Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO, Mindshift Advisors
An organization I worked with asked employees for their annual feedback and promised to share the results at a monthly all-hands. Employees took the invitation seriously. They described what was working and where they were frustrated.
Then came the presentation. Leadership shared a sanitized version of the results, emphasizing the positives and downplaying the concerns. The intention was to energize the company. Give people something to feel good about. And, celebrate the wins.
But, the company Slack channel blew up afterward. Employees who had shared negative feedback recognized what had been minimized. They started texting one another and comparing notes. And, before long, the negativity bloomed into full on dissent.
Leadership had sent the survey to start a conversation, then made parts of that conversation unwelcome. So, employees found somewhere else to have it. Much to the company’s detriment.
The entire point of surveys like these is to strengthen organizational culture and employee satisfaction. This company’s response had created the exact opposite result.
Asking for your employee’s perspective and then doing nothing useful with it can do more damage than never asking at all.
You Need the Information You Cannot See
As a founder or start up leader, you depend on people working closer to the customer, the product, and the daily friction of running the company. People who know which handoffs keep failing or which processes only work because one person keeps quietly rescuing it. They know which decision made sense in the leadership meeting and became a problem when it was time to execute.
You need that information while you can still do something useful with it. But, it’s still easy to treat employee feedback as an annual administrative task and not the business intelligence tool that it actually is.
With all the constant change of start up life and the hectic pace it runs on, employee experience usually doesn’t get attention until a department starts missing targets. But by then you’ve already lost months of productivity and dozens of opportunities to innovate in favor of putting out the latest fire.
That can be the difference between a business that scales and one that sinks. So, you need the feedback. But, even more importantly, you need to make smart decisions about what to do when it arrives.
Gallup warns that collecting employee feedback without taking action can increase resentment and undermine engagement. In other words, when people stop feeling heard, they begin withdrawing their participation in improving anything else.
This kind of quiet quitting is death to a start up. The ownership you need from employees requires some level of belief that their contribution matters. Repeatedly asking people what they think, then giving them no evidence that their input was used, wears that belief down.
The Work Starts Before the Survey
A survey is just on piece of an employee engagement strategy that has to be built way before you hit send. It starts with an ongoing conversation. Employees need room to ask questions, share half-baked ideas, and raise concerns before they have a fully developed solution or proof that something is about to break.
Your leaders need time to listen, too. If their schedules leave no room to understand how work is happening, you cannot reasonably expect them to anticipate the consequences of every concern. Give them the responsibility and the capacity to notice. Then ask questions that reach beyond a survey score.
“What is a problem you see that you’re concerned I don’t care about?”
This question invites someone to tell you two things: what concerns them and what they believe about your response. You may discover they’ve interpreted your lack of awareness as indifference. Once you know, you have an opportunity to respond differently.
“What is a risk to our organization that you don’t think I’m taking seriously enough?”
By acknowledging your own inability to see and control it all, this question invites the kind of challenging you want from your top performers. Perceptions about your prioritization are often simple misunderstandings. But, you can’t address them if you don’t know where they are.
“What would need to change for you to be thrilled to work here five years from now?”
This question gives people room to think beyond today’s irritation. To see the bigger picture and what matters to your employees long term.
As you ask questions, make room for what’s working, too. Study the teams performing well. What conditions support strong performance? Where are people succeeding despite a process that needs attention? What is happening in the outliers that you can replicate somewhere else?
Your goal is to understand the experience well enough to protect what works and address what does not. The organization wide average can hide some of your most actionable insights.
You Can’t Address Every Concern.
You’re going to learn a lot from the feedback you receive. And, it will most likely fall into one of three primary categories.
- ASAP. Feedback that highlights an issue or opportunity you need to address immediately.
- Cultural issues you had no idea about. Process concerns impacting the bottom line. An efficiency or training gap that you’d never considered that could 10x the output of your teams.
- This feedback is both urgent and important.
- These items go to the top of the pile and may require you to change your priorities, your product roadmap, or your organizational design. But, you need to act and act quickly.
- Investments. Feedback you need to address at some point, but is not a top priority right now.
