Encouraging your staff to voice their ideas and contribute to finding better ways of doing things can have a positive impact on your business performance.

Business advantages of staff feedback and ideas

The business benefits of encouraging regular staff feedback, opinions, and ideas are:

Better connectivity and awareness

You will be more aware and in touch with what is going on at every level of your business. You'll also be in a better position to gauge staff how staff feel at any given moment on what is and what isn't working within your business. You will also be better informed when making key decisions.

Creates an open and honest culture

By encouraging two-way communication with your staff you grow the trust within your business and sow the seeds for an open and honest culture to freely express opinions and ideas. This helps you to address challenges at an early stage, identify opportunities, and promote collaborative working.

Increases productivity

Encouraging staff to voice their opinions and ideas will increase employee engagement, motivation, and productivity. Staff will feel invested in your business and more determined to ensure its success.

Identifies business solutions

Seeking ideas for improvement from a wider section of your organisation can lead to finding solutions to business problems that may otherwise never have been identified.

Promotes collaborative working

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest working environment allows employees to express their concerns and ideas. This creates a workplace culture of collaboration and togetherness enabling teams to work together more effectively and efficiently.

Drives innovation

By encouraging feedback from staff from various backgrounds, working in different areas of your company you are more likely to get a diverse range of ideas that contribute to innovative solutions putting you in a better position to take advantage of business opportunities.

More valued and motivated staff

If staff feel that their opinions matter and their contribution to the business is essential then they will feel valued and motivated to do their very best for the organisation. Seeking staff feedback and ideas also helps to enhance employee recognition. This gives staff pride in their work and motivates them to be more productive.

Helps attract and retain staff

If staff feel valued that their contribution matters it encourages them to stay with the organisation helping to reduce staff turnover and the costs associated with replacing staff that resign. By developing a rich workplace culture where employees are valued and can contribute to key business decisions you will be able to attract the talent that your business needs to grow and thrive.

Supports career development

Employee feedback can help to identify opportunities for career progression and improvement. By regularly asking staff about job satisfaction and career goals employers can better understand the current needs of their employees and then provide the necessary support and guidance to help them progress in their careers.

Improves agility

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest culture develops staff that have the skills and resilience to adapt to change. This makes your business more agile and flexible to make the necessary adjustments to take advantage of opportunities to grow.

Reduces workplace conflict

Developing a culture where open and honest communication between all levels of staff gives employees the tools to address issues before they escalate. When staff don't feel valued or that they can't voice their opinions or ideas then resentment and workplace conflict can easily develop.

In order to encourage your staff to share opinions, ideas and feedback, your employees must be informed about your business, and have a clear understanding of what it does and what it wants to achieve.

You will only gain meaningful input and ideas from your staff if you effectively communicate key information on how to improve your business. This will help establish an open and honest workplace culture. How you do this will depend on your business.

How to effectively communicate with your staff

To keep your employees informed of what is going on in your business you could consider:

Regular performance updates

Providing regular perfromance updates through the channels you have available eg email, intranet, noticeboards, posters and digital screens around the workplace.

Regular face-to-face business updates

You could host regular meetings where you can share information and give employees the opportunity to ask questions. Consider hybrid meetings so that employees workimg remotely can take part too.

Briefing materials

Equip your managers with briefing materials and support that helps them put business perfromance information into context for their teams.

Regular discussion forums

You could run regular discussion forums with staff that focus on particular topics or issues of interest to your staff. These can be more infromal sessions that enable you get to know your staff beyond just a professional level.

Employee recognition events

You should reward and recognise the efforts of your staff. You could consider hosting one or two events a year to show your appreciation of employees that have gone the extra mile to deliver goals or targets or help colleagues in your business.

Encouraging feedback, opinions, and ideas from your employees can help you to make improvements to your business and discover growth opportunities.

How to encourage staff feedback

There are a number of methods you can use to encourage staff to give their feedback including:

Online feedback form

Provide an online platform perhaps on your company intranet where employees can conveniently post feedback or ideas. To maintain awareness and encourage regular use you could promote the online feedback form in internal email communications or every so often you could request staff feedback or ideas on a specific issue or area of the business.

It is important that you make sure you assign someone to take responsibility for collecting the feedback and reporting on how the business plans to act on it. You should also outline the reasons for ideas that have not been taken forward. See evaluate staff feedback and ideas.

Staff suggestions box

You could encourage staff feedback by having a suggestions box in the workplace where staff can easily submit anonymous feedback. This is particularly useful for staff that don't readily have access to internal email or the company intranet.

Discussions that focus on specific business issues

By posing a question around a particular business theme, issue, or problem you can invite staff views, stimulate discussions, and identify solutions from the feedback. You could do this on a regular basis or as and when a specific issue has been identified and needs to be addressed.

Team briefings

By giving managers a standing agenda for team briefings you can invite questions and feedback from employees within these sessions.

Training for managers

You could provide training and guidance to help managers develop the skills needed to seek and handle feedback from staff.

Staff focus groups

You could hold regular employee focus groups that seek feedback from a cross-section of staff across your business - download guidance on running employee focus groups (DOC, 184K).

