7 Employee Feedback Trends to Boost Team Productivity

Keeping up with the latest employee feedback trends is a no-brainer if you want to drive your organization toward success. 

But, over the last few years, the highly dynamic work environment might have left you wondering how to: 

1. Adapt to individual employee needs.
2. Provide employee feedback effectively to ensure better outcomes.

A practice that was perfectly fine yesterday may not work tomorrow, especially when you consider the growing remote working culture.

With every new generation in the workforce, how you give employee feedback also needs to change.

This article will cover the best trends you can adopt to empower and inspire your team through effective feedback that goes beyond bombarding them with commands.

But first, let's discuss how employee feedback has changed.

😷 Employee feedback in a post-pandemic world

One of the most significant changes post-pandemic is that leaders no longer have constant oversight and immediate access to their teams. 

With more employees working from home or at least part of the week, there's a clear need to reevaluate employee management.

There's no debating the importance of employee feedback, especially when you factor in its positive impact on employee engagement, development, performance, and satisfaction.

Employee feedback and employee engagement

One cannot deny the connection between effective employee feedback and employee engagement. 

Case in point: Companies that use engagement surveys to seek employee feedback and act on it have 80% engagement rates compared to 40% when companies fall short in this area.

Feedback helps clarify expectations and builds trust, nurturing a more engaged and motivated workforce.

Positive feedback recognizes employees for their contributions. 

For negative feedback, a friendly and constructive approach can motivate employees to work harder. 

Employee feedback and employee development

Receiving feedback from managers and colleagues informs employees of both what they are doing well and where they need to develop their skills. It also makes your people more self-aware of how others perceive them.

Feedback also gives employees prompts they can use to create effective development plans to facilitate their professional growth.

Employee feedback and employee performance

When employees receive recognition for a specific action, they are more likely to take that action again.

When delivered tactfully, feedback from supervisors and peers helps break bad habits and reinforce positive behavior, ensuring employees work more effectively to achieve organizational goals.

Employee feedback and job satisfaction

Providing feedback to employees is a critical managerial function that facilitates employees' professional growth and skills mastery.

It inspires confidence and instills a greater sense of job satisfaction in the workplace. 

And when an employee feels satisfied with their jobs, they are motivated to put more significant effort into their role, increasing the organization's overall bottom line.

But here's the catch. According to cognitive psychologist LeeAnn Renniger, only 26% of employees feel the feedback they receive is constructive to work upon and improve their work capacities.

To ensure your employees don't feel the same way, let's look at the leading feedback trends that inspire confidence and improve employee performance.

📈 7 Employee feedback trends you need to know

Constructive feedback adds value to the overall performance of managers and employees. 

Opening a solid feedback loop strengthens the relationship between both parties.

Below are seven current trends and employee feedback that can help you improve your workplace culture and promote retention.

⚙️ Automating and digitizing employee feedback

It's high time your organization moves on from the endless cycle of paper shuffling and procrastination. Instead, it's time to embrace employee feedback automation and digitization.

Think about it, which one of the following two scenarios would you prefer?

1) Manual feedback, where:

• Formal performance reviews are slow and often tedious.
• You have to be more hands-on, leading to possible delays in giving feedback.
• Employees don't have access to valuable business insights and trends.

2) Automatic feedback, where:

• There's a fast, automated process in place that saves time and cost.
• You get valuable insights and performance trends.
• Performance reviews concluded on time, and you can suggest practical performance improvements.

Hard to think you'd prefer manual feedback.

Use software to build an efficient employee feedback system to eliminate the bottlenecks and inefficiencies of providing feedback manually. 

Tip: Employee enablement solutions like Zavvy allow you to merge employee feedback with training and development, which is another advantage, helping you deliver an improved employee experience.

🔄 Develop a holistic approach to feedback

When you picture employee feedback, chances are you imagine 1:1 conversations between a manager and an employee.

While there's nothing wrong with this setting, its potential to generate bias and tension isn't ideal. 

That's why recent employee feedback trends favor adopting a holistic approach to providing feedback, known as 360 reviews.

360-degree feedback, also known as multi-rater or multi-source feedback, involves collecting insights across the organization. It includes CEOs, managers, supervisors, co-workers, and even customers to help employees better understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Here are a few tips to help you create a solid 360 feedback survey for your organization:

• Add short, intentional feedback questions. For example, "What words would you use to describe this person?"
• Give raters a reasonable timeframe to avoid delays or impulsive answers.
• Ensure equal participation from everyone, from the top bosses to junior employees.
• Use 360 feedback tools like Zavvy and Typeform to streamline the survey process.

