Employee feedback increases employee engagement, which is proven to increase productivity, drive growth, and improve employee retention. Learn how to collect employee feedback using ContactMonkey for your internal communications.
With businesses scrambling to retain their veteran employees and attract top talent, employee engagement is more important than ever before. Why employee feedback is important is that it allows you to understand where to direct your efforts and how to improve employee engagement at your organization.
Collecting employee feedback tells you exactly what issues your organization needs to address. It can also help you gather actionable insights that you can use to improve your overall employee engagement.
We’ll explore why you should collect employee feedback and how it impacts your business, as well as how you can gather employee feedback using different employee feedback tools.
What Is Employee Feedback?
Employee feedback is any information that your employees choose to share with you about themselves or your business. Whether shared directly with leadership, via survey, during a meeting or town hall, or any other instance, employee feedback can tell you a lot about how your employees feel about your company.
Your employees may have ideas on how to improve processes at your company; they might have suggestions on how they prefer to work. You’ll only learn what feedback your employees have to share by prioritizing effective employee feedback methods.
Why collect employee feedback?
Employees who can freely share their thoughts and opinions are more likely to feel comfortable at your business. Why does employee feedback matter and why measure employee feedback? If your employees feel that their input impacts the outcomes of their work, they’re more likely to have increased engagement with their day-to-day tasks.
The reasons why you should collect employee feedback are three-fold:
- Your employees get to share their opinions and influence decisions that affect their work.
- You get to collect ideas that can innovate and improve your business.
- Employee feedback is a great indicator of overall employee engagement and productivity.
Ultimately, your method of how to collect employee feedback will impact the type of feedback you collect, which in turn impacts how you can act on it.
Types of Employee Feedback to Collect
Before we examine specific employee feedback methods, employee feedback questions, and employee feedback surveys, it’s useful to understand the different categories of employee feedback.
- Qualitative vs. quantitative feedback: Qualitative feedback is unique feedback provided by your employees, like suggesting a topic for your next company town hall or responding to staff spotlight questions. Quantitative feedback is generic data provided by your employees, like responding to a yes/no survey question.
- Positive vs. negative feedback: Positive employee feedback affirms, celebrates, or agrees with the topic at hand. Negative feedback criticizes or disagrees with the topic at hand. Both kinds of feedback are useful for internal communicators for understanding employee engagement at their organization.
- Problem-focused vs. solution-focused feedback: Problem-focused feedback identifies roadblocks facing your employees, and can shine a light on issues that would otherwise be ignored. Solution-focused feedback provides suggestions or insights for solving known problems. Both kinds of feedback help you address hurdles you may face when building employee engagement.
- Solicited vs. unsolicited feedback: Solicited feedback is provided in response to a specific question, like on an employee engagement survey. Unsolicited feedback is provided without prompting, often by employees who feel that their concerns are important and deserve attention.
Using the categories we describe above, you can better understand the feedback you receive from your employees so you can learn how to get more meaningful employee feedback. You can also better tailor your employee feedback collection methods to elicit specific kinds of feedback from your employees.
How and When to Ask for Employee Feedback
Constantly asking for feedback is a surefire way to make your employees tune out your employee feedback questions and surveys. Instead, you need to be strategic with how you collect employee feedback to ensure you gather meaningful information.
How to ask for employee feedback
You don’t have to write the perfect question every time you need to collect employee feedback. However, your employee feedback questions should follow these general guidelines to help your employees feel more inclined to provide their input:
- Keep questions simple and brief: Think of your survey question the way you would an effective email subject line. Keep questions short—no more than 50 characters if you can—and ensure you state your question simply and clearly.
- Respect your employees’ time: Provide your employees with adequate time to respond to your employee feedback surveys or questions. Make it easy for your employees to provide their feedback—like embedding a pulse survey into your employee newsletter.
- Be polite: Avoid demanding feedback from your employees. Your employees will be more inclined to answer your questions thoughtfully if they are asked—rather than forced—to respond.
- Provide adequate context: Ensure your employees understand what you’re asking them. This doesn’t mean making your questions longer; rather, we suggest placing your survey questions alongside relevant information. Need to collect employee feedback about an upcoming event? Use your event invitations as a space for your employees to provide input and suggestions—which you can do using ContactMonkey’s event management feature.