Senior management forums

You could create specific sessions during which employees can come and talk to senior managers and express their views or raise issues.

Regular staff surveys

You should conduct regular surveys with your employees, using a core set of questions each time so that you can track responses, measure success, identify trends, and compare data.

Rewarding ideas

Create a spot prize that gives managers the freedom to recognise a particularly innovative idea or suggestion for business improvement.

Recognise staff contribution

By celebrating all productive ideas that employees have suggested, however small, you show that everyone can help shape the way your business is run.

Anonymised feedback

To prevent discussions aren't dominated by the same strong personalities ensure there are enough opportunities for staff to give anonymous feedback. This gives those who may be reluctant to come forward in front of others the chance to voice more meaningful and honest feedback.

When you receive ideas from your employees try to interpret the feedback fairly and objectively. Some feedback is likely to be critical so you should analyse it in terms of the facts presented and avoid letting your feelings or opinions cloud your thinking. By setting up an ideas evaluation process you will add transparency for staff and build their confidence to submit feedback and ideas in the future.

Establishing an ideas evaluation process

The ideas evaluation process you need will depend on the size of your business and the amount of feedback you receive from staff. If volumes of feedback are relatively small you might be able to manage the evaluation process personally.

If you have a larger business, you may need a scheme administrator, who will manage the ideas evaluation process - including communications - and an evaluation team made up of representatives from across your business.

Evaluation criteria for staff feedback

Some evaluation criteria you could use to help you assess employee ideas include:

• cost reduction
• generating business income
• increasing market share
• improving customer service or relations
• improving the working environment or work/life balance
• enhancing the reputation of the business
• improving decision-making or reducing risk
• improving the efficiency of working practices/processes

It's important that you define what these broad criteria mean to your specific business and that you brief your evaluation team accordingly.

If you ask for ideas on a particular area, then you may need more specific evaluation criteria.

It's also important to make sure employees understand that suggestions for small changes are as welcome as big ideas. Sometimes small changes can have a major impact on the way the business operates.

Sorting feedback into actions

When you have received employee feedback you may have quite a bit of sorting to do to identify key themes. Group those suggestions that relate to each other together and place them in categories or subcategories if required. You can then mark whether each idea requires action or not. If an idea is marked as no action, you should outline the reasons for this so you can explain it to staff.

Once you have identified your individual actions you can develop an action plan that will help you plan and implement the ideas for improvement.

Acknowledge staff feedback

Communicate your evaluation of ideas and show the difference the ideas have made to your business.

If you implement any ideas on the back of staff feedback, make sure that you recognise and reward employees whose suggestion it was. This will help generate a positive business culture of engagement and encourage other staff to provide valuable feedback and ideas.

Every business has a range of online channels it uses to communicate with employees. These could be email, an intranet system, blogs, or social networking sites which can all help employees share views, knowledge, and ideas.

What technology is right for your business?

When deciding which technologies are right for your business to facilitate staff feedback, you could consider:

Asking staff

Ask your staff what would them easily communicate with management and colleagues.

Developing clear policies and guidelines

Create and communicate clear guidelines and policy on the use of technology including the accessing of social networking sites and use of language and addressing any misuse of them. See develop a social media policy.

Using collaborative systems

Use internal systems, external tools, collaboration sites or a combination of these mechanisms depending on your aims, technical capabilities and budget.

Involving management

Demonstrate your own support by participating in discussions too and encouraging colleagues to do the same.

Establishing early adopters

Identify and support early adopters who can start encouraging involvement across the rest of your business.

Recognising and rewarding staff

Celebrate ideas, feedback and improvements that come from collaboration through tools and online channels.

Many businesses use employee forums to generate ideas for identifying efficiencies and improving business operations and performance as a whole.

How to establish an employee forum

Different approaches to staff forums work for different businesses. There are a couple of ways to establish an effective employee forum in your business.

Employee board

Establish an employee board with rotating membership where ideas can be generated and debated.

Employee taskforce

Set up an employee taskforce to look at potential solutions for a key business challenge or to streamline operations or processes.

Make sure any initiatives seeking views or ideas from customers are mirrored within your business to give employees the chance to submit their ideas.

If you create a staff forum try to remember the following key points.

Define the role and remit of the staff forum

Have a clear remit for the employee forum with terms of reference that are clearly understood across the business as a whole.

An effective way of creating terms of reference is to involve the forum members at the stage of defining them.

Create clear responsibilities within the staff forum

Set out and ensure there is agreement of key responsibilities for the employees in the forum when establishing it, for example:

• proactively seek views and feedback from employees in their area of the business
• identify where progress has been achieved and communicate this
• run employee focus groups to seek views and opinions
• present and report to managers on relevant feedback from their area of the business
• communicate with people in their area of the business about ideas or issues

Creating clear responsibilities shows you are keen to work with the staff forum and that the employees involved have important roles to fulfil.

Invite participants to the staff forum

Although the types of employee forum discussed here are informal bodies, try to have an open and transparent approach to recruiting members of staff. This will be important to the credibility and trust in the staff forum.

