How Decision Making Without Employee Feedback is Hurting Your Business

As a business owner or manager, you have many tasks on your plate. Whether you’re addressing customer feedback or helping design your next product or service, your to-do list is long and it’s only getting longer. 

In short, decisions need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Extended time spent sitting on your hands will often do more damage than simply making the decision.

Certain tenants of decision making cannot be compromised away, and one of those tenants focuses on employee feedback. Without accounting for employee feedback when making decisions within your business, it’s much more difficult to make the best choices for your company. In other words, understanding the employee experience and accounting for this factor when forming both small and large decisions is a critical component of great decision making – even if employees are “wrong.”

Decision making can be difficult even for the most experienced entrepreneurs and managers. But without obtaining the knowledge and understanding of all aspects of a problem (typically obtained through employee feedback), you’ll be making your future business life rather difficult.

The Importance of Employee Feedback When Making Decisions

Why is employee feedback so critical to decision-making managers? There are several reasons that include gathering useful insights, assessing engagement, and improving cohesion of team members.

Unearthing Hidden Insights

One of the largest reasons that employee feedback is important is that management often doesn’t have as much information about what is truly occurring in the organization. While managers and owners often take a higher-level view of the organization, employees are in the trenches speaking with customers on a day-to-day basis and building and designing your products or services. 

Ultimately, your employees have an intuitive understanding of some of the pain points that customers face, and they can see operational inefficiencies that management may have overlooked.

With employee feedback, you’re getting an unvarnished view of the business. Every organization has plans or projections, but the boots on the ground can tell you whether expectations are meeting reality.

Measuring Engagement

Without welcoming feedback in your decision making, you’re passing on the chance to learn about employees’ engagement with the company. Accepting employee feedback allows you to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of the staff at large, and you can see whether employees are engaged at work and thinking of ways to take the company to the next level.

By making decisions without at least asking for employee feedback, you’re potentially foregoing opportunities to discover how your employees truly think about their job and the future of the company. Regardless of whether you see their feedback being right or wrong, you can continue filling in a picture of an employee’s aptitude, intellect, motivation levels, and passion for their job.

Building Camaraderie

Employee feedback also provides immeasurable benefits on a more intangible level. Obtaining feedback and then incorporating it into future business decisions will increase employee morale, showing employees that you value their feedback and that it will be acted upon. 

Acknowledging the employee experience in decision making helps bring team members closer together. This is a motivating force, leading to even more honest feedback that can be used for making future decisions. By contrast, failing to obtain and include employee feedback in decision making can undoubtedly be a demotivating force for your staff.

Are You Asking Questions to Help Your Business?

To develop the best quality decision-making processes, first collect information that helps you understand the formal and informal processes that are already in place. To do so, try asking a few open-ended questions, such as:

• What factors does your team currently consider when making decisions?
• Do you feel your input is valued and seriously considered when company decisions are made?
• Are you able and motivated to quickly and efficiently take actions based on the decisions that your company makes? Why or why not?
• What recommendations do you have to improve your company’s decision-making processes?

Has A Clear Decision-making Process Been Established?

Effective decision making should account for several factors, which include:

• Your teams’ and company’s specific goals
• The procedures required for teams to implement the decisions that are made
• Employee feedback received about current practices for decision-making and implementation

By actively recruiting feedback about how to improve processes, you’re helping invest team members more personally in the outcomes rather than just handing down orders through a chain of command. In this way, even if everyone isn’t involved in the decision-making processes themselves, they still feel their voices are being heard, which helps them feel valued. 

Furthermore, by establishing clear processes that include both procedures and rationales, you ensure transparency throughout the organization and improve the employee experience. Employees will appreciate this transparency and be more likely to comply because their responsibilities will feel less arbitrary, even if they may disagree with the decisions themselves.

Obtain Employee Feedback with Olumo Today

As you can see, employee feedback is extremely insightful and can lead to better decision making. But how do you obtain this feedback?

Luckily, there’s a game-changing tool to help you with this task. Managers and entrepreneurs can use Olumo to understand what is really happening within their companies. We allow employees to provide anonymous feedback on workplace topics, all through a simple text message survey that collects live, actionable data. 

Ultimately, using our platform can let you obtain fresh data about your organization through the anonymous responses. With these insights in hand, you can easily incorporate the employee experience to help grow the business.

Want to learn more about how Olumo can help you and your business? Obtain a perfect baseline of your employee experience and what to do about it. Use the power of millions of daily data points to gain deep insights into how you’re doing.  Get employee feedback from the horse’s mouth today!