Managing a hybrid workspace can involve a lot of uncertainty and guesswork. You may find yourself struggling to see your team’s needs and how you can improve the work experience. An excellent solution to this problem is ensuring that you get constructive feedback for your company and use it to your advantage.
This article will discuss the benefits of unfiltered feedback and what you can do to obtain it in your hybrid workspace from your team.
Benefits of unfiltered feedback
Real constructive and unfiltered feedback can do wonders for your hybrid workspace. By learning exactly what the needs are through your employees’ perspectives, you will be able to make changes that will be efficient, effective, and very beneficial to your team’s productivity and overall well-being.
Benefits of unfiltered feedback:
- More employee engagement: Giving your employees the chance to speak up and voice their opinions means that they will be more engaged with the workspace, which is excellent for team building.
- New ideas and perspectives: Real feedback allows you to step outside of your way of viewing things and understand just how other people are thinking. Many great ideas will come from your employees who would not otherwise have the chance to speak up.
- An improved workplace culture: With everything out in the open, you can guarantee that your workplace culture will improve drastically.
- Bringing balance: Unfiltered feedback will give your employees the chance to speak up truthfully without the fear of repercussions and will allow for balance in the workspace as more perspectives will be considered.
- Equality: No one will feel as though they are left out or are below or above others. Instead, unfiltered feedback will bring a sense of unity into your workspace, improving employee experience.
Step 1: Try anonymous feedback
Now that we’ve established just how great unfiltered constructive feedback is, we must discuss how to obtain it from your team. The first step is to make sure that your feedback has the option of being anonymous.
To gain real insights from your employees, it is a good idea to give them the option to keep it anonymous. Some employees may not feel comfortable expressing themselves without the fear of negative responses from their superiors. If there is no accommodation, that could lead those employees to simply not speaking their thoughts and opinions rather than doing so and risking the chance of backlash.
When inviting your employees to share their thoughts and feedback, make sure you let them know that their feedback will not be attributed to their thoughts, feelings, complaints, and suggestions and that you will not seek out to find out who wrote the feedback. Instead, you are simply looking for honest and reliable opinions.
Tip: Make sure that as a leader, you follow through with your promises. If you don’t end up sticking to your word about keeping the feedback of those who wish anonymous, you will undoubtedly face mistrust from employees and accept that you will never get honest feedback again.
Step 2: Have more than one way of sharing feedback
The next significant step in encouraging your team to give you feedback is to provide different avenues for them to do so. Giving your employees the option to choose the method they will provide feedback will allow them to use whatever way they find most convenient and comfortable.
Some ways to collect feedback:
- Digital feedback channel on Slack: If you don’t have slack, you can use whatever other method of communication you have, but if you do have Slack, a great option is to have a channel dedicated to feedback where people who don’t mind their identity revealed to add suggestions or feedback.
- Workplace suggestion box: This is a more physical way of getting feedback but great for the anonymous. You could easily set up a suggestion box in the workspace somewhere, where your team could drop in suggestions at any point. You could then empty your bin every month or so, according to your preferences.
- Consecutive surveys: These are surveys that are done regularly, could be weekly or monthly. These short surveys will be on specific topics such as employee satisfaction, communication, and work environment.
- Longer surveys: These types of surveys will also be consecutive but will be done much more rarely and will consist of multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank, and even options to write down other thoughts. Depending on what you want, they can cover the same topics or more and allow your employees to say more.
Tip: When choosing the ways you want your employees to give you feedback, make sure you give them enough options, but also not too many. Select two to four ways and stick to them. This will make sure not to restrict or overwhelm your employees too much.
Step 3: Create a Safe Environment
If your employees don’t feel safe enough to share their ideas, your efforts may be pointless. Your responsibility is to make sure that your team feels comfortable enough to come with suggestions, problems, or concerns and have you validate them. You can’t just expect your employees to open up without a problem. As mentioned before, many may feel afraid that they will lose their jobs if they genuinely speak up.
If they are not met with encouragement, then you will face problems. You have to make sure that you become a leader that can take constructive criticism and transform it into something useful. Ensure that when one of your employees speaks up that they are met with validation for their honestly and that you make them feel safe in doing so.
Make sure you take every feedback you can get and that you can listen to it, as it can have a life-changing effect on your company. The people who challenge your procedures or systems will end up being the ones who will create a natural and good change for your company, so make sure that you take that feedback and run with it.
Step 4: Encourage people to give feedback
It may be the case that your employees may have something at the back of their minds, but they forget to mention it because of how busy they are. Try giving them a nudge in the right direction to complete a survey, or even remind them that there is a box of suggestions that is waiting for theirs.
Try sending out reminders on a regular basis, perhaps at the end of an email or have them scheduled to be sent out to the whole team on a specific day of the week so that you don’t forget either. If you see that some people may be shyer or more reserved you could also personally encourage them to write feedback if they have any, that way they will feel more at ease doing so.
Conclusion
Real unfiltered feedback can be crucial to your hybrid workspace’s growth and to the well-being of your employees and company. If you do it right, not only will you harbour a great open environment, but you will also gain valuable insightful feedback that can transform your hybrid workspace in incredible ways.
