If you are looking to increase your employee engagement rate, lower your turnover rate, or encourage an overall happier workplace culture, you may want to increase your company’s agility when processing employee feedback.
That is, when a company receives responses from employees, either from surveys, suggestion boxes, meetings, or reviews, management acts on the results in a reasonable time frame.
Long cycles of issue to action can make employees quit!
The truth is, that most people don’t quit their jobs on a whim. It usually takes time and opportunity before someone will accept an offer for another company. Turnover hurts though, it lowers productivity, morale and your overall bottom line.
In a recent study it was estimated that turnover can cost employers at least 33% of an employee's annual salary. The same study also concluded that 75% of the causes of employee turnover are completely preventable.
As diverse as your workforce, so are the motives driving employees to terminate their employment. A few common reasons people quit are:
Not feeling appreciated or recognized
Little growth or opportunity for development
Too much stress or workload
Lack of support
Toxic workplace cultures
Personal or interpersonal problems
Lack of communication and trust
Did you notice rate of pay wasn’t on the list?
Top researchers, like Gallup, have reported year after year that a person’s pay has little to do with the reason why they leave their job. Many of the reasons listed above are issues of how an employee feels at work and with management. How a person feels on the job has a greater influence over their job satisfaction and productivity than anything else.
Surveys and suggestion boxes are good at collecting organizational wide metrics. They can uncover company wide problems easy enough, but they do not create actionable steps for managers to improve on the issues that may surface from the data right in their own departments.
Where qualitative statistics do not currently exist to confirm how long, on average, companies are moving from data collection to implementing solutions, our experience in discussion with business owners over the years has determined that an average issue-to-action response rate is approximately 1.5 years (and that may actually be on the low side).
As an example, here’s a breakdown of the current process for understanding and responding to employee issues:
HR runs an engagement survey
HR collects the results and identifies problem areas
Further analysis is done on teams with low engagement with potentially additional surveying or interviewing of at-risk employees is conducted.
Analysis is compiled and reports are created for leadership.
Action plans are developed with input from leadership.
Action plans are distributed to managers.
Managers take action.
This is a long process! 1 year to send and analyze the survey, 6 months to do something about the results.
Increase agility, lower turnover
In order to take actionable steps from insights collected from feedback, you must deploy an agile system. Employees can’t wait 1.5 years for you to fix an issue that was uncovered today. They just can’t. The real value in implementing workplace surveys is what you do when you receive the data, and how quickly you can turn it around.
With Lean DEI you can connect directly to your employees using a conversational AI chatbot we call Kim. Kim sophisticated empathy driven analysis system not only diagnoses issues but engages employees in a solution-building process. This accomplishes a few things:
Reinforces that employees’ feedback is being heard.
Allows you to intelligently deep dive to the heart of employee issues.
Incites employees to continue participating in the process in the future.
Crowdsources suggested actions that leaders can take that they know will be effective.
Rather than burning cycles interpreting survey results and guessing on how to turn them into actions, Lean DEI's broadcast functionality allows you to ask employees directly which actions will have the biggest impact.
Using these tools, companies can drastically improve the employee experience by reducing this response rate from 1.5 years to as little as 2 weeks.
Creating a plan of action with the feedback you receive from your employees will show your employees that they are appreciated, supported, and most importantly have a voice that impacts management.
Trusted, connected, and appreciated employees become happier more engaged workers. Those who are happy and more engaged at work go the extra mile for the companies they work for. This increases productivity and lowers turnover. It’s that simple.
Meet Kim!
Lean DEI's emotionally aware feedback empowers managers with unique actionable insights needed to drive change today. Kim gives employees a voice. This always available Chatbot is designed to carry on organic conversations with employees to understand their issues and needs, as they arise. This encourages honest feedback through a unique combination of anonymity and empathy that builds more engaged and trusting workforces.
Want to learn more? Book a demo and meet Kim today.