How to Gain Honest Employee Feedback for Better Engagement

Speaker A: Hi everyone and welcome to the How to Gain Honest Employee Feedback for Better Engagement webinar. We're super excited today to talk about this topic because earlier this year we ran a survey where majority internal communicators told us that one of the biggest challenges they face when trying to measure their internal comms is how can they measure how employees are feeling about their efforts, because employees tend to not give honest feedback or are reluctant to share how they feel about the company transparently. So we've really been looking forward to exploring this topic and also talking about how ContactMonkey as a tool can actually help you gain that honest feedback from your employees. So to start with, I'll just quickly introduce myself and my co-host as well. So I'm Maitali Jha and I'm a digital marketing manager at ContactMonkey. and I also handle the monthly webinars. Piyush?

Speaker B: Hi guys, my name is Piyush Shul. I'm an Account Executive here at ContactMonkey, and my job is really just to help organizations increase their employee engagement.

Speaker A: Perfect. So quickly going over the format for today, it's going to be a quick presentation by us where we're going to kind of share some insights on employee feedback. What are the challenges you might be facing? how you can actually work on those using the ContactMonkey tool, and just general tips and best practices. And then we'll kind of open it up for Q&A toward the end, but if you have any questions during the webinar, just feel free to pop them into the Q&A box and then we'll try to answer almost all of them if we can. So just to start with, what is employee feedback? It seems fairly straightforward, but we've seen that most often employee feedback is viewed as the feedback that managers give to their employees, but employee feedback goes both ways, and it's also the feedback that employees have to share with the organization. And it's almost equally important, if not more, to understand how your people are feeling and actually gauge that and take that advice in a constructive way and work on it. So we're going to look at how you can get that feedback from them and how you can actually implement it. So why do we need employee feedback, which is the feedback that comes from employees to management? And one of the main things is it fuels growth. There's actually a study by Gallup that showed that managers who receive feedback from their employees experienced almost 9% greater profitability after that feedback. So that's a big plus and we have statistics to back it. Also, it improves employee engagement. We know that that's one of the main goals of internal communicators and When you encourage employee feedback, you're creating a culture of open communication, of trust, of transparency, and all of these are seen as key drivers of employee engagement. Also, it increases job satisfaction. So employee productivity and retention have often been tied to job satisfaction and how connected employees feel to the organization. And by enabling this two-way communication where they feel like they can— confident enough to speak up about how they feel, that improves their job satisfaction. It also really helps with workplace relationships because it's not easy to always foster that trust and that connectedness, and managers can't artificially create those connections. But when they enable that feedback loop, then they're kind of eliminating those friction points with their employees and creating a setting in which the workplace relationships are actually thriving and working better together. And then finally, it supports learning and professional development. So more than 80% of employees said that when, like, lack of progression would influence their decision to leave the company. And when they don't see that conversation happening with their employers where not only are the employers giving them feedback, but they're able to share how they feel so that management can maybe implement changes that make their workplace a better place for them to grow and develop. We need to do that in order to kind of retain these employees. So employee feedback is crucial because at the end of the day, it builds that culture where you retain your top talent, help them grow, keep them engaged, and eventually improve your bottom line. So what are the different ways in which organizations collect feedback? A lot of you might be implementing these, but there's a whole combination of them. And one is just ongoing informal discussions. So creating a feedback culture where it's open and transparent to communicate how you feel, like I mentioned before, just creates a healthy environment, a healthy company culture, and having it in an ongoing informal way just makes it more natural and more likely for them to give you honest feedback in that context. But then companies, and these are really common, they also do formal reviews like those annual reviews. And they have benefits too in that they show employees that you actually care about their input and you're taking it very seriously through this formalized channel. But they do have their cons in that they're like really lengthy, they're one-time, and you'll get a huge amount of feedback all at once. And then if you're not able to actually act on the feedback or improve on the areas that your employees point out to you, then that's kind of going to backfire on you because employees will feel like they were just not heard and it was just an exercise being done by the company. So it's important to incorporate them, but make sure that you're able to implement the feedback as well. Another useful way to collect the feedback is employee surveys. So we have Pulse surveys at ContactMonkey, and they're a really good way to capture real-time feedback, especially on ongoing events or changes that have just taken place, because that gives you an understanding of how employees are feeling in that moment in time in relation to that particular change. ENPS is an employee net promoter score. It's basically a measure of how likely your employees are to recommend your organization as a place to work. And this was inspired by the NPS, which was a net promoter