Why it's important to ask for feedback
It’s all too easy in business to assume that everything is OK. Customers/team members are happy, communications are effective, meetings productive and your marketing efforts appreciated. But sometimes, everything is not ok and it’s your job to act quickly.
So, if you find that orders are decreasing, projects are being put on hold, employees seem unhappy, and important goals are being missed, it could be time to ask why.
Informed insight for better decisions
Feedback can provide valuable insights for you, your team and your business. It also can help you to understand your marketplace and your competition, refine your offering, seek out new opportunities, or deal with any potential issues. Effective feedback, both positive and negative, can also be used to help make important decisions based on facts, rather than assumptions.
Many organisations send out short surveys to customers following a purchase. Others undertake an annual employee engagement survey or utilise annual appraisals to learn more about what people like and don’t like. Asking people for constructive feedback is vital because it:
Helps employees with their ongoing development, enabling them to learn from their mistakes and build confidence.
Makes people feel important and involved
Demonstrates that you are listening and willing to make changes
Encourages a culture where employees feel valued and can support one another
Helps you to improve relationships, develop individuals and grow the business
The Red Clematis offering
Recently I decided it was time to gather some feedback on my own business. I wanted to find out:
Whether I was including the right content when it came to my coaching and personal/team development offering
What topics/themes were currently of interest to my contacts
If my marketing offering was relevant and timely
To this end I set up meetings with contacts on my database, some of whom I knew well and others less well. I have now completed some initial calls and will do more soon. With the notes I took, I’ll be looking to review what I do and make some tweaks over the coming months.
In summary, everyone I talked to was happy to hear from me and they felt they were helping me out, so it wasn’t awkward, or hard work. I allowed 30 minutes per call and prepared some questions as a framework, although more often than not, the conversation went off on a completely different tangent!
The answers to my core questions, yielded some interesting results. I now have more understanding of what content would be relevant to them as individuals and as teams. Everything from managing uncertainty, how to support a team member with personal issues and building team morale, to defining clear roles and responsibilities, running reviews and maintaining culture in a virtual team. I have also learnt more about what information I need to provide and its frequency.
The feedback provided food for thought and was something simple and easy to organise. For best results though, when you are giving feedback, it needs to be ‘in the moment’ and regular. Having objectives and questions in mind to guide the conversation, along with examples, really helps and it’s important to create an environment where people feel comfortable and free to speak openly and honestly. This in turn can help to create a more positive and collaborative workplace, improve retention, boost morale, as well as increasing productivity and performance.
How I can help
If you’d like some help in using feedback, please get in touch. I can support you through bespoke one-to-one coaching, or guidance, to enable you to deliver feedback with ease, so that everyone can succeed and thrive.