4 Laws of Building Listening Organizations — Rule 3: Make it Easy

This is the third article in the series on building a habit of listening in the workplace. In this article, we have seen that to make something a habit, it must be made obvious. A “Speaking” culture at the organization can be cultivated by making as many listening terminals as possible. This helps the employees to internalize the habit of speaking up wherever there’s a need. And the more attractive we make this process; the more are the chances that people will continue to speak their minds. However, relying on attractiveness could be a capital mistake.

To ensure that you are listening to your talent enough, making the process is extremely easy is very important. At times, the drive to express gets affected if there aren’t enough channels facilitating the feedback collection.

For instance, you had a team meeting. 3 members of your team wish to share some constructive feedback with you. Chances are that they will either talk it out with other colleagues near the water cooler or will just forget it. The medium to give feedback is not comfy. Face-to-Face conversations or email — the problem with this approach is that the feedback will be identified, and the employees may feel judged.

What if the team members have a mobile app. They can simply open the app and record their feedback anonymously. Or they can even record feedback on WhatsApp without worrying about their identity. These kinds of methods to collect feedback removes friction from the process and makes the experience better.

At Lissen.io and QaizenX, the two emerging feedback platforms, feedback can be collected through the following channels:

1. Mobile App: The employees are asked to download a mobile app, log in and that’s it. The app will prompt the user at specific incidents to record feedback.
2. WhatsApp Bot: Like chatting with a colleague, the employee can chat with a WhatsApp bot and record feedback. No download, no login and no need to remember credentials. The WhatsApp bot will non-intrusively remind to chat/express feelings
3. Web App: If you got an attendance system or an intranet where employees interact on a daily/weekly basis, all you got to do is integrate the same with the web app. Using SSO, the employee will be taken on the feedback screen with a single button click and that’s it.

Along with the above methods, the tools also support taking offline feedback. If you got employees who are not computer literate or who don’t have access to smartphones/internet, you need not worry. You can set up a kiosk for the employees to give feedback. We also administer the survey in paper-pencil mode for illiterate employees.

The medium to collect feedback must be easy enough so that employee doesn’t have to go through pain to give feedback. The feedback channel which is meant to collect information about pain points shouldn’t become a pain point.

Once a practice is obvious, attractive, and easy to follow, there’s no obstacle in making it an organization habit.

The next step from here is to act on the feedback collected. If there’s no action, there will be no feedback. Dynamic methods that allow us to drive actions on feedback without action planning so that the experience becomes rewarding for the feedback giver and receiver is something that we will in the next article. Till then, I bid adieu.

Note: views expressed are personal

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.