Answering feedback messages promptly and effectively is essential for maintaining an open communication culture within the organization as people are investing their time in answering surveys and leaving a message about how they are feeling.
Since they are making this effort, if they do not receive an appropriate response, they may think things like:
- "What am I participating for, if they don't bother to respond to me, next time I won't write."
- "But there is someone behind the tool or it's just a bot".
For that reason, it is very important to answer all feedback messages, both positive and negative, in the most natural and individualized way you can, as it will undoubtedly increase the engagement and participation of your employees. Learn more about the importance of answering all feedback messages.
We are aware that answering all feedback messages is a difficult task, so we have compiled a list of our best practices to help you to achieve it!
1. Set response time goals
You may receive too many feedback messages to be able to answer them at one as
you have many other responsibilities, however it is very important to establish specific time goals for responding to feedback messages, for example, replying all the feedback messages over 1 week, 15 days, etc.
Although this response time goal may be internal to the People/Human Resources team, do not forget to communicate it to the organization through an official company channel as everyone will have the knowledge that their feedback messages are being read and that they will be answered to.
Below you can see an example of communication:
Hello team,
First of all, thank you for participating in Nailted 🤩
We are receiving a large number of anonymous messages, and we want to read each one carefully and respond one by one.
You will receive a response within ---- hours/days.
Once again, thank you very much for participating.
Thank you, the "------" team
💡We advise you to have different time goals depending of the type of message received. For example, complaints are easily identified with this icon
2. Answer messages attending to their priority
Create a prioritization system in which you answer feedback messages based on urgency as it is important to address critical issues or concerns first.
Nailted categorizes for your the different types of incoming messages attending to the source they are coming from, which can help you to create a specific prioritization system. The different categories that you will find on your inbox are the following:
-
Face icons
: These messages come from Nailted surveys sent every 2 weeks, 3 weeks or every month.
-
Envelope icon
: These messages are spontánous feedback messages that employees have sent actively sharing their feedback.
-
Exclamation icon
: These are complaints messages that employees have sent using Nailted’s whistleblowing system.
-
Notepad icon
: These messages are attached to a custom poll that has been sent by the organization.
💡You can use filters to batch process similar messages to streamline your workflow and extracting key information to act upon.
3. Organize messages using the filters available
Organize all your messages in your messages inbox using filters to quickly identify and prioritize messages according to group or topic which will help you to have a better idea of what is the general opinion about each topic.
💡Remember that you can focus only on the pending messages, putting your full attention to new feedback!
4. Delegate messages to managers or other administrators
Create a system for delegating messages responses to other team members or managers (remember they can also be administrators!), as on many occasions they may be the most adequate people as they have the full context of what is happening within their team.
This delegation system will help you to share the responsibility of answering all the incoming feedback ensuring timely and accurate responses. However, it is very important to create a response guideline providing all the information to ensure consistency on the answer provided to employees.
💡Before providing access to managers to manage the response of their team, please reflect on the level of maturity of the manager, as Nailted survey has many questions asking feedback about managers.
5. Create a response guideline
Establishing guidelines for responding to feedback will help to ensure consistency and effectiveness in all the stakeholders involved in answering feedback. Below you will find some important aspects to include in your response guideline:
- Define tone and language: Determine the appropriate tone for responses that will be used by everyone involved as this will ensure consistency in communication.
- Empathize and validate: Train responders to empathize with the feedback provider’s perspective, acknowledge their concerns or feelings to demonstrate understanding.
- Establish response timeframes: Set clear expectations for response times.
- Offer follow-up actions (when required): Determine when and how follow-up actions should be taken, such as providing updates on a very sensitive issue, for example.
- Advices on how to handle negative feedback: Train responders on handling negative feedback with professionalism and grace providing specific guidelines for de-escalating tense situations and turning negative experiences into positive ones.
- Encourage positive engagement: Include guidelines for responding to positive feedback by expressing gratitude and encourage further engagement.
💡Make sure to always offer training sessions or resources to ensure that all staff members understand and can effectively implement the feedback response guideline, specially when it is iterated.
6. Create standardized response templates
Not all the messages can be answered in the same way, however on occasions to similar feedback it is only necessary to make some twists to something you have previously written. For that reason, we advise you to develop a library of pre-written responses for common types of feedback that later on you can customize, which will significantly speed up your response time.
We leave you a template so you can generate your own answers.
⚠️ Be careful of how many times you use the standard template, because if you overuse them, it is possible that the respondents believe that there is no-one handling the answering process, and that it is fully automated.
7. Schedule specific times to manage incoming feedback messages
Responding to feedback is a very sensitive task and we advise you to never multitask when handling messages as it can be potentially a hazard. In order to minimize distraction while handling messages, turn off non-essential notifications, close unnecessary tabs and schedule specific time blocks to focus only on the tasks in hand.
You will see that you will improve efficiency simply by reducing context-switching apart from providing higher quality answers as your focus is entirely on it.
💡Add this block to your work calendar to prevent any meeting to be placed on this focus time and communicate, in case that you fully block your notifications during this time, a communication channel to your team if any urgency arises.