To continue with the TITS concept from my last post, we addressed some broad suggestions on how to keep your employees engaged. I wanted to further define what I would suggest in getting authentic and useful feedback from your employees to improve your business for all stakeholders. Now for customers, who are just as important as your employees, there are some books I’d highly recommend looking into that will describe how to connect and reach your target market through social media more thoroughly than I could in a single blog post. Ted Coine and Mark Babbitt’s A World Gone Social, Jay Baer’s Youtility, and Shama Kabani The Zen of Social Media Marketing are great informative and entertaining reads for any company looking to start or improve upon their social media presence and application, which is basically everybody. Additionally, I know some great customer experience bloggers that I’d recommend going to their sites: Katie Shive, Kristin Stith, and Sam Simpson are some Reno locals who have some awesome concepts to explore when it comes to the customer experience.

The same concepts preached in these insightful reads apply to both your external and internal campaigns for generating critical feedback. However as mentioned above, I want to focus on how to get your employees involved with continuous improvement, for personal development, team-building, and process enhancements. As we all know, each individual learns and grows differently within various environments. And unless you have Mary Poppins on your staff to change your actual environment through a song and spoonful of sugar, you and your entire team will have to collaborate to create the ideal working condition for each individual to help them become their potential best for the company and themselves.

The description I gave above also sounds a lot like empowerment, which I will get into in my next blog post. But, the empowerment we want to give employees needs to start with critical feedback, both from them and you. By continuously revisiting the following questions with your team, (and at a greater frequency than just once a year during the annual performance review) will help keep the end-goals in mind and re-affirmed to ensure the correct steps are being taken for the right individuals:

• Where do you see yourself in a year? 5 years?
• Are your goals still aligned with the company?
• Is the company providing resources to help you achieve said goals?
• If your answer to #1 is somewhere other than where you currently are, how can we help you get there?

Honest answers and feedback to these questions, even if the end goal for the employee isn’t with the company, can make your team more effective in the long-run by keeping the right people and providing them with the right resources to get the right goals accomplished at the right time and place. Sounds a lot like the 7 rights of marketing, yea? I know I only counted 5, but don’t spoil my concept connection!

Even though social media, a strongly-used avenue to get customer feedback, can also be used to get internal feedback from your employees to help answer the questions mentioned above, having normally “private” information out there can be scary. What’s the phrase: you don’t go to Facebook to get hired, you go there to get fired. Yea…*goose pimples*. But, using current platforms that are public, like Twitter, can even provide greater visibility or transparency with your customers, too. Showing that you’re willing to answer to your employees publicly can generate a better perception of your company that you’re open, honest, and not willing to hide anything. This show of character can go beyond what an ROI can calculate and potentially create a stronger customer loyalty and devotion. Whichever way your company decides to get that instantaneous communication with your employees to discuss normally “forbidden” topics of growth and development, make it meaningful and not only once a year. Have quick feedback and availability with the proverbial “open-door” policy will generate that integrity into trust that most any human being is looking for.

Tell me about your suggestions for quick feedback, (i.e. gold star stickers, free coffee, email notification shout-out, etc.) that made you feel appreciated and you think other groups should start using.

Photo credit: https://appirio.com/cloud-powered-blog/what-does-it-take-to-effectively-empower-your-workforce