Gaining unfiltered employee feedback is critical to understanding the issues your teams are struggling with and the ideas from the front line on how to address them.

In the workplace, receiving and giving negative employee feedback can be a delicate matter. As a manager, knowing how you’re helping employees is critical to the growth of the business. You wouldn’t want to stop doing things that motivate employees, right? What may be just as important is understanding what doesn’t help or resonate with employees, along with the things that employees wish you’d do.

Every workplace is different. To find out which employee engagement factors most heavily affect your employees, you’ll need to ask them. Be careful, however, as this isn’t something you can simply ask while standing by the coffee machine.

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.”

Feedback can often feel abstract and individualized. When given a question, each employee will give a different answer, and it’s difficult to formulate all these answers into a coherent path forward. But real-time feedback, given and tracked, becomes actionable data that can be used to cultivate organizational growth.