Why truly understanding feedback comments from your employees is essential in driving your business forward.
We Love Surveys are firm believers that the devil is in the data, and that collecting the right information can not only transform your employee experience, but also the overall success of your business.
Throughout this article, we will be exploring why listening to your team is crucial, the consequences of not doing so, alongside the benefits of written comments, and how this can provide you with more insight than tick box answers alone. We will also explore the common pitfalls of comment analysis and how we are taking a different view at We Love Surveys.
Collecting the feedback
Every organisation will have a different reason or goal for the collection of feedback. Quite often, it is driven by the need for a statistic for a board report, perhaps not the best reason alone for asking for feedback. In an ideal world, you will be collecting feedback for two reasons: 1 Because your organisation has a true desire to understand how their most valuable asset is feeling, and 2 Because you want to make changes that will positively impact both your colleagues and your organisation as a whole.
We are passionate about the impact that qualitative data, more specifically colleague comments, can have on business decisions. While it is important, for example, to see at a glance how your team feels about their work and their role, a score alone lacks context and can leave organisations open to making assumptions about the things that need to be improved. Qualitative data is vital when it comes to feedback, as it allows us to better understand the colleague story, which will inform better decisions by the organisation.
While it is clear this type of feedback is rich, insightful and powerful, it's notoriously hard to deal with once collected and, as a result, many companies are reluctant to ask for comments at all. A lack of time or resources to read through the comments and concerns about how the results could be analysed in the first place, can all mean that a decision is made not to collect in-depth feedback at all. This is a significant mis-step, in our opinion, and leads organisations to make ill-informed decisions. We would always recommend giving colleagues the opportunity to have their say through a comment, even if it will be hard for you to analyse (in theory).
Analysing the data
When connected together, your feedback metrics or scores paired with your colleagues' comments form an extremely powerful combination. This is often very hard to see, even for data analysts., because our own mind can only really see X (score) and Y (comment) for each colleague that responded. We can’t see, and often don’t realise, the impact of Y (comment) on X (score).
Imagine you see a large number of respondents talking about the same thing, you may assume that this is something that needs to be addressed. However, it’s almost impossible for your human eye to assess the impact of what is being said on the respondent’s engagement. This is a crucial missed opportunity, one which most organisations don’t even consider possible.
On the flip side, when you are reading thousands of comments, it would be easy to miss those small things that appear to have a bigger impact. Perhaps a few people have commented on a new policy or project but you ignore it as the numbers are small. Have you missed a warning sign to a bigger issue in future?
Each company ultimately needs to decide what topics matter to them, and to nip certain issues in the bud to avoid small concerns becoming larger problems. Sometimes these will be quick and easy fixes, but other times they will require longer-term planning to resolve.
“In most cases, organisations will have a preconceived idea of the challenges in their business. Staff surveys are often created to prove this theory and are usually written to prove the desired outcome.
By adding an open comment, we can start to understand what the colleagues are concerned about and what unseen problems are deserving of attention. Our Impact over Volume analysis model allows the colleague voice to stand out.” –Helen Dargie, CEO, We Love Surveys.
The benefits don’t end there, though, as engaged colleagues provide a range of positives to the workforce. According to Gallup1, engaged employees are 40% more productive than their less engaged counterparts and organisations benefit from a 41% reduction in absenteeism – one of the biggest challenges for companies around the world. Giving your colleagues a voice and hearing that voice is vital to cultivating an engaged, motivated and effective workforce.
Since the now infamous ‘great resignation’2 of 2021, where we saw a shift worldwide with employees leaving roles that were not fulfilling to them after reflecting on their careers due to furlough and the impact of the pandemic, the need to hear colleagues and understand their needs have become even more critical.
For companies that have a large amount of data that needs analysing and reviewing, there are solutions that can transform collated data and turn it into meaningful insight.
This innovative technology helps you to cut through the noise and surface the things that are actively impacting the way colleagues feel about their work.
By encouraging rich, contextual feedback from your colleagues, you are making their voice important. By investing in solutions to enable accurate analysis of that feedback, you are investing in understanding what matters to the whole organisation. By investing time and effort to listen and understand, you are contributing to the creation of a world-class culture.
Understanding the importance of comments in feedback
Adopting an appropriate approach to collecting feedback from colleagues will help you uncover what matters most to your team. This can be everything from skills gaps, staffing issues or conversations that need to be had surrounding key topics like flexibility and where your team can work.
While often seen as a difficult medium to work with, the best and most effective way to uncover genuine insight is through the use of free text. This way of collecting feedback from your team means they can freely explore the topics that matter most to them.
