Why engagement matters more than score

Pop quiz! What’s going to be more useful to you in the long run: feedback with low engagement and a high score, or feedback with higher engagement and a lower score?

A high score is good, right? Low is bad?

You want to know how your people really feel, so you need as much feedback engagement as you can get. Amazing if you can get 100% of your people talking, but what matters is that people do talk, and that you get feedback you can use.

Just try doing something with ‘3’.

Surveys are an average of opinions… of those who bother responding

When do you leave a hotel review online? When the stay has been awesome? When it’s been terrible? When it’s been… just OK? Most star ratings come from a combo of 5- and 1-star reviews with a smattering in between. You can’t factor in the people who don’t respond, even though their feedback could change the score completely.

It’s the same deal with feedback at work: it usually takes a strong opinion one way or other to move people to respond. You’ll likely hear from the really happy and the extremely annoyed, but you might not hear anything from the rest.

So while it’s tempting to consider a high score a win regardless of engagement, that’s not really how it works. Sure, more people gave you a high score than a low one, but many others didn’t respond at all. Why not?

Do we really need to hear from the people who don’t respond?

Yeah, you really do. The value of feedback isn’t in discovering how awesomely you’re doing; it’s in finding ways you can do better. There’s a potential goldmine of information in the non-responses: any number of reasons why people don’t engage, and some of those things can be easily fixed. But if you don’t hear from them, how will you know what to work on?

Four quick ways to encourage more engagement with feedback

If you’re after a better engagement, you need to make feedback an ongoing conversation. Check in with employees regularly and encourage everyone to have their say.

Invite people to talk about work more often

Companies are increasingly using shorter, more frequent feedback (say, a question a week). It doesn’t take as much time to complete, provides more current information, and allows for faster follow up than annual surveys.

Make feedback attributed and open

For feedback to be useful it needs to be actionable, and the most useful feedback is often actionable at an individual or small team level. If people believe their feedback won’t be acted on, because you have no way of knowing whose feedback it is, then they’re less likely to give it. So use confidential feedback when you absolutely have to, and make sure people know they’re being heard on everything else.

Make feedback a conversation

Turn engagement into a conversation by following up with employees directly: ask for more detail, offer help, solve problems and generally keep people engaged by listening and responding to their feedback.

Be provocative

Encourage deeper conversations by asking the types of probing, challenging or unexpected questions you don’t get in a typical survey. The right questions can spark discussions on topics you otherwise wouldn’t know were important; and people are way more likely to talk about things that are important to them.

If people don’t engage with feedback it’s often because they don’t think there’s a point; that their participation isn’t going to change anything. Change that perception by making feedback more engaging, and watch feedback engagement rise.