score that was used to measure customer loyalty, and it proved to be very accurate. And therefore, ENPS has now become a great measure for measuring employee satisfaction. And then there's email newsletters. Maybe not everybody sees this as a channel for employee feedback, but they're actually a great way again to get real-time feedback anonymously, make sure that the feedback is coming on a regular ongoing basis, and just promote that feedback culture that you want to create. So in an ideal world, implementing a combination of all these feedback tools is the best way to ensure that your getting all kinds of feedbacks and building that culture of communication where employees are getting used to and acclimatized to the whole idea of expressing themselves. But then there are also several challenges that come in the way of collecting that feedback. So you may have all these tools at your disposal and you may be implementing a lot of them, but what happens is that even though employees may engage, they may answer your survey, or they may have, like, may give you some responses during a face-to-face review, there are a lot of things that hold them back from giving an honest opinion. And one of the main reasons for that is actually psychological safety. So psychological safety is an environment rewarded by vulnerability where human beings feel safe to learn, to contribute, to express how they feel, to challenge the status quo. So that's the most That's the most important thing an organization needs to do is create that psychological safety. But a lot of the times they lack it, and I'll go into why that may be. One reason is just like if your peers have had a negative experience sharing feedback, then that negative feedback from your peers may make you hold back. Another thing is just general lack of confidence, or you're embarrassed to speak up because you're afraid of being judged for your opinion. So that's the reason employees hold back. And another one is that they just feel like maybe if I say something that the manager doesn't like to hear, then maybe it will impact my career in the wrong way. So it's all of these fears that kind of take away from that psychological safety and how to address that. There's a lot that companies can do, but the general idea is that the employees don't want to be judged. The employees don't want to face a negative brunt of speaking up and they don't want it to affect their career. So here are some best practices and tips that you can explore, and they would probably help encourage that honest feedback from your employees. One of the main things, as I've mentioned a couple of times already, is creating that feedback culture. So get to know your employees personally, normalize the discussion about how they feel at the workplace. If you have these conversations on a regular basis, If you're able to create like a— create the effect around the company where every employee starts to feel that way, that negative banter will go away, that perception will go away, and employees will start to become more confident to express how they feel to you. Another thing is just make it a regular cadence. So if it's ongoing, it just becomes so normalized rather than having it as this one big annual review or this one face-to-face conversation where the employee feels kind of put on the spot. If you make it a regular cadence, giving constructive feedback, making it part of the daily operations of the organization. And a great way to do that is through internal newsletters. That kind of helps normalize the whole candid feedback process. Another thing is just remove emotions from feedback. So when you're encouraging employees to give you feedback, it's best not to react to it. It's best to listen to it, process, process what they've said, ask questions, and show an openness to listen and adapt based on what their feedback is. When they see that it's being taken in a positive and constructive way, they're more likely to share more feedback more often with you. And this is the way you kind of want them to take your feedback as well, so it's best to demonstrate that. Also model the kind of feedback you desire. So like I just said, you need to show them how to take the feedback. So when they experience, when they experience your openness to receiving it, that's how they're going to receive your feedback too, and that overall leads to a better organization. Also, just vary the methods and channels of employee feedback. So employees are more likely, for example, to give feedback when it's anonymous and not face-to-face because then they don't feel like it's going to affect them. So experiment with that through your email newsletters, but at the same time, there is obviously some pros of having those annual reviews, which is that it's formalized. So like a mix of them would be ideal. You may not want to do anonymous comments if it's something to do with a particular employee, then you want to have a face-to-face conversation with them. But if it's just a larger initiative and you're just looking for general input from your whole team, enabling anonymous feedback will get you a more authentic response. And then just a good tip is to leave the office. I feel like if they feel like they have the freedom— maybe now this is not an issue at all, everyone's doing it from home— but usually if it's at the workplace, just giving them the space to not feel like they're being scrutinized or not feeling like they have to be looking over their shoulder at their manager. That just helps them feel more free and open when giving that feedback. And finally, show them that the feedback matters because at the end of the day, if it just becomes an exercise in which you don't really act or implement any of the issues they bring up, then you're kind of just making them feel like it's not worth it to give you the honest feedback. So summarize their feedback, document the steps you're probably going to take in order to address it, take action. At the end of the day, professionals who've seen workplace improvements have seen that there's an 87% likelihood that they're going to give honest feedback again. So these are just really good mechanisms to incorporate while trying to encourage employee feedback from your people.