You may want to consider an evaluation or election process for the forum eg members of the staff forum could nominate a chairperson on a rotational basis for a certain period of time.

Communicate outputs from the staff forum

It is important to the credibility of the staff forum that you communicate outputs to the rest of the workforce and emphasise the difference it has made to the running of the business. You could outline how a business issue or problem was identified and how the staff forum has worked to provide a suitable solution.

The involvement of trade unions and union and non-union employee representatives can provide a collective voice for all or part of your workforce.

Information and consultation requirements apply to all organisations with at least 50 employees. For more information see how to inform and consult your employees.

Trust, cooperation, and information sharing are essential to the employee voice and the collective voice within your organisation. Your approach to employee and collective voice should support and complement each other.

A genuinely engaged workplace will be a foundation for the more formal process of involvement and consultation.

How to align your collective voice and employee voice

To align your collective voice with employee voice, you could:

Involve union and non-union representatives at an early stage

Invite union and non-union representatives to presentations on business progress and performance before briefings are given more widely to your employees. See work effectively with trade unions and working with non-union representatives.

Include representatives in key discussions

Invite representatives to become involved in meaningful discussions on a broader range of business topics beyond those formally agreed.

Use representative platforms

Ask representatives to canvass their members on ideas for improving your business or responding to a particular challenge. Staff may be more willing to voice their ideas and give more meaningful and honest feedback when using representative platforms.

Work with representatives to implement actions

Invite representatives to presentations on the results from employee surveys and ask them to work with you on plans to address any issues.

Encouraging your staff to voice their ideas and contribute to finding better ways of doing things can have a positive impact on your business performance.

Business advantages of staff feedback and ideas

The business benefits of encouraging regular staff feedback, opinions, and ideas are:

Better connectivity and awareness

You will be more aware and in touch with what is going on at every level of your business. You'll also be in a better position to gauge staff how staff feel at any given moment on what is and what isn't working within your business. You will also be better informed when making key decisions.

Creates an open and honest culture

By encouraging two-way communication with your staff you grow the trust within your business and sow the seeds for an open and honest culture to freely express opinions and ideas. This helps you to address challenges at an early stage, identify opportunities, and promote collaborative working.

Increases productivity

Encouraging staff to voice their opinions and ideas will increase employee engagement, motivation, and productivity. Staff will feel invested in your business and more determined to ensure its success.

Identifies business solutions

Seeking ideas for improvement from a wider section of your organisation can lead to finding solutions to business problems that may otherwise never have been identified.

Promotes collaborative working

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest working environment allows employees to express their concerns and ideas. This creates a workplace culture of collaboration and togetherness enabling teams to work together more effectively and efficiently.

Drives innovation

By encouraging feedback from staff from various backgrounds, working in different areas of your company you are more likely to get a diverse range of ideas that contribute to innovative solutions putting you in a better position to take advantage of business opportunities.

More valued and motivated staff

If staff feel that their opinions matter and their contribution to the business is essential then they will feel valued and motivated to do their very best for the organisation. Seeking staff feedback and ideas also helps to enhance employee recognition. This gives staff pride in their work and motivates them to be more productive.

Helps attract and retain staff

If staff feel valued that their contribution matters it encourages them to stay with the organisation helping to reduce staff turnover and the costs associated with replacing staff that resign. By developing a rich workplace culture where employees are valued and can contribute to key business decisions you will be able to attract the talent that your business needs to grow and thrive.

Supports career development

Employee feedback can help to identify opportunities for career progression and improvement. By regularly asking staff about job satisfaction and career goals employers can better understand the current needs of their employees and then provide the necessary support and guidance to help them progress in their careers.

Improves agility

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest culture develops staff that have the skills and resilience to adapt to change. This makes your business more agile and flexible to make the necessary adjustments to take advantage of opportunities to grow.

Reduces workplace conflict

Developing a culture where open and honest communication between all levels of staff gives employees the tools to address issues before they escalate. When staff don't feel valued or that they can't voice their opinions or ideas then resentment and workplace conflict can easily develop.

In order to encourage your staff to share opinions, ideas and feedback, your employees must be informed about your business, and have a clear understanding of what it does and what it wants to achieve.

You will only gain meaningful input and ideas from your staff if you effectively communicate key information on how to improve your business. This will help establish an open and honest workplace culture. How you do this will depend on your business.

How to effectively communicate with your staff

To keep your employees informed of what is going on in your business you could consider:

Regular performance updates

Providing regular perfromance updates through the channels you have available eg email, intranet, noticeboards, posters and digital screens around the workplace.

Regular face-to-face business updates

You could host regular meetings where you can share information and give employees the opportunity to ask questions. Consider hybrid meetings so that employees workimg remotely can take part too.

Briefing materials

Equip your managers with briefing materials and support that helps them put business perfromance information into context for their teams.

Regular discussion forums

You could run regular discussion forums with staff that focus on particular topics or issues of interest to your staff. These can be more infromal sessions that enable you get to know your staff beyond just a professional level.

