Employee feedback is a great way to get a feel for how your team is tracking. But it's easy to miss key insights and improvement areas, especially if your new to pulses and surveys.
Using an example of a pulse report in Everperform, we want to break down 3 quick and easy insights you can gain from getting feedback from your employees.
How often should you collect feedback?
There are no hard and fast rules here, but we do have two guidelines to recommend. When it comes to frequency, once a week or fortnight is perfect. Getting feedback consistently will allow you to identify trends and action issues faster. The other guideline relates to content, and less really is more here.
Tie this into our recommended frequency, and you can quickly see how longer surveys take too much time and become repetitive. Variety is also important here.
1. How aligned is your team?
It seems like such a simple question to answer, and easy to mistake alignment from 'a feeling'. This really isn't the case. We aren't just talking about the alignment of work here, but also the alignment and agreement on potential issues.
One way to see how aligned your team is looking at how responses are distributed in pulses/surveys.
Let's look at an example pulse report from Everperform below.
Looking at this graph from a high level, we can see that this team is semi-aligned based on the distribution of responses. Most responses in this pulse fall in the same 45 - 65 range. While these responses may not be great (they are in the mid-range of scores) from a performance point of view, it does beg a few more questions to be answered. Particularly, what are people agreeing about that they are giving average responses to, and is it something we need to fix.
Distributions are also a great way to identify outliers, and we can see from the graph above that we have one. It's hard to say what those potential issues could be without digging in more, but at least we now know there may be a problem we need to action.
2. Where are the areas to improve in?
One thing you should easily be able to answer from any form of employee feedback is where you need to improve, or at least areas you need to keep an eye on.
Let's take a look at the graph below. We can see that for each category in this pulse, we have average scores across the team.
There's not a lot to gain from this view, the results are average but we don't know the makeup of those results. So we need to drill down a level. Let's pick the Mindset category and see what's causing those average scores.
Now we have some good data to work with. We can see two particularly low areas in Mindset. "I am feeling good and energised" is at 35%, and most people haven't received valuable feedback from someone else in the team recently. Already we know areas that we need to improve upon, across the board the team isn't feeling great, and praise/recognition needs to be encouraged more.
3. What needs to be actioned immediately
The insights we've gained above have all looked at results from a team/distribution point-of-view. One of the advantages of small pulses and frequent feedback is that you can get results at a personal level.
Looking at feedback from an employee's view rather than just the organisation's lets you identify real issues, real quick.
Let's look at the example response heatmap below.
Already, you should be able to notice two results that raise some questions. The last employee on the list has rated 1 star for both "I am feeling good and energised" and "I did what I set out to do last week" (names have been hidden from the graph). An issue that should be immediately noted and followed up.
This is a great, quick insight you can get from employee feedback when it's done well. We don't know how long this person has felt like this, or how it's impacting their well-being, work and the rest of the team, but we know this person is asking for help and we can now give it.
Finding key insights from employee feedback doesn't need to be hard, and you don't need a dedicated team of data scientists to do it. If you aren't collecting feedback from employees on a regular basis, we encourage you to incorporate it into your operating schedule.
