Getting audience feedback is vital for the outlook of all kinds of organizations. Savvy companies put a lot of resources toward gathering feedback at all levels and gaining insights from it to develop innovative campaigns, products, decision-making processes and more.
However, there are a surprising number of cases where feedback isn’t maximized the way that it should be. For example, surveys are an underrated tool, and need to be well crafted to unearth the best information possible. Many organizations struggle with how to maximize the response rate to a simple survey.
One way for them to improve in this essential function is to re-examine feedback’s roots and outline areas and mechanisms where feedback operates as a springboard for innovation. Let’s look at just a few things we should be considering about feedback.
Feedback Should Be a Part of Everyday Tasks
Weaving feedback mechanisms into the fabric of a workplace is incredibly important. It can help organizations make incremental, but still essential, change. Feedback collection doesn’t have to be too complex — it can be gathered through simple surveys at the end of regular meetings, or during weekly catch-ups. Any team can offer a wealth of ideas and experience, we just need to be methodical and diligent in soliciting and analyzing it.
Promoting diversity of thought through feedback is a boon to organizational innovation. It’s a well-studied fact in leadership that higher diversity among company leaders produces higher innovation, and therefore growth and market capture (reportedly 45% and 70% more, respectively).The diversity that, in this case, helps lead to a wider range of ideas and a more complete offering of feedback, comes from a combination of inherent diversity, such as race or gender, and experiential diversity.
Incorporating this diversity into feedback and making it an everyday aspect of work increases engagement and generates plenty of recorded, usable insight. Innovation is about problem solving, and proper, regular feedback can make it easier for organizations to find the right solutions.
Feedback Cements Your Leadership Capabilities
Innovation can be a messy process, but fortunately good leadership can cut through that. Feedback makes a difference here, too. According to the benchmarks and analysis found in the 2021 Global Leadership Forecast, weaving high-quality assessments into development programs boosted the strength of the leadership bench by an average of 30%.
In a fast-changing world, this makes perfect sense. Knowing how to seek high-quality feedback and make meaningful improvements grounded in it is crucial to good leadership. That’s why modern organizational leadership curricula are focusing on innovation, particularly emphasizing disruptive abilities that leverage emergent technology like social media. In other words, feedback goes hand in hand with helping team leaders and managers improve their team’s performance as a whole.
Feedback Helps Organizations Meet People’s NeedsThis last point seems rather obvious, but the kind of innovation people respond to is the kind that tangibly makes their life richer or easier, or serves some useful social purpose. That means meeting people where they’re at. Creating innovation relevant to a 22nd century lunar colonist might be all well and good, but will it connect in the here and now.To innovate well, we need the best information we can draw from our customers, our marketplace and our employees through feedback. There is no value in waiting for the information to come to us. We must be creative and relentless in gathering it. That’s what we at MeetingPulse are setting out to do: creating feedback tools that are easy to deploy, easy to respond to, and capable of adding value to each and every company.