- These topics are generally important, but not urgent.
- It might look like a new insight that will impact your roadmap 2-3 quarters from now. An opportunity to explore a new program that will take time and effort to evaluate well.
- Investments require a longer timetable to pay dividends. You will eventually consider them deeply, but now is not the time. Make sure they are documented and reviewed regularly, so you don’t lose the insight – but on the back burner they go.
- Gaps. Feedback about something that is impacting the team, but will not be addressed.
- Perhaps it’s a known tradeoff or accepted constraint of your solution. Maybe it’s an issue that only looks like an issue because you haven’t shared the bigger picture of why a process is designed the way it is.
- These are deceptively difficult to solve. You think once everyone understands, they’ll stop raising the concern. But, it almost never works that way.
- Because what you’ve got to change here isn’t processes and design. It’s hearts and minds. With gaps, you’ve got to help your team members see the broader perspective and be willing to make tradeoffs in their own personal comfort for the greater good.
- A strong leader is your best asset with gaps. With inadequate leadership in place, you’ll lose the battle for what’s best and probably some team members along the way.
Regardless of which category your issue falls into, you have an obligation to explain what you are protecting, the choices you’re making, and what you can do to reduce the burden on the people living with it.
That last part matters a lot. Understanding a decision does not make its consequences disappear. Your employees don’t need everything to be perfect. But, they do need clarity and support.
Put the Response on the Calendar and in the Budget
Before you ever send the survey questions, decide how the leadership team will review the answers. Put that review into your operating cadence, with clear responsibility for moving decisions forward.
HR can help coordinate the process, but every leader should own the employee experience in the part of the organization they oversee, including the systems that make work easier or harder. A warm leadership style cannot compensate indefinitely for a broken process.
Look for recurring themes. Invest where you can create meaningful improvement for the greatest number of people, then examine patterns within individual teams so the concerns of smaller groups do not get swallowed up. Serious concerns also need an appropriate response even when only one person raises them.
Choose two or three priorities you can credibly address in the coming quarter. Give each a named owner, a tangible action, and a due date.
Then, fund the work. Put a line item in the budget for responding to what you learn, along with the staff time required to follow through. You cannot know every finding in advance. But, you can decide that improving employee experience will always have the resources available to make it work.
Give People a Reason to Keep Contributing
At that all-hands I mentioned earlier, the leaders failed because they tried to gloss over the concerns that were raised. When you share your survey results, it’s fine to start with what’s going well – absolutely. But, then you’ve got to be transparent about the concerns raised and why they matter.
Name the two or three priorities you’ve selected to focus on for the next quarter, explain why they were selected, and share the actions, owners, and dates associated with your plan to address. Employees should be able to recognize their experience in the account you give, including the uncomfortable parts.
Invite people to help design the improvements. Form cross-functional working groups, with a clear leader and a defined task. The employees who raised a concern may have valuable insight into what would make a new process work. Invite their involvement.
Give them time to contribute. Leadership remains accountable for the result, but being responsible to help should not mean inheriting an unfunded second job. So, build flex time into all your leaders schedules so they can respond the way you need them to.
For concerns outside the immediate priorities, say what happens next. Explain that the remaining themes are still under review, when you will revisit them, and where employees can take an issue that needs attention sooner.
Then report back quarterly on the work. Explain what changed, what is delayed, and whether employees are experiencing the improvement you intended. Keep making the connection between what they told you and what you did. That is how you give the next conversation a chance to be more honest than the last.
Communication and Connection
Keeping communication lines open is one of the best ways to stay connected to your team. The bottom line is this – when people feel heard and valued, they do better work. They contribute at their highest level. And, they connect with each other in positive and beneficial ways.
At Mindshift Advisors, we help founders and leadership teams build that capacity into how their companies operate. If your team is asking for feedback but struggling to turn it into decisions and visible progress, let’s talk.
Mindshift Advisors is a coaching and consulting firm that specializes in the human architecture of growth. To design your next project in a human centric way, reach out or subscribe to stay with us as we unlock the psychology of results.
