Employees are and should be the most important asset of any business. Without them, your sales and service come to a grinding halt, so it’s no surprise that most HR professionals collect employee feedback on a regular basis.
Collecting feedback is the best way to gain insight into how your employees are feeling. You can discover what they like and dislike about work and what you need to do to improve their overall satisfaction. This makes it much easier to support them in the best way possible. After all, happy employees are engaged employees and engaged employees provide the best service to your customers.
Think of feedback like Trip Advisor for hotels. Hotels use this platform to gain a TRUE reflection of what guests think of their hotel and what they can do to make them enjoy their visit even more.
Why is employee feedback crucial during a crisis?
When your HR team is busy managing a crisis, it can be quite easy to overlook the importance of collecting feedback. Most will just see it as a time-consuming task which they haven’t got the capacity to do because they are too busy fighting fires. In fact, collecting employee feedback during challenging times can help you resolve issues faster, take a proactive rather than reactive approach, and improve relevant policies and procedures for the future.
There is probably no better time to collect employee feedback, so let’s dive into the 5 reasons why it’s so crucial for you and your business’s success.
- It engages your staff, making them feel involved.
The worst thing you can do during a crisis is constantly hold private senior meetings without involving your teams. In times of uncertainty, your staff needs guidance, support, and reassurance.
Sending out a survey that asks for their thoughts, feelings, and ideas lets them know that you value their opinion and that they are a crucial element in helping you overcome the challenge at hand.
It reassures them that you care about their wellbeing and happiness even during times of struggle. Overall, it will engage your team making them easier to manage and cooperate with.
- It gives you a fresh perspective on how to manage the crisis.
Managing a crisis is any HR department’s worst nightmare. With so many meetings and conversations with your head office colleagues, it might end up getting stuck in a rut. After all, there are only so many ideas and solutions the same group of people can come up with.
What’s more, the senior team with whom you are discussing plans, have no insight into the frontline. They are viewing the situation from their position in the head office. This means your solution is going to be biased. To come up with a holistic solution you need to get feedback from all employees, not just the senior team.
Collecting feedback from all employees allows you to come up with new ideas and a fresh perspective on how to manage the challenge.
- It can guide your future training efforts.
During a crisis, it can be easy to push training to the side. In fact, crisis training is some of the most valuable training you can give your employees. What most HR leaders struggle with is the type of crisis training they should be giving.
Sending out surveys and collecting feedback during this time will make it exceptionally easy to see areas your employees are struggling with which can help shape your future training efforts.
It also allows you to send out in the moment training to support employees with the issues that are happening right now. Using a mobile LMS app is the most effective way to ensure training is done regularly during a crisis.
- It makes it easier to prepare for future crisis situations.
Rather than rushing to come up with a crisis plan which ignores your employees, why not use the feedback from your team to generate a plan which stands the test of time.
It doesn’t matter what the crisis is, there will usually be the same common themes that arise from your staff. Being able to address these for all future disasters will help you become much more proactive rather than reactive, and better able to handle disasters in the future.
- It helps your employees learn about what’s going on.
Sending out surveys with detailed questions gives your employees a good insight into what’s going on. It sheds some light on the situation helping them to understand and learn about what you as a business are struggling with and how they can help.
Let’s say for example you ask the question ‘How easy is it to find the policies you need during this time?’ This gives them a clear indication that policies are vital to follow during this uncertain times.
There you have it. Those are our 5 reasons why it’s crucial to collect employee feedback during a crisis. We hope you can see the true value of engaging your employees during difficult times and we guarantee you will reap the benefits.