Speaker B: Awesome. So we're actually going to open up the poll question to you guys here. So what kind of employee feedback do you guys typically receive? So this is something that you guys can leave a comment in the chat below and share some examples of common kinds of employee feedback that your organization might be receiving right now. But where we will start off is just with 3 common examples of employee feedback that we've heard from organizations, and then we'll discuss some tips on how to interpret them and what you can actually do about it as a communicator or as a leader or just a colleague at the organization. So the first one here is no one knows what's going on here. So a stat from a 2020 communication survey showed that 8 out of 10 people rate their own business's communications as either average or poor. So this is often due to a lack of communication. So if you've received this feedback at your organization, some tips on how to overcome this include Understanding that there's no such thing as overcommunicating important information. So it's much more important to make sure that your employees are receiving the information regardless of the channel you're posting it in, rather whether it be intranet, email, maybe team meetings. Communicate strategically. Communicate to accommodate multiple learning types. So whether that be through incorporating videos in your communications, maybe learning activities, takeaway pages, just accommodating for those different learning types such as visual or auditory learners. Inspire with your communication. And this really comes down to tying in your company vision, reiterating the motto or the goal of your organization so employees do feel inspired by that communication, as well as providing channels for feedback and assessing the effectiveness of your communication. And this really comes down to being honest with yourself and really taking the time to assess how effective your channels of communication are and your chances for employees to give that anonymous feedback. Now, the second example we do have here is, I work hard but don't feel noticed. And this is often a case of employees feeling underappreciated. And some tips on dealing with underappreciated employees. Connect frequently with your employees. So that goes for communicators, that goes for managers, managers, as well as leadership teams. Give balanced feedback, and balanced feedback includes both positive evaluations as well as areas of growth for the organization. Address growth opportunities within the organization. Provide flexibility, and that comes down to both flexibility with hours, maybe flexibility with workloads and deadlines. And then the last one here, give specific public praise. And not just on, you know, what was done well, but also why it was done exceptional. And you want it to be in a public space so they do really feel like they are being appreciated. And then the last one here, really a common one, especially with everything going on right now, is all I do is work and I'm still behind. So a study from 2018 concluded that 23% of employees reported feeling burnt out at work very often or always, while an additional 44% reported feeling burnt out sometimes. So as the quote suggests, this is a case of employee burnout. And if you've ever received employee feedback about burnout, it's very important to consider tips such as the first one, treat employees fairly, which I think this one goes without saying. Avoid bias, avoid favoritism with your employees. Help create manageable or realistic employee workloads. And this could be more so from a leadership standpoint, as well as helping employees understand their roles. So from an internal comms perspective, It's important to stay involved with speaking with your leadership team on your findings. So whether that be through direct employee feedback, whether that be through your eNPS scores, through your poll surveys, maybe that you're including in your newsletters, and then taking that feedback and those findings and speaking with the right managers on putting measures in place to help employees deal with their workloads and with their specific roles. Provide frequent communication and expression of support. Once again, this can be done From a leadership level, this can also be done through your communications, as well as be reasonable with deadlines with your employees. So from here, I'm actually going to jump into Contact Monkey and how our tool includes these feedback options directly within our platform. For those of you that aren't familiar with Contact Monkey, we are a plugin directly to your existing Outlook or Gmail, depending on what platform you're on. That really allows you to streamline your internal communications while tracking and measuring your employee engagement. So I'm actually going to pause my screen here and just jump into a new email within my Outlook. And from here you'll see, as I mentioned, Contact Monkey is just an add-in directly to your existing environment. When I do open it up, it's going to open up our Contact Monkey sidebar here with all of the features of our tool. And you're just going to add in your existing distribution lists the exact same way. So we'll work off your existing permissions. But for this webinar here, I'm going to show you exactly how we incorporate