lens for continuous performance management. 

In today’s era, your employees are more likely to thrive when they are empowered and inspired, and not bombarded with commands on what to do. Long gone are the days when the meaning of employee feedback was just limited to the meaning – you giving your employees input on their performance. As stated above, the definition has expanded as it now includes bottom-up feedback from employees to their leaders. This makes it easier for the employees to be open about their concerns regarding work-life balance, workload, unfair bias, discrimination, and their job duties. By increasing your awareness and efforts, you can develop feedback into a magical tool that will finetune it all for your organization. 

Let us now take a glance at the outdated form of feedback & the evolving approaches to employee feedback to blur out the room for any doubts for you. This plays an influential role in making leaders and organizations in taking advantage of the current trends in employee feedback. 

Outdated form of feedback

Even in today’s rapidly changing era, there are organizations out there whose employee feedback approach gravitates to be afterthoughts. They might take the route of setting up a suggestion box or circulating the annual surveys asking the employees the universal mainstream questions like how do they feel at work? These ways do more harm than good as your employee is very likely to think that their concern will go unheard. Moreover, you won’t have a way to follow up with them regarding their hindrances. Since the surveys aren’t always anonymous, there are high chances that your employees answer them authentically so as to portray themselves as happier than they are. Unfortunately, such approaches don’t allow the employees to be frank about their apprehensions. They also provide organizations with distorted results while the real problems remain concealed. 

The Evolving approach of the employee feedback

The employee feedback approach is now evolving for all the right reasons. Feedback systems are becoming more employee-oriented and aim at encouraging employees to be vocal about their concerns. As per a survey by the State of Employee Feedback, 21% of the employees prefer to zip their lips about their issues at the organization as they feel that nothing would be done to solve it and feared the repercussions. Your employees not feeling comfortable in raising their issue is certainly something that you wouldn’t want in your organization, would you?

While the legion of organizations does provide mediums to provide feedback, their employees often opt not to use them as they’re not legitimately anonymous. Likewise, your employees might be reluctant to give feedback through such means by which they can be named as it can put them at the risk of retaliation. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found retaliation to be the biggest workplace concern in employees.  Anonymous reporting will stimulate your employees to be more complacent to be open about their concerns at the workplace.  

Day by day leaders are making it a priority to provide their employees with a psychologically safe place to work in. This benefits you and your organization as well since the employees tend to become more engaged, productive, and responsible in such environments. You got to substantiate that your employees know that they can raise report concerns, provide feedback and address the issues anonymously, privately with the managers, or candidly without being put down, ignored, and condescended. 

Equipping your organization with a performance management tool that facilitates real-time, continuous and 360° feedback has become more than a necessity now. This enables your organization to reap the benefits of the development of employee feedback. The better your workforce feels and engages, the better will be their productivity and commitment towards guiding your organization towards success. 

What are the trends in employee feedback?

1. Hybrid and remote

The pandemic shifted organizations and industries in ways that no one anticipated – the major one being the transition to either fully remote or hybrid work culture for every organization. This establishes the need of reevaluating how to go about maintaining high employee engagement and motivation when only some or none of the team members are physically present together. Organizations are adopting new techniques and technologies that enable their remote teams to continue working collaboratively, facilitating communication, providing and getting timely feedback. 

2. More reporting pipelines

Organizations are beginning to give their employees more feedback channels to work in this new norm. They are especially on the lookout for performance management tools that will do it all for their organizations – set goals, regulate them, align their teams and enable them to facilitate timely and two-end feedback. With the thought of not overwhelming the employees with tons of different mediums, the huge number of organizations leaning towards performance management tools is a no-brainer. Once organizations realize that the employees feel more congenial in giving and taking feedback in real-time, they bid adieu to the traditional annual performance approach.

3. Digitization of HR

With the objective of meeting employees where they are and providing them different routes for reporting and feedback, a substantial number of HR departments are taking the road of digitization. Digitalization in HR is all about how to assist your organization and help in attaining the objectives of its employee strategy.  This transformation consists of changes such as virtual hiring and interviews, recruitment automation, digital inductions, and e-signature documents. HR departments are being equipped with the tools that facilitate them to take and give feedback to organizational employees swiftly, easily, and in real-time. 

Need more light on the in-demand topics and tools such as performance management, OKRs, employee engagement, and real-time feedback? Contact the proficients now!