Employee recognition events

You should reward and recognise the efforts of your staff. You could consider hosting one or two events a year to show your appreciation of employees that have gone the extra mile to deliver goals or targets or help colleagues in your business.

Encouraging feedback, opinions, and ideas from your employees can help you to make improvements to your business and discover growth opportunities.

How to encourage staff feedback

There are a number of methods you can use to encourage staff to give their feedback including:

Online feedback form

Provide an online platform perhaps on your company intranet where employees can conveniently post feedback or ideas. To maintain awareness and encourage regular use you could promote the online feedback form in internal email communications or every so often you could request staff feedback or ideas on a specific issue or area of the business.

It is important that you make sure you assign someone to take responsibility for collecting the feedback and reporting on how the business plans to act on it. You should also outline the reasons for ideas that have not been taken forward. See evaluate staff feedback and ideas.

Staff suggestions box

You could encourage staff feedback by having a suggestions box in the workplace where staff can easily submit anonymous feedback. This is particularly useful for staff that don't readily have access to internal email or the company intranet.

Discussions that focus on specific business issues

By posing a question around a particular business theme, issue, or problem you can invite staff views, stimulate discussions, and identify solutions from the feedback. You could do this on a regular basis or as and when a specific issue has been identified and needs to be addressed.

Team briefings

By giving managers a standing agenda for team briefings you can invite questions and feedback from employees within these sessions.

Training for managers

You could provide training and guidance to help managers develop the skills needed to seek and handle feedback from staff.

Staff focus groups

You could hold regular employee focus groups that seek feedback from a cross-section of staff across your business - download guidance on running employee focus groups (DOC, 184K).

Senior management forums

You could create specific sessions during which employees can come and talk to senior managers and express their views or raise issues.

Regular staff surveys

You should conduct regular surveys with your employees, using a core set of questions each time so that you can track responses, measure success, identify trends, and compare data.

Rewarding ideas

Create a spot prize that gives managers the freedom to recognise a particularly innovative idea or suggestion for business improvement.

Recognise staff contribution

By celebrating all productive ideas that employees have suggested, however small, you show that everyone can help shape the way your business is run.

Anonymised feedback

To prevent discussions aren't dominated by the same strong personalities ensure there are enough opportunities for staff to give anonymous feedback. This gives those who may be reluctant to come forward in front of others the chance to voice more meaningful and honest feedback.

When you receive ideas from your employees try to interpret the feedback fairly and objectively. Some feedback is likely to be critical so you should analyse it in terms of the facts presented and avoid letting your feelings or opinions cloud your thinking. By setting up an ideas evaluation process you will add transparency for staff and build their confidence to submit feedback and ideas in the future.

Establishing an ideas evaluation process

The ideas evaluation process you need will depend on the size of your business and the amount of feedback you receive from staff. If volumes of feedback are relatively small you might be able to manage the evaluation process personally.

If you have a larger business, you may need a scheme administrator, who will manage the ideas evaluation process - including communications - and an evaluation team made up of representatives from across your business.

Evaluation criteria for staff feedback

Some evaluation criteria you could use to help you assess employee ideas include:

• cost reduction
• generating business income
• increasing market share
• improving customer service or relations
• improving the working environment or work/life balance
• enhancing the reputation of the business
• improving decision-making or reducing risk
• improving the efficiency of working practices/processes

It's important that you define what these broad criteria mean to your specific business and that you brief your evaluation team accordingly.

If you ask for ideas on a particular area, then you may need more specific evaluation criteria.

It's also important to make sure employees understand that suggestions for small changes are as welcome as big ideas. Sometimes small changes can have a major impact on the way the business operates.

Sorting feedback into actions

When you have received employee feedback you may have quite a bit of sorting to do to identify key themes. Group those suggestions that relate to each other together and place them in categories or subcategories if required. You can then mark whether each idea requires action or not. If an idea is marked as no action, you should outline the reasons for this so you can explain it to staff.

Once you have identified your individual actions you can develop an action plan that will help you plan and implement the ideas for improvement.

Acknowledge staff feedback

Communicate your evaluation of ideas and show the difference the ideas have made to your business.

If you implement any ideas on the back of staff feedback, make sure that you recognise and reward employees whose suggestion it was. This will help generate a positive business culture of engagement and encourage other staff to provide valuable feedback and ideas.

Every business has a range of online channels it uses to communicate with employees. These could be email, an intranet system, blogs, or social networking sites which can all help employees share views, knowledge, and ideas.

What technology is right for your business?

When deciding which technologies are right for your business to facilitate staff feedback, you could consider:

Asking staff

Ask your staff what would them easily communicate with management and colleagues.

Developing clear policies and guidelines

Create and communicate clear guidelines and policy on the use of technology including the accessing of social networking sites and use of language and addressing any misuse of them. See develop a social media policy.

Using collaborative systems

Use internal systems, external tools, collaboration sites or a combination of these mechanisms depending on your aims, technical capabilities and budget.

Involving management

Demonstrate your own support by participating in discussions too and encouraging colleagues to do the same.