Now that you know how to ask for employee feedback in an effective manner, let’s look at the other part of this process:
When to ask for employee feedback
Some times are better than others for your employees to provide their feedback. If you’re sensitive to your employees’ habits, you’ll better understand how to encourage employee feedback and how to get employee feedback that really matters. When planning your employee feedback surveys, keep these best practices in mind:
- Survey employees at regular intervals: Your employees are creatures of habit like anyone else. Create consistent and recurring opportunities for your employees to share their feedback. Consistent surveys help employees get into the habit of responding, which is why continuous employee feedback is more effective than one-off surveys.
- Collect feedback before/after the relevant events or announcement: Need to gather feedback about a certain event, topic, or announcement? Be sure to time your employee feedback methods in close proximity to whatever you’d like your employees to comment on. This way their opinions will be fresh in their minds.
- Survey employees joining/leaving your organization: New employees can offer a fresh perspective on your business, while tenured employees can use their experience to provide meaningful feedback before they leave your organization.
The best times to gather employee feedback will largely depend on the type of information you’re aiming to collect. For more specific examples on how to encourage employee feedback and when to collect employee feedback, check out our list of employee pulse survey templates to learn more about creating effective employee feedback questions.
How to Gather Employee Feedback With ContactMonkey
There are various ways to collect employee feedback depending on the type of information you’d like to collect. Let’s examine some of the most effective employee feedback collection methods you can try at your business.
How to gather employee feedback quickly with pulse surveys
An employee pulse survey is a short, focused question about a pertinent workplace topic—think of it like taking a “pulse check” on how your employees feel about a particular topic. Pulse surveys are commonly used alongside your regularly occurring internal communications, like employee newsletters.
Using ContactMonkey’s email template builder, you can embed pulse surveys into your email template quickly and easily. Simply drag the survey tile where you’d like it to appear within your email. Once embedded into your template, click the Select Surveys button to choose which kind of survey you’d like to feature:
Choose from emoji reactions, star ratings, thumbs up/down, and yes/no survey options.
Note: Be sure to link your selected survey with your survey question. Do this by dragging the survey tile directly below the paragraph tile within your email template.
How to collect anonymous employee feedback with ContactMonkey
Anonymous employee comments allow your employees to share feedback alongside their survey responses with greater confidence due to their anonymity.
You can collect anonymous employee comments on any survey you create with ContactMonkey. Simply switch on the Comments toggle at the top of the email template builder to enable anonymous employee comments for your surveys.
When your employees respond to your surveys, they’ll be shown a pop-out comment box that lets them elaborate on their survey response:
In addition to anonymous comments, ContactMonkey offers anonymous email tracking for those companies that need to gather email metrics while maintaining their employees’ privacy. We’ll explore how to collect anonymous employee feedback using ContactMonkey further down in this blog.
How to find your most enthusiastic employees with Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS)
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) measures how likely your employees are to recommend your product/service or your business as a place to work to their friends or family. Your eNPS survey standardizes the measurement of employee advocacy for a company, brand, or product.
You can embed an eNPS survey into your email templates the same way as other surveys. However, the key difference is that using an eNPS survey requires you to ask one of two questions:
- How likely are you to recommend [company product/service] to your friends and family?
- How likely are you to recommend [company] as a place to work to your friends and family?
The results of your eNPS surveys will appear in your Campaign Overview dashboard:
How to make it easy for your employees to provide feedback, wherever they are
Email is the most popular and effective channel for internal communication, but not every employee has easy access to a desktop computer. With more remote workers than ever before, you need to ensure that your employees can access your emails and employee feedback surveys from wherever they may be.
Employee feedback surveys created using ContactMonkey are sent in fully responsive HTML emails. This means they’ll display perfectly regardless of the device or email inbox your employees are using. You can also use the Mobile View to preview how your email will look on mobile devices:
But you can extend your employee feedback methods even further. If you have frontline employees who don’t regularly check their emails, you can use ContactMonkey’s SMS text messaging feature to alert employees whenever there is a new survey/question for them to respond to.
You can easily draft and send a text alert to your employees about your employee feedback survey, and include a link to the email so they can access it directly:
You can also alert your employees working within Microsoft Teams whenever you have sent a new employee feedback survey. With ContactMonkey’s Microsoft Teams integration, you can create and send alerts to specific channels with your company’s Microsoft Teams:
These alerts will include a link to a web-based version of your email where your employees can provide their feedback.
