Frontline employee feedback will help you stand out as the best place to work

Are you a company that has been recognized as a Best Place to Work or Employer of Choice? That means you’re one step, or maybe many, ahead of other organizations that don’t have that reputation. But how are you standing out among other businesses that also prioritize workplace satisfaction of their employees?

One way to remain competitive and maintain this status is by looking at how you’re engaging with your hourly workers to collect feedback. A recent WorkStep survey on what drives frontline worker turnover showed feedback was the #2 reason. So it’s important to know, even if you already have a method for collecting feedback, not all feedback is equal and therefore sometimes not effective.

Here are the top things to consider to ensure the most success when engaging with your hourly workforce to help you remain an Employer of Choice.

Frequency of obtaining employee feedback

How often are you checking in with your hourly workers? In order to gather real-time insights into the sentiments of your workforce, you have to engage regularly at key milestones.

Sending a quarterly or annual survey does not help you understand what motivates your employees to stay. 75% of hourly workers who leave a role will leave within the first 95 days after starting. If you are not checking in with employees within the first week, month, and so on, chances are you are missing out on an opportunity to prevent a turnover event.

Additionally, by engaging more regularly, and acting on those insights, you’re sending a message to your workforce that you care about their wellbeing.

Collecting comments and qualitative data

Often companies send out surveys consisting of only multiple choice questions. While this does help gather some great information from hourly workers, it’s also missing the opportunity to allow them to express what is truly important or concerning to them.

Think about it. In order to compose multiple choice questions you have to make assumptions about how your employees may answer. But what if their actual feelings aren’t represented in the A-D options you offered? Then the information you’re gathering isn’t necessarily going to expose all problem areas that could be improved on.

That’s why it’s important to use an engagement tool that allows employees to leave comments on every question. This way they can expand on anything not included, and give companies a more comprehensive understanding of their hourly worker sentiments.

Responding to employees

First, it’s important to be able to have real-time visibility of feedback you collect. This gives you the ability to act quickly when necessary. What’s also important is the ability to respond to feedback directly from the engagement tool you’re using.

Addressing hot-button issues immediately will help you stand apart from other companies using surveys to engage with their hourly workforce. Having a tool that alerts you when problems like safety, harassment, or other chosen themes is the first step. From there, being able to send a response directly to that employee reassures them that their feedback was heard and that leadership is working to remedy the situation.

Leadership communication

As you collect feedback from various roles across different departments and facilities, it’s critical to be able to share this information easily. Having all the data hosted in one repository can help streamline this process.

Instead of manually assessing the information and compiling it into a report to share, use a tool that gives leadership access to the information at any time. This not only eliminates the additional work, but also allows teams to simply compare data across the organization to identify common trends.

By having this visibility, impactful changes can be made quickly, positioning your company as one that not only collects feedback, but takes action. This will help boost your reputation as an employer who actually listens and genuinely cares about their hourly workers.

Measuring success of employee engagement initiatives

You’re collecting feedback regularly, communicating the results with leadership across the organization, and taking action on that information. But are you able to measure the success of these actions and tie it to outcomes?

Tracking the impact of the changes you’re making in response to employee feedback helps you to understand what is actually influencing higher retention. This information can help make smarter improvements that save the company money while also leading to positive results faster. Your engagement tool should allow you to do this within the platform, making it easy to measure.

The more success you can tie to the actions you take, the more likely your employees are feeling heard, which heavily contributes to the reputation of the company and continues to position you as and Employer of Choice.

Does your employee engagement tool check all the right boxes?

If you’re looking to stand out against your competitors as the best place to work, make sure the engagement tool you use is checking all these boxes:

• Automated employee check-in delivery at key milestones
• Allows answers via comments to be submitted with each question sent
• Alerts set up to quickly surface hot-button issues
• Ability to directly respond to urgent feedback
• Insights accessible by leaders through one repository across the organization
• Ability to track the success of the actions being taken based on employee feedback

If you find the platform you currently use is not hitting all these marks, you may want to reassess whether it will help you stay ahead as an employer of choice for the long run or not.