Establishing early adopters

Identify and support early adopters who can start encouraging involvement across the rest of your business.

Recognising and rewarding staff

Celebrate ideas, feedback and improvements that come from collaboration through tools and online channels.

Many businesses use employee forums to generate ideas for identifying efficiencies and improving business operations and performance as a whole.

How to establish an employee forum

Different approaches to staff forums work for different businesses. There are a couple of ways to establish an effective employee forum in your business.

Employee board

Establish an employee board with rotating membership where ideas can be generated and debated.

Employee taskforce

Set up an employee taskforce to look at potential solutions for a key business challenge or to streamline operations or processes.

Make sure any initiatives seeking views or ideas from customers are mirrored within your business to give employees the chance to submit their ideas.

If you create a staff forum try to remember the following key points.

Define the role and remit of the staff forum

Have a clear remit for the employee forum with terms of reference that are clearly understood across the business as a whole.

An effective way of creating terms of reference is to involve the forum members at the stage of defining them.

Create clear responsibilities within the staff forum

Set out and ensure there is agreement of key responsibilities for the employees in the forum when establishing it, for example:

• proactively seek views and feedback from employees in their area of the business
• identify where progress has been achieved and communicate this
• run employee focus groups to seek views and opinions
• present and report to managers on relevant feedback from their area of the business
• communicate with people in their area of the business about ideas or issues

Creating clear responsibilities shows you are keen to work with the staff forum and that the employees involved have important roles to fulfil.

Invite participants to the staff forum

Although the types of employee forum discussed here are informal bodies, try to have an open and transparent approach to recruiting members of staff. This will be important to the credibility and trust in the staff forum.

You may want to consider an evaluation or election process for the forum eg members of the staff forum could nominate a chairperson on a rotational basis for a certain period of time.

Communicate outputs from the staff forum

It is important to the credibility of the staff forum that you communicate outputs to the rest of the workforce and emphasise the difference it has made to the running of the business. You could outline how a business issue or problem was identified and how the staff forum has worked to provide a suitable solution.

The involvement of trade unions and union and non-union employee representatives can provide a collective voice for all or part of your workforce.

Information and consultation requirements apply to all organisations with at least 50 employees. For more information see how to inform and consult your employees.

Trust, cooperation, and information sharing are essential to the employee voice and the collective voice within your organisation. Your approach to employee and collective voice should support and complement each other.

A genuinely engaged workplace will be a foundation for the more formal process of involvement and consultation.

How to align your collective voice and employee voice

To align your collective voice with employee voice, you could:

Involve union and non-union representatives at an early stage

Invite union and non-union representatives to presentations on business progress and performance before briefings are given more widely to your employees. See work effectively with trade unions and working with non-union representatives.

Include representatives in key discussions

Invite representatives to become involved in meaningful discussions on a broader range of business topics beyond those formally agreed.

Use representative platforms

Ask representatives to canvass their members on ideas for improving your business or responding to a particular challenge. Staff may be more willing to voice their ideas and give more meaningful and honest feedback when using representative platforms.

Work with representatives to implement actions

Invite representatives to presentations on the results from employee surveys and ask them to work with you on plans to address any issues.

Encouraging your staff to voice their ideas and contribute to finding better ways of doing things can have a positive impact on your business performance.

Business advantages of staff feedback and ideas

The business benefits of encouraging regular staff feedback, opinions, and ideas are:

Better connectivity and awareness

You will be more aware and in touch with what is going on at every level of your business. You'll also be in a better position to gauge staff how staff feel at any given moment on what is and what isn't working within your business. You will also be better informed when making key decisions.

Creates an open and honest culture

By encouraging two-way communication with your staff you grow the trust within your business and sow the seeds for an open and honest culture to freely express opinions and ideas. This helps you to address challenges at an early stage, identify opportunities, and promote collaborative working.

Increases productivity

Encouraging staff to voice their opinions and ideas will increase employee engagement, motivation, and productivity. Staff will feel invested in your business and more determined to ensure its success.

Identifies business solutions

Seeking ideas for improvement from a wider section of your organisation can lead to finding solutions to business problems that may otherwise never have been identified.

Promotes collaborative working

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest working environment allows employees to express their concerns and ideas. This creates a workplace culture of collaboration and togetherness enabling teams to work together more effectively and efficiently.

Drives innovation

By encouraging feedback from staff from various backgrounds, working in different areas of your company you are more likely to get a diverse range of ideas that contribute to innovative solutions putting you in a better position to take advantage of business opportunities.

More valued and motivated staff

If staff feel that their opinions matter and their contribution to the business is essential then they will feel valued and motivated to do their very best for the organisation. Seeking staff feedback and ideas also helps to enhance employee recognition. This gives staff pride in their work and motivates them to be more productive.

Helps attract and retain staff

If staff feel valued that their contribution matters it encourages them to stay with the organisation helping to reduce staff turnover and the costs associated with replacing staff that resign. By developing a rich workplace culture where employees are valued and can contribute to key business decisions you will be able to attract the talent that your business needs to grow and thrive.

