Creating a feedback culture:
Keeping your finger on the pulse

What does employee engagement mean to me? 

In essence, employee engagement (EE) describes the level of enthusiasm and dedication employees feel towards their job or, as cited in the work of the Utrecht University group of occupational psychologists – it is the vigour, dedication and absorption an employee shows towards their work. Understanding how engaged your employees are is crucial to the running of a business, especially when your only real asset is those people and their skills. 

For me, engagement goes even deeper than this – it’s about how much employees care to provide you with this feedback, whether that be positive or critical. The key engagement number for me is how many of our employees have engaged with our Employee Engagement platform. Yes, of course the scores and comments being provided are vital to shaping our people strategy, but what would concern me the most is if people stopped providing any feedback at all.  

If someone is taking the time to provide you with feedback, however negative that maybe, they are engaged enough to want to make the business a better place. All feedback, positive and constructive, is a gift to be utilised and listened to. This of course is a foundational starting place, there are many aspects that roll into employee engagement, and the topic has been widely debated in the HR world but, to me, it all boils down to “care” – do employees care about their work, do they care about the business, do they care about the people they work with. This, for me, tells me how engaged they are.

Our evolution: from an annual survey to a pulse survey model  

Like many other businesses, we have taken the leap in the last 12 months to transition from an annual employee survey to a pulse survey platform. A key driver for this being wanting a real-time measurement of engagement. With an annual survey, the data becomes out of date as soon as it’s been provided, it’s purely a snapshot in time. Receiving continuous feedback with a pulse survey platform has really changed our approach and people strategy, to be a bit more nimble and agile with what we are doing.  

It’s important to us that our people feel listened to and can see that we are acting on their feedback. With an ‘always on’ pulse survey, this allows our people to be constantly providing us with feedback, not just at one moment in time, and allows us to quickly action this feedback. The platform that we use at Revere, Wotter, also gives us the ability to respond to comments (whilst still allowing the provider to be anonymous) which has proved invaluable.   

At Revere, we’re a hybrid company with a work-anywhere policy, so another key thing for us was to open up the feedback channels more and make sure everybody sees feedback as a really positive thing. When you’re not having those corridor conversations, how can you make sure people can still provide feedback? A pulse platform helps to support us with that feedback strategy, more than an annual survey ever could.  

Gone are the days when you put a strategy in place and then just stick to it for the next 12 months. Now, we’re constantly developing our people strategy. There are still the main buckets, but we’ll be working a lot off the back of feedback and seeing what people want from us.  

The wonders (and challenges!) of continuous feedback  

It can be quite a shock to the system going from annual or ad hoc feedback to daily feedback. On one hand, it’s amazing to have your finger continuously on the pulse and be tapped into how your employees are thinking and feeling daily, but it can also feel overwhelming and daunting. How can you possibly action all of this feedback? 

The thing to remember is that we are all only human, we need to prioritise, and often the important thing to do is to purely ensure people feel listened to and this is enough. It’s that often-used comment, “do you want a solution, or do you want to vent?”, often cited by ‘relationship experts’ on social media, but it can be translated to many relationships, including that of employer and employee. 

Because of their frequency, a pulse survey and the element of “continuous feedback” can also be overwhelming for employees completing it. They can reach a point where not enough time has passed for meaningful change to take place since they last provided feedback on a particular question, and this can lead to apathy.  

That said, I’m very much in the camp of continuous feedback being a wonder – we don’t know what we don’t know, using a pulse survey allows us to stay connected to our people which, for me, is really what being an HR professional is all about.

Ongoing innovation and evolution 

At Revere, it’s important we continue to keep our finger on the pulse, and there is a lot more that we can do to achieve this. We are keen to continue to listen to our teams, and this extends to hearing their feedback on our feedback methods – whether that be through exit interviews, focus groups, “stay” interviews, etc. we want to listen.  

This is why, as part of our people strategy, we have focused on creating a ‘feedback culture’ at Revere. This has been a big part of our EE evolution – a core Value of ours is promoting openness and transparency, and we wanted to bring this to life by promoting a culture of feedback, that is open and honest.  

We are keen to keep that ‘human’ element. When providing feedback anonymously via an online platform that provides you with numerical data (alongside qualitative), this can sometimes be forgotten. The individuals providing feedback are human, and those reading this feedback are also human. This is where we look to our teams and encourage everyone to provide feedback in good faith, with the best of intentions.  

Something I love about our current platform, Wotter, is that it is continuously innovating and evolving with us, especially through their use of AI. Implementing new features like employee satisfaction scores, AI generated trend analysis and suggestions for action, whilst being open and able to make positive changes to the platform based not only on our feedback, but that of our people too. This has been like a breath of fresh air and has answered a lot of frustrations I’ve had with previous platforms.  

I’m also personally keen to speak to other HR professionals to learn what works for you, your business, and your teams. Do you have a culture of continuous feedback? Or do you believe that ‘no news is good news’? It would be great to continue this discussion so we can continue to innovate and evolve together – drop me a DM, or let’s connect if we aren’t already.