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Putting trust in your employees

POSTED ON 
December 4, 2012
Ever since I attended Yammer’s YamJam conference last month, I’ve been thinking about a quote I heard: “If you have a culture of trust at your organization, employees won’t be afraid to point out your mistakes. And they’ll do this before your competitors.” Being open to employee feedback not only helps you adjust course quickly but it also shows employees that you value their opinions, a key factor in strong employee engagement.Building a culture of trust takes time, but asking for employee feedback shouldn’t be a long, hard process. Before overloading employees with more emails or another survey that might go unopened, think about getting employees to weigh in using your social enterprise tools via your intranet or Yammer. Pose an open-ended question to your people – “What’s one thing you would improve in X area?” or “What’s working for us?” – and invite them to post their responses. It’s even better if you encourage employees to review the suggestions and interact with their colleagues through likes or commenting on posted suggestions.Recently, we worked with a Brilliant Ink client to develop an open employee feedback campaign. The client used SharePoint to ask their people one question per week, such as what sets them apart from their competitors, what products they’d make if they could and how they can be better partners to merchants. As soon as the question was posted to the private feed - no one outside of the company could access the page - employees weighed in with their thoughts. The client started listening right away.Using social enterprise tools to gain employee input and feedback has proved invaluable for our client to make adjustments while supporting and building an open, collaborative work environment. So what are you waiting for?

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