Supports career development

Employee feedback can help to identify opportunities for career progression and improvement. By regularly asking staff about job satisfaction and career goals employers can better understand the current needs of their employees and then provide the necessary support and guidance to help them progress in their careers.

Improves agility

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest culture develops staff that have the skills and resilience to adapt to change. This makes your business more agile and flexible to make the necessary adjustments to take advantage of opportunities to grow.

Reduces workplace conflict

Developing a culture where open and honest communication between all levels of staff gives employees the tools to address issues before they escalate. When staff don't feel valued or that they can't voice their opinions or ideas then resentment and workplace conflict can easily develop.

In order to encourage your staff to share opinions, ideas and feedback, your employees must be informed about your business, and have a clear understanding of what it does and what it wants to achieve.

You will only gain meaningful input and ideas from your staff if you effectively communicate key information on how to improve your business. This will help establish an open and honest workplace culture. How you do this will depend on your business.

How to effectively communicate with your staff

To keep your employees informed of what is going on in your business you could consider:

Regular performance updates

Providing regular perfromance updates through the channels you have available eg email, intranet, noticeboards, posters and digital screens around the workplace.

Regular face-to-face business updates

You could host regular meetings where you can share information and give employees the opportunity to ask questions. Consider hybrid meetings so that employees workimg remotely can take part too.

Briefing materials

Equip your managers with briefing materials and support that helps them put business perfromance information into context for their teams.

Regular discussion forums

You could run regular discussion forums with staff that focus on particular topics or issues of interest to your staff. These can be more infromal sessions that enable you get to know your staff beyond just a professional level.

Employee recognition events

You should reward and recognise the efforts of your staff. You could consider hosting one or two events a year to show your appreciation of employees that have gone the extra mile to deliver goals or targets or help colleagues in your business.

Encouraging feedback, opinions, and ideas from your employees can help you to make improvements to your business and discover growth opportunities.

How to encourage staff feedback

There are a number of methods you can use to encourage staff to give their feedback including:

Online feedback form

Provide an online platform perhaps on your company intranet where employees can conveniently post feedback or ideas. To maintain awareness and encourage regular use you could promote the online feedback form in internal email communications or every so often you could request staff feedback or ideas on a specific issue or area of the business.

It is important that you make sure you assign someone to take responsibility for collecting the feedback and reporting on how the business plans to act on it. You should also outline the reasons for ideas that have not been taken forward. See evaluate staff feedback and ideas.

Staff suggestions box

You could encourage staff feedback by having a suggestions box in the workplace where staff can easily submit anonymous feedback. This is particularly useful for staff that don't readily have access to internal email or the company intranet.

Discussions that focus on specific business issues

By posing a question around a particular business theme, issue, or problem you can invite staff views, stimulate discussions, and identify solutions from the feedback. You could do this on a regular basis or as and when a specific issue has been identified and needs to be addressed.

Team briefings

By giving managers a standing agenda for team briefings you can invite questions and feedback from employees within these sessions.

Training for managers

You could provide training and guidance to help managers develop the skills needed to seek and handle feedback from staff.

Staff focus groups

You could hold regular employee focus groups that seek feedback from a cross-section of staff across your business - download guidance on running employee focus groups (DOC, 184K).

Senior management forums

You could create specific sessions during which employees can come and talk to senior managers and express their views or raise issues.

Regular staff surveys

You should conduct regular surveys with your employees, using a core set of questions each time so that you can track responses, measure success, identify trends, and compare data.

Rewarding ideas

Create a spot prize that gives managers the freedom to recognise a particularly innovative idea or suggestion for business improvement.

Recognise staff contribution

By celebrating all productive ideas that employees have suggested, however small, you show that everyone can help shape the way your business is run.

Anonymised feedback

To prevent discussions aren't dominated by the same strong personalities ensure there are enough opportunities for staff to give anonymous feedback. This gives those who may be reluctant to come forward in front of others the chance to voice more meaningful and honest feedback.

When you receive ideas from your employees try to interpret the feedback fairly and objectively. Some feedback is likely to be critical so you should analyse it in terms of the facts presented and avoid letting your feelings or opinions cloud your thinking. By setting up an ideas evaluation process you will add transparency for staff and build their confidence to submit feedback and ideas in the future.

Establishing an ideas evaluation process

The ideas evaluation process you need will depend on the size of your business and the amount of feedback you receive from staff. If volumes of feedback are relatively small you might be able to manage the evaluation process personally.

If you have a larger business, you may need a scheme administrator, who will manage the ideas evaluation process - including communications - and an evaluation team made up of representatives from across your business.

Evaluation criteria for staff feedback

Some evaluation criteria you could use to help you assess employee ideas include:

• cost reduction
• generating business income
• increasing market share
• improving customer service or relations
• improving the working environment or work/life balance
• enhancing the reputation of the business
• improving decision-making or reducing risk
• improving the efficiency of working practices/processes

It's important that you define what these broad criteria mean to your specific business and that you brief your evaluation team accordingly.

