Collecting employee feedback is an essential part of boosting employee morale and engagement. Understanding what your employees need helps to support their productivity. Therefore, it’s the management's role to provide different feedback tools for them. While there are various types of channels available, it’s important to find those that work best for your organization. Having more than one channel assures that you are catering to the different comfort levels and preferences of your staff. We’ll be looking at the different types of employee feedback mechanisms to help you to determine which ones best fit your company.

Utilizing online feedback surveys

For large offices, online feedback surveys can be a great tool to consistently get staff opinion. HR divisions can send these out bi-annually or annually, depending on the demands of the organization.

However, some employees may be uncomfortable with voicing out their complaints to superiors, for fear of being punished. Thus, management needs to consider whether it would help to make these surveys anonymous. Anonymous feedback allows employees to be completely honest without hesitation. On the other hand, anonymous feedback may also allow for feedback that isn't constructive, such as spiteful remarks that don’t help the office in any way. The lack of accountability may also decrease the accuracy of the feedback. Ultimately, the choice will depend on office culture and structures.

Small Business Trends lists the important questions to ask in an employee feedback survey, such as job satisfaction, how challenged an employee feels in their role, how satisfied they are with the compensation and benefits, and how well they’re being supervised. It helps to maintain the same line of questioning throughout the years to properly track the organization’s progress of meeting its employees’ needs.

Mobile survey tools

In this day and age, there’s an added value in employees being able to provide feedback via their own phones, especially as Maryville University claims that global mobile traffic had increased by 63% year-on-year in 2016. This trend has increased every year since, with Globe Newswire reporting that the global mobile base had risen to 7.97 billion subscribers in 2018. This has led to a demand for businesses to deliver mobile friendly content and for online feedback surveys to be optimized for mobile devices. This will also allow employees to complete the surveys outside of office hours. Various survey applications can be used for this purpose such as SurveyMonkey, SurveyPlanet and LimeSurvey.

Explore how Journyz can help you conduct quick surveys and feedback polls, all on a mobile platform.

Employee feedback through productivity applications

It’s important to note that if employees must go to another website or application to fill out a form, chances are they won’t do it. Deepa Kartha discussed how integrating feedback technology into workplace communication software is the way to go. If you integrate feedback tools into your regular workplace productivity application, feedback becomes part of your employees’ daily tasks. For example, ranking co-workers out of five stars after they’ve submitted output to you could be one way of doing it. This allows people to be more specific when giving feedback, a tip which The Balance Careers says is crucial to continual improvement in the workplace. Applications that support this are Journyz, Slack, Basecamp, and even Skype.

Face-to-face feedback sessions

Some employees are more engaged in providing feedback through less structured settings like individual face-to-face sessions with their superiors or peers. The Mission suggests allowing your employees to choose the method they’re most comfortable with. This makes the decision-making process more inclusive and boosts employee morale even more. Scheduling informal one-on-one sessions with your staff not only helps you build rapport as a team, it also is one of the best ways for your employees to reach out to you regarding their needs and concerns.

And you can do all of this on a single integrated platform. Take charge of employee engagement with a mobile, social, gamified platform like Journyz.

Author: Julia Scott