Key advantages of adding an open comment question to your survey include:
Collecting unique insights from individuals – each respondent will have a unique take on the organisation, its pros and cons for them as a colleague. This can be articulated freely in a comment.
Rich qualitative data to identify what really matters to your team – quantitative data is useful, but without context, it is easy to make assumptions about the reason for a score and focus on the wrong things as a result.
Collating data you can draw actions from – given the freedom to express their thoughts in their own words, your colleagues will give you the gift of front-line insight into your organisation and enable your leadership to create meaningful action plans.
There is no hard and fast rule on how to handle comments in your survey. We recommend adding either one comment to catch all thoughts or perhaps a couple of comments along the lines of ‘what works well’, ‘what could we improve’. This can work well to help you separate general thoughts from areas of action.
There is also no reason why you can’t ask a closed question followed by a free text option in which they can express themselves about that specific topic. We caveat that with a note that, in these cases, colleagues will be less free-flowing with their response – they will be thinking about the specific question rather than a holistic view of the business.
Metric + Comment = Actionable Insight
Imagine that you now have a great (short) survey with a defined metric like eNPS as an indicator of engagement, and you have added a comment option for all colleagues. What you have at your fingertips is the makings of the ultimate in actionable insight. To be able to look at what colleagues say and calculate the impact of WHAT they say on their overall engagement will give your organisation an unparalleled view of your colleague experience.
This would be near impossible for a person to do accurately and would be a full-time job in itself.
We Love Surveys Theming is changing that for UK and European organisations. We are making a tool available for you to quickly review unstructured text, organise by themes and sub themes, and then surface the things that ultimately have most impact on your team engagement.
For example, a recent dataset of 1,000 colleagues we reviewed revealed that, although travel policy was only mentioned in 5% of comments, the impact on their overall engagement was -2.2. This was a new policy, not experienced by all colleagues at that point, so action was taken to better communicate the policy and its benefits.
The importance of listening to your team
Regardless of industry, listening to your team is essential. Research suggests that disengaged workforces are more common than you might at first suspect. According to HR Cloud3, 51% of employees are disengaged in the workplace, while 13% are actively disengaged. Actively disengaged means feeling unhappy at work and this negative attitude can impact the feelings of others.
While asking for feedback in conversations with your team is a good option, and is a great way to get feedback to implement small changes, it’s not the best way to get the quality feedback you need. Chats around the coffee machine are also not going to be accepted as part of your business case for change. A survey that is tailored to your unique business goals is a better way to ensure you can get the data you need to not only support your team and learn more about your business, but also to inform important decisions.
“A promise of anonymity, at least in some capacity, is a step in the right direction of giving everyone a voice,” said Liz Ratto, head of people at Cedar. When a survey is anonymous, respondents are more inclined to discuss sensitive issues and provide more detailed and honest feedback. It’s why we tend to see more anonymous staff surveys compared to those that require staff to provide identifiable information.
However, locating or creating the ideal survey and getting your team to share their thoughts can have its challenges. It’s important to consider the motivation levels of your team (especially for optional surveys) and the practical side of gathering feedback, such as how much capacity your team has and whether the survey will take up valuable time in the working day. Longer surveys are a great way to collect the insights you need, but you must be confident you can justify the time they require.
At We Love Surveys, we offer a wide range of specialised feedback solutions, including our Pulse surveys, which allow you to collect a small amount of data every day, to our longer annual surveys, which are suited for more detailed feedback from your team. Each of these feedback options will have a host of different benefits and limitations, which is why we take the time to get to know our clients so we can confidently recommend what option would work best for a given situation.
Maximising team collaboration
It’s important that asking for feedback doesn’t simply become a box ticking exercise and that there is a purpose behind it. While annual surveys are a great way to collect detailed feedback, sometimes a ‘little but often’ approach is better, especially if you are interested in celebrating success immediately or highlighting issues before they have the chance to grow.
It’s also important to work on the culture around giving feedback. It needs to be promoted positively so that your team sees value in their contribution, ensuring colleagues are happy and confident to give honest feedback.
According to Builtin, 89% of HR leaders believe peer feedback and regular check-ins enhance the organisational culture. This shows that when employees feel confident about providing honest feedback about their organisation and subjects that matter to them at work, it will improve the overall company environment.
Final thoughts
Encouraging comments in your feedback surveys has the potential to transform the way your team acts upon feedback while driving your business forward. The benefits include everything from improving engagements rates to getting detailed data that will help you address issues head-on, which is valuable whether you work within a team of 10 or 100. Some companies are reluctant to use free text analysis due to time and resource limitations, but if you’re looking for a team of experts to help you navigate the challenge of unstructured comments, get in touch with us today.