If you ask for ideas on a particular area, then you may need more specific evaluation criteria.

It's also important to make sure employees understand that suggestions for small changes are as welcome as big ideas. Sometimes small changes can have a major impact on the way the business operates.

Sorting feedback into actions

When you have received employee feedback you may have quite a bit of sorting to do to identify key themes. Group those suggestions that relate to each other together and place them in categories or subcategories if required. You can then mark whether each idea requires action or not. If an idea is marked as no action, you should outline the reasons for this so you can explain it to staff.

Once you have identified your individual actions you can develop an action plan that will help you plan and implement the ideas for improvement.

Acknowledge staff feedback

Communicate your evaluation of ideas and show the difference the ideas have made to your business.

If you implement any ideas on the back of staff feedback, make sure that you recognise and reward employees whose suggestion it was. This will help generate a positive business culture of engagement and encourage other staff to provide valuable feedback and ideas.

Every business has a range of online channels it uses to communicate with employees. These could be email, an intranet system, blogs, or social networking sites which can all help employees share views, knowledge, and ideas.

What technology is right for your business?

When deciding which technologies are right for your business to facilitate staff feedback, you could consider:

Asking staff

Ask your staff what would them easily communicate with management and colleagues.

Developing clear policies and guidelines

Create and communicate clear guidelines and policy on the use of technology including the accessing of social networking sites and use of language and addressing any misuse of them. See develop a social media policy.

Using collaborative systems

Use internal systems, external tools, collaboration sites or a combination of these mechanisms depending on your aims, technical capabilities and budget.

Involving management

Demonstrate your own support by participating in discussions too and encouraging colleagues to do the same.

Establishing early adopters

Identify and support early adopters who can start encouraging involvement across the rest of your business.

Recognising and rewarding staff

Celebrate ideas, feedback and improvements that come from collaboration through tools and online channels.

Many businesses use employee forums to generate ideas for identifying efficiencies and improving business operations and performance as a whole.

How to establish an employee forum

Different approaches to staff forums work for different businesses. There are a couple of ways to establish an effective employee forum in your business.

Employee board

Establish an employee board with rotating membership where ideas can be generated and debated.

Employee taskforce

Set up an employee taskforce to look at potential solutions for a key business challenge or to streamline operations or processes.

Make sure any initiatives seeking views or ideas from customers are mirrored within your business to give employees the chance to submit their ideas.

If you create a staff forum try to remember the following key points.

Define the role and remit of the staff forum

Have a clear remit for the employee forum with terms of reference that are clearly understood across the business as a whole.

An effective way of creating terms of reference is to involve the forum members at the stage of defining them.

Create clear responsibilities within the staff forum

Set out and ensure there is agreement of key responsibilities for the employees in the forum when establishing it, for example:

• proactively seek views and feedback from employees in their area of the business
• identify where progress has been achieved and communicate this
• run employee focus groups to seek views and opinions
• present and report to managers on relevant feedback from their area of the business
• communicate with people in their area of the business about ideas or issues

Creating clear responsibilities shows you are keen to work with the staff forum and that the employees involved have important roles to fulfil.

Invite participants to the staff forum

Although the types of employee forum discussed here are informal bodies, try to have an open and transparent approach to recruiting members of staff. This will be important to the credibility and trust in the staff forum.

You may want to consider an evaluation or election process for the forum eg members of the staff forum could nominate a chairperson on a rotational basis for a certain period of time.

Communicate outputs from the staff forum

It is important to the credibility of the staff forum that you communicate outputs to the rest of the workforce and emphasise the difference it has made to the running of the business. You could outline how a business issue or problem was identified and how the staff forum has worked to provide a suitable solution.

The involvement of trade unions and union and non-union employee representatives can provide a collective voice for all or part of your workforce.

Information and consultation requirements apply to all organisations with at least 50 employees. For more information see how to inform and consult your employees.

Trust, cooperation, and information sharing are essential to the employee voice and the collective voice within your organisation. Your approach to employee and collective voice should support and complement each other.

A genuinely engaged workplace will be a foundation for the more formal process of involvement and consultation.

How to align your collective voice and employee voice

To align your collective voice with employee voice, you could:

Involve union and non-union representatives at an early stage

Invite union and non-union representatives to presentations on business progress and performance before briefings are given more widely to your employees. See work effectively with trade unions and working with non-union representatives.

Include representatives in key discussions

Invite representatives to become involved in meaningful discussions on a broader range of business topics beyond those formally agreed.

Use representative platforms

Ask representatives to canvass their members on ideas for improving your business or responding to a particular challenge. Staff may be more willing to voice their ideas and give more meaningful and honest feedback when using representative platforms.

Work with representatives to implement actions

Invite representatives to presentations on the results from employee surveys and ask them to work with you on plans to address any issues.

Encouraging your staff to voice their ideas and contribute to finding better ways of doing things can have a positive impact on your business performance.

Business advantages of staff feedback and ideas

The business benefits of encouraging regular staff feedback, opinions, and ideas are:

Better connectivity and awareness

You will be more aware and in touch with what is going on at every level of your business. You'll also be in a better position to gauge staff how staff feel at any given moment on what is and what isn't working within your business. You will also be better informed when making key decisions.

