While it’s certainly useful to track hard ‘people measures’ over time (absenteeism, turnover, productivity) – and in fact we’d encourage all businesses to be disciplined in ensuring they keep a close eye on these trends – these measures simply highlight where further investigation might be needed, rather than confirming that there is an issue, what the issue is exactly and most importantly, why it exists. Eliciting feedback directly from your people will go a long way towards understanding what satisfaction levels are within your business and whether there’s anything that needs to be addressed.
There are several ways you can both formally and informally get their feedback, but at POD we believe these four methods to be ‘mission critical’ to implement in your business.
ONE: REGULAR 1:1 CATCH-UPS
Regular contact between employees and managers is vital for effective management and development of individuals. Busy managers with their own workload to manage need to be mindful to book time to spend with every individual on at least a monthly basis – and if you make a time, stick to it! One on one meetings are opportunities not only for giving feedback, but for asking for feedback from your team member. Often things come out of these meetings that would otherwise not have been discussed.
TWO: PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL FRAMEWORK AND ANNUAL APPRAISALS
Effective formal appraisal systems provide a transparent and fair platform from which to consider and conduct all pay negotiations, create training and development plans and manage performance improvement within your team. They provide another valuable, albeit more formal, communication and feedback channel.
THREE: EXIT INTERVIEWS
Exit interviews are a golden (and often missed!) opportunity to find out why someone is leaving and what can be improved about your business. These are best conducted by an impartial person and there must also be strong reassurance that any negatives revealed are gladly received as growth opportunities and will not change the tone or content of any reference the employee has asked for.
FOUR: WORKPLACE SATISFACTION SURVEYS
Ideally undertaken on an annual basis, workplace satisfaction surveys (also called employee engagement surveys) are an excellent way to gain an understanding of employee engagement and satisfaction levels and to track and measure satisfaction levels with various aspects of your peoples’ experience working for your business. Various targeted HR initiatives can then be implemented to further enhance satisfaction and engagement levels depending on any areas of concern highlighted within workplace survey findings. While it is great to begin this benchmarking exercise within your business, there are pitfalls to avoid to ensure that you’re measuring what you think you are, which we’ll cover later in this report.
If you’re keen to learn more about how to implement any of what we’ve covered get in touch with our team today.
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