those feedback options in our tool. So I jumped into a new template here, and I'm just going to start one from scratch here. So when you're creating a new email, you can start from scratch with a blank canvas or work off of any of our prebuilt designs that you see here below. So I'll jump into the newsletter, for example, here. And from our template builder, you can see the different kinds of contents you can drag and drop directly into the body here. I'm actually gonna go over to rows here where you see the blank structures that you can also add content directly into these buckets. But once again, for this webinar, I'll be focusing on the feedback options. So you have 2 different kinds. The first one is ENPS. Now scroll down to the bottom here to show you an example in the newsletter. And these are questions on a scale of 0 to 10, maybe how likely are you to recommend our organization or our services to friends or family? Now these are a great way to just get a pulse check on your employees directly within your newsletters or your emails going out that might not be as formal as those communications that you're sending out or those ENPS surveys that you're sending out every few months. Now, the great thing with these scores is when people do leave their feedback directly out of their Outlook, you're going to get the results on the backend there of your detractors, your passive scores, and your promoters. And then you'll be able to actually calculate that ENPS result and see how you're doing from a standpoint of the question that you're asking your employees. Now, the other options we do have here are emoji reactions, and these are questions that you can drag throughout your newsletter if you want to get feedback maybe on the new product update with a thumbs up and thumbs down for was this information useful or not. Maybe you want to use the emotes rating to say, hey, how happy are you working remotely during this time? Then we also have a yes/no rating, a thumbs up, or a star rating. Maybe you want to add to the bottom for, was— what did you think of this week's newsletter? And to add these in, just like I mentioned with the content, you're just going to drag and drop it into the body here and then drag a text box into the same row. So you can see it's linked there, and that will allow you just to associate that question. So how this is going to be received by employees I always recommend you leave comments turned on at the top right here. And when I get this in my inbox, let's say I'm an employee of the organization, um, I can leave my rating directly out of Outlook or Gmail. And let's say I left a 5-star on this week's newsletter. That's going to take me to a separate pop-out screen that thanks me for my vote, and it's also going to include a text box where I can leave completely anonymous feedback on that question being asked. So like Mike Tillie mentioned, it's, it's really important to leave anonymous feedback options. You can get that, that candid employee feedback without them being, you know, scared of repercussions or of other employees judging them based on their feedback. So then as a communicator, what this looks like for you on the back end here, if I jump into my campaign after my email sent out, I can see exactly how it performed from a data perspective in terms of the numbers and percentages. If I scroll down here, we see other analytics such as that read time, most engaged recipients, best performing locations and links. But if I get down to the bottom here, this is where you'll see the results of those Pulse surveys. So the first example here of employee NPS on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our organization? to friends or family as a place to work. So we can see what the scores were. We can see what they actually mean in terms of 70— 17% were detractors, 50% were passive, and then 33% were promoter scores. And it actually calculates it for you as well. And we can see we have a net promoter score of 16. Now the other portion of this is the comments. So if we pop open the comments here, This is where we'll be able to see those anonymous comments that our employees have left for us. Okay, so this is a great way for you to see the thoughts of your employees, and once again, it is completely anonymous. And then it's really up to you what you want to do with this information. One best practice that we suggest is actually screenshotting the results or even saving it as a PDF. You can share these results back with your employees and say, hey, this was the results of our last survey we sent out. This is the feedback we received from you guys, and this is what we're going to do about it. So just really showing that their employee feedback does matter to your organization. And then we just have a couple more examples here of emoji reactions. So how would you rate the last town hall? We can see how many people responded, what the average score was, and then once again, we can pop open the anonymous comments down below just by clicking on the comment box here. Okay, so that's really a walkthrough of how ContactMonkey incorporates those feedback options directly into our tool here. Now I'm just going to pop back over to the PowerPoint. We're actually going to open up the floor for any questions that you guys might have for Matilda or myself.