How to Analyze and Use Employee Feedback
Now that you know how to collect employee feedback, what do you do with the employee feedback you’ve collected? Collecting employee feedback and not acting on it discourages employees from providing feedback in the future—if their input doesn’t matter, why should they share it?
Let’s look at how to use the employee feedback you receive, and how you can analyze your feedback using an employee feedback software like ContactMonkey.
Learn more about your email metrics with employee feedback
Email metrics and engagement are inextricably linked with employee feedback. After all, if you don’t have good engagement with your emails, you’ll struggle to collect meaningful employee feedback. And without solid employee feedback, you’ll be left to guess why your email engagement is suffering.
We recommend using email metrics and employee feedback in tandem, using each to contextualize each other. For example, you could include a pulse survey on your next internal newsletter asking employees to rank the newsletter they just read. If your employees respond that they didn’t find it engaging, you can use that information to understand why your average open rates and click-through rates are what they are:
Then you can create a follow-up question asking employees what they’d like to see from your newsletter. You can measure the difference in your email metrics before and after you implement the suggestions from your employees. The difference in your email metrics will represent the impact incorporating their feedback had on your internal communications.
This is just a simple but useful example of how to use the employee feedback you collect.
Understand employee engagement trends via employee feedback
You can use employee feedback to contextualize other aspects of your email metrics as well. Did you recently host a company event with low employee turnout? Use your ContactMonkey Campaign Dashboard to see how many of your employees actually saw your event invitation, and then check to see if your employees left any comments on your event RSVP:
Improve your email design using employee feedback
Employee feedback can also help you refine your email design to be more effective. Use ContactMonkey’s click maps feature to see which parts of your email are getting the most attention from your employees:
Based on your click maps data, you can create employee feedback questions aimed at exploring what parts of your emails your employees like and dislike.
How to Improve Employee Feedback: Strategies and Tips
Always emphasize your appreciation for your employees taking their time to provide feedback to your questions and surveys. If you conduct an employee feedback survey, be sure to thank the group of employees that provided feedback—whether that be via a personal thank you, or via an email sent to those who received the survey.
Your ability to act on the feedback you receive will largely depend on the quantity of feedback you’ve gathered. If thousands of employees provide feedback, you won’t be able to address each concern in a timely manner. However, if a smaller group of employees provide feedback to you, be sure to engage with it by bringing it up in your next meeting or town hall.
If you end up incorporating the feedback you receive into your business plans—be it your internal communication strategy or your employee engagement strategy—always recognize the contributions your employees made via their feedback. Your workforce will be far more inclined to provide feedback if they know that it’ll be seriously considered and incorporated into your business’s operations.
Some other useful strategies for improving employee feedback include:
- Using your email analytics to determine engagement rates on your surveys, and resending them to your employees to increase response rates.
- Using anonymous employee comments to inform future employee survey questions, targeting specific issues brought up by your employees.
- Adding deadline dates to your employee surveys to create a sense of urgency among respondents.
- Creating survey questions aimed at specific groups of employees to obtain more in-depth feedback.
Use these tips to refine how you implement your employee feedback. The more effective examples of feedback you learn about, the more apparent the importance of employee feedback becomes.
Why You Should Use ContactMonkey to Collect Employee Feedback
We’ve hopefully established why employee feedback is important, as well as how to measure employee feedback and why you should measure employee feedback. Your employees have unique insight into the day-to-day operations of your business, and you can harness that knowledge to improve employee engagement, optimize your internal communications, and reduce turnover and attrition.
With ContactMonkey’s all-in-one internal communications and employee feedback software, you can use your internal emails to collect effective employee feedback and email metrics to improve how your organization does business. Create, send, and track employee feedback emails, employee newsletters, and more from our easy-to-use email dashboard that integrates with your existing Gmail and Outlook business email inboxes. You can even use pre-made employee feedback survey templates to get started on your employee engagement efforts.
Try ContactMonkey for yourself by booking a risk-free demo for 14 days. You’ll learn how ContactMonkey can improve your internal communications and make employee feedback a priority at your organization:
