Your company may use performance reviews to let staff members know how well they’re doing, but also consider utilizing dedicated employee feedback information resources to ease the evaluation process and gather input on management, company policies and the office environment.

Employee feedback is a reliable way to not only gauge staff satisfaction, but also improve morale, open the channels of communication and uncover customer service, money and time-saving ideas. To ensure you get the most honest results and also provide accurate information to employees, consider the following:

1. Hire a consulting firm to help you develop questions, conduct the employee feedback research and provide an analysis of the results to measure employee satisfaction.

2. Buy software to create a customized employee feedback survey and generate specialized reports to boost company efficiency.

3. Give managers employee feedback resources to automate performance reviews and gather employee review feedback.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Contact a firm to handle employee feedback surveys and analyze the results

Once you've worked with the consultants to develop employee feedback questions on topics such as company communication, benefits, policies, new management or ways to improve efficiency or morale, the group will take over to conduct the employee feedback research and provide a comprehensive report to help you interpret the results.

I recommend: The National Business Research Institute (NBRI) will customize options for a paper, online or telephone survey. Click the link for a price quote. The Gelfond Group helps design employee feedback surveys and provides graphic reports that track demographic and internal trends, as well as normative data that you can compare with similar organizations or national norms. Human Systems Development will not only develop and implement phone or online surveys, but also conduct exit interviews to help you pinpoint causes of turnover and increase employee retention.

Find software to generate your own employee feedback surveys and tabulate the results

By building your own surveys to gather the information you need, you'll easily be able to add or change questions, send survey reminders and instantly retrieve the data in house. Software will also allow you to easily turn the employee feedback references into reports that address specific areas of interest to increase company productivity.

I recommend: Customize an employee feedback questionnaire, generate perpetual surveys and improve data quality and the number of timely responses with Inquisite tools. Click the links to see a product demonstration, download a free trial or obtain more information. Allegiance offers TotalEngage, a web-based program that allows employees to provide feedback online. The program also features reporting functions and the company offers training to help you use employee feedback references to increase satisfaction and efficiency.

Use automated tools to help managers give accurate reviews and harvest employee evaluation feedback

Automating the employee review process will not only eliminate time-consuming paper-based reviews, but also help you track employee development, include feedback from multiple sources and receive insight into employee performance. You can also demonstrate that you value the importance of employee feedback by using the program to let staff members comment on reviews, journal about their own progress and help develop professional goals.

I recommend: Halogen Software products assist with appraisals for full-time, hourly and new employees, performance tracking and career management. The tools also have employee performance review feedback features. ManagerAssistant.com offers intuitive software to monitor training, incidents and accomplishments to quickly generate accurate performance reviews and reports.

Tips & Tactics

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  When collecting employee feedback, include every employee, including part-time, temporary, seasonal and entry level staff members for multiple points of view. If you'll be tabulating and analyzing the questionnaire answers, however, be sure to include a 'not applicable' box to ensure the survey generates accurate results.