Speaker A: Yeah, so go ahead and pop your questions into the Q&A box or even the chat, and then we'll be happy to answer them. Just give it a few minutes. So we got one question, which is, what's a good ENPS So ENPS scores can range anywhere between -100 to 100. So any score above 0 is considered acceptable, but generally if you score between 10 to 30, then it's considered good. And if it's over 50, then it's insanely good. And if you're in the minus, especially if you're -10 or something, then that's a sign that there's something to worry about. We have another question. Can you alter the number of stars or the scale? Instead of a scale of 1 to 10, can you do 1 to 5?

Speaker B: Good question. So for ENPS, it is always on a scale of 1 to 10 when it comes to ENPS. But if you did want to, like you had mentioned, use a star rating of 1 to 5, the star rating does have a scale of 1 to 5, yes.

Speaker A: Cool. Any other questions? Okay. Yeah. With the tool I'm using right now, emails always end up in spam because it's external. Does this happen with Contact Monkey?

Speaker B: Really good question again. So I can, I can answer this. So the great thing about Contact Monkey is we are an add-in directly within your existing Outlook. or Gmail, depending on what you're using. But what that means is when you're sending an email using ContactMonkey, we're actually sending from your internal servers. So it's not coming from an external platform, so it'll never end up in your spam folders. It actually stays internal the whole time you're sending it out.

Speaker A: Nice. And is there any way to see who is sending the feedback?

Speaker B: No. So the reason we have feedback as completely anonymous, unless you do ask the employees to leave their name, That's completely up to you, but we do leave it anonymous just to encourage people to leave their honest feedback. And then that's how you'll get the most results with those type of poll surveys. But once again, if you did ever have a specific question that you wanted people to include names, you can always include that in the question you're being asked, including please leave your name if you do have specific feedback. And then that's up to your employees if they want to leave their name or leave it anonymous.

Speaker A: And we have another question. I'm not sure we have the answer to this, but it's what percent of employees typically respond to these reactions and surveys? I don't think we have that.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. And to be completely honest with you, from my experience, it really does depend on the organization. So smaller organizations sometimes have higher percentages responding to those reactions. Once again, it does depend on Maybe what kind of culture the organization has, how maybe how used they are to receiving those pulse surveys. But one thing I have found for sure is that the more you do use them and incorporate them within those newsletters and then show how you're using that feedback, maybe in the next newsletter to make decisions, that really encourages employees to then say, hey, our feedback is being recognized, I'm going to participate in these surveys. To really provide change to the organization.

Speaker A: And in terms of using Contact Monkey with a bilingual workforce or a French-speaking only, would that be possible?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's completely possible. So we support multiple languages and French is definitely one that you can use with both a bilingual workforce if you want to have an index linking to English and then French, or you can have an all-French email as well in our template builder, completely up to you.

Speaker A: Any other questions? Cool. Okay, one more question, which is, when is it with the tool I'm using? Okay, when is it most useful to use Pulse Surveys? So Like mentioned earlier, pulse surveys make the most sense when there's a new scenario or a new change that's going to impact the employees, because that's a good way to find out how they're feeling about this new change or event. And it's important with pulse surveys also to just keep the audience in mind. So if it's something that's going to impact the whole organization, then do it across the board, but you could also do them if it's a department-level thing, you can also do it department level. The idea with pulse surveys is because they're very real-time and ongoing, it's also important to make sure you're asking questions about something that you're going to be actually able to implement a change on. If they're giving you feedback, are you going to be able to act on that feedback? Because if it's just a pulse survey without any reaction to whatever they say, then it's not going to be taken too well. But yeah, like ongoing changes, something that you need a real-time response on, that's the ideal time to use it. That's it. Okay, so I think we've covered all the questions. Thank you, guys. Those are really good ones. Piyush, could you go on to the next slide?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So let me pop back in here.

Speaker A: Okay, so we've just— we've wrapped up our employee feedback webinar, and thank you guys for joining us, and thank you so much for asking us those questions. That was really fun. But just wanted to tell you that we also have a really helpful resource, which is 7 Ways to Get Honest Feedback from Employee Surveys. So you can go to this link, and what I'll do is we'll also make sure we email it to you, the recording of this webinar and the deck, so you have access to that. It's really helpful if you're just trying to come up with the kind of questions and the kind of ways you can ask those questions. And then we also have on the next Next slide. Not able to change it. Yeah. We also want to talk about our next webinar that's coming up in November. We're super excited about it. We've partnered with Sarah Jackson, who is the executive director of Internal Comms Pro, and she actually hosts a really popular internal comms podcast. So we'll be having her on board talking about the key characteristics of successful IC innovators. So she's worked within the IC industry forever. She's spoken to so many industry leaders, and she's going to share what her tips and tools are for being an innovator in your space. And then here's the link to the podcast. Definitely hear it. Another good piece of information is that we're going to be having a Contact Monkey podcast with Sarah that's coming up in November, as well as another webinar called Backstage. So we'll be sharing the links to all of these, and we hope you join us for them. And thank you so much for joining us today and taking time out of your day, and we'll stay in touch with all our upcoming events. Have a good day, guys.

Speaker B: Thanks, everyone.

Speaker A: Thank you.