When executed correctly, 360 feedback surveys will give employees a holistic view of the behaviors and skills desired in your organization. 

You will help them understand their effectiveness as employees, staff members, or co-workers from others' viewpoints.

👌 Build a continuous employee feedback process

Continuous employee feedback is a modernized performance management method that creates ongoing 360 feedback to provide unbiased and customized feedback for employees to drive performance, engagement, and growth.

Jo Taylor, the Global Director of Talent & OD/MD at Let's Talk Talent, strongly believes a continuous learning process is a much better alternative to annual appraisals. 

She sees continuous feedback as a "more informal and regular approach to employee feedback that allows two-way development conversations, creating trust, care, and psychologically safe places to work, where people thrive in."

Think about it: won't your employees benefit more from getting frequent feedback in real-time rather than nerve-wracking annual performance appraisals?

Your employees also likely believe continuous feedback trumps annual appraisals. 

Consider the following statistics:

• 60% of Gen Z workers want their manager to check in multiple times during the week. Out of this number, 40% look forward to interacting with their boss daily or several times each day.
• According to Gallup, Millennials, too, want feedback at work. Those who meet with their managers regularly are more than twice as likely to be engaged at work.

Considering Gen Z and Millennials now make up nearly half of the full-time U.S. workforce, the verdict is clear: continuous feedback is here to stay.

📡 Have a look at how Cisco’s runs frequent and future-focused performance conversations to help prime teams for success.

🖥️ Implementing advanced feedback tools for hybrid and remote workforces

Feedback isn't just about managerial opinion. It also includes employee insights. 

After all, how is an organization supposed to prosper without active participation from its human capital?

With workforces going remote or hybrid, manually filling up feedback forms or setting up suggestion boxes is no longer feasible for collecting feedback from every employee. 

So, you need advanced feedback tools to collect and store feedback from team members instead.

With Zavvy, for instance, you can enable a feedback culture that fosters development and allows you to implement 360 feedback to improve outcomes.

💡 We've also created a guide discussing which type of feedback is most helpful to help you manage your team more efficiently.

🤝 Being strategic when giving feedback

Feedback promotes confidence, loyalty, and productivity when given strategically and constructively.

But giving constructive feedback isn't always smooth sailing.

From employees taking feedback negatively to them being unable to handle inputs, many things can go wrong. 

So it's on you to strike the right balance between praise and criticism and encourage improvement without hurting morale.

To make way for meaningful improvement on the employee's part:

• Give actionable advice. 
• Pinpoint areas for improvement. 
• Offer specific suggestions. 
• Enabling them to secure better results and improve professionally.
• Coaching them to achieve higher performance.

💡 Read our constructive feedback guide to master the art of providing intentional feedback that promotes employee well-being and creates job satisfaction.

🎥 Discover Netflix’s rules for giving and receiving feedback.

🧱 Using employee feedback as a pillar for data-driven decision-making

When giving feedback, back up your statements with data to create accountability and promote transparency. 

You can use positive actions to validate behaviors and set development paths for other employees.

If you're wondering how to do that, we've got you.

Consider investing in software with built-in data analytics to model success stories and create two-way feedback loops. 

With the right automation technology in place, you'll have a clearer picture of where employees fit in the organization's future and provide helpful feedback to people struggling to elevate.

Also, think systems like the 9-box grid and skills matrices to get a better understanding of your peope's skills and gaps.

🚶‍♂️ Acknowledging the link between employee feedback and talent retention

Effective teaching communication is the most effective way to engage in ploys. It creates an energizing, healthy work culture that goes beyond perks and ensures your employees stay with you for the long haul.

If this is something you want, you need to start improving employee feedback loops that encourage employees to:

• Voice what's on their minds, 
• Commit to necessary changes,  
• Stick to those changes.

A two-way feedback loop reassures employees they're always welcome to participate in feedback surveys. 

The result? You'll promote a work culture of mutual trust and encourage transparency. 

You'll make your people feel heard while improving buy-in into the feedback system.

➡️ Stay ahead of employee feedback trends with Zavvy

Providing empowering feedback is a challenging but necessary task.

Post-COVID, organizations have shifted to hybrid and remote settings that make the traditional feedback setting of annual performance reviews and manually collecting suggestions redundant.

That's where Zavvy comes into the picture.

Use our world-class 360 feedback software to strengthen your organizational culture and drive business performance and continuous growth from Day 1. 

With our supportive tools, you can create learning opportunities to help your people thrive professionally and personally.

Sign up for a demo and experience the magic of Zavvy yourself.