Creates an open and honest culture

By encouraging two-way communication with your staff you grow the trust within your business and sow the seeds for an open and honest culture to freely express opinions and ideas. This helps you to address challenges at an early stage, identify opportunities, and promote collaborative working.

Increases productivity

Encouraging staff to voice their opinions and ideas will increase employee engagement, motivation, and productivity. Staff will feel invested in your business and more determined to ensure its success.

Identifies business solutions

Seeking ideas for improvement from a wider section of your organisation can lead to finding solutions to business problems that may otherwise never have been identified.

Promotes collaborative working

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest working environment allows employees to express their concerns and ideas. This creates a workplace culture of collaboration and togetherness enabling teams to work together more effectively and efficiently.

Drives innovation

By encouraging feedback from staff from various backgrounds, working in different areas of your company you are more likely to get a diverse range of ideas that contribute to innovative solutions putting you in a better position to take advantage of business opportunities.

More valued and motivated staff

If staff feel that their opinions matter and their contribution to the business is essential then they will feel valued and motivated to do their very best for the organisation. Seeking staff feedback and ideas also helps to enhance employee recognition. This gives staff pride in their work and motivates them to be more productive.

Helps attract and retain staff

If staff feel valued that their contribution matters it encourages them to stay with the organisation helping to reduce staff turnover and the costs associated with replacing staff that resign. By developing a rich workplace culture where employees are valued and can contribute to key business decisions you will be able to attract the talent that your business needs to grow and thrive.

Supports career development

Employee feedback can help to identify opportunities for career progression and improvement. By regularly asking staff about job satisfaction and career goals employers can better understand the current needs of their employees and then provide the necessary support and guidance to help them progress in their careers.

Improves agility

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest culture develops staff that have the skills and resilience to adapt to change. This makes your business more agile and flexible to make the necessary adjustments to take advantage of opportunities to grow.

Reduces workplace conflict

Developing a culture where open and honest communication between all levels of staff gives employees the tools to address issues before they escalate. When staff don't feel valued or that they can't voice their opinions or ideas then resentment and workplace conflict can easily develop.

In order to encourage your staff to share opinions, ideas and feedback, your employees must be informed about your business, and have a clear understanding of what it does and what it wants to achieve.

You will only gain meaningful input and ideas from your staff if you effectively communicate key information on how to improve your business. This will help establish an open and honest workplace culture. How you do this will depend on your business.

How to effectively communicate with your staff

To keep your employees informed of what is going on in your business you could consider:

Regular performance updates

Providing regular perfromance updates through the channels you have available eg email, intranet, noticeboards, posters and digital screens around the workplace.

Regular face-to-face business updates

You could host regular meetings where you can share information and give employees the opportunity to ask questions. Consider hybrid meetings so that employees workimg remotely can take part too.

Briefing materials

Equip your managers with briefing materials and support that helps them put business perfromance information into context for their teams.

Regular discussion forums

You could run regular discussion forums with staff that focus on particular topics or issues of interest to your staff. These can be more infromal sessions that enable you get to know your staff beyond just a professional level.

Employee recognition events

You should reward and recognise the efforts of your staff. You could consider hosting one or two events a year to show your appreciation of employees that have gone the extra mile to deliver goals or targets or help colleagues in your business.

Encouraging feedback, opinions, and ideas from your employees can help you to make improvements to your business and discover growth opportunities.

How to encourage staff feedback

There are a number of methods you can use to encourage staff to give their feedback including:

Online feedback form

Provide an online platform perhaps on your company intranet where employees can conveniently post feedback or ideas. To maintain awareness and encourage regular use you could promote the online feedback form in internal email communications or every so often you could request staff feedback or ideas on a specific issue or area of the business.

It is important that you make sure you assign someone to take responsibility for collecting the feedback and reporting on how the business plans to act on it. You should also outline the reasons for ideas that have not been taken forward. See evaluate staff feedback and ideas.

Staff suggestions box

You could encourage staff feedback by having a suggestions box in the workplace where staff can easily submit anonymous feedback. This is particularly useful for staff that don't readily have access to internal email or the company intranet.

Discussions that focus on specific business issues

By posing a question around a particular business theme, issue, or problem you can invite staff views, stimulate discussions, and identify solutions from the feedback. You could do this on a regular basis or as and when a specific issue has been identified and needs to be addressed.

Team briefings

By giving managers a standing agenda for team briefings you can invite questions and feedback from employees within these sessions.

Training for managers

You could provide training and guidance to help managers develop the skills needed to seek and handle feedback from staff.

Staff focus groups

You could hold regular employee focus groups that seek feedback from a cross-section of staff across your business - download guidance on running employee focus groups (DOC, 184K).

Senior management forums

You could create specific sessions during which employees can come and talk to senior managers and express their views or raise issues.

Regular staff surveys

You should conduct regular surveys with your employees, using a core set of questions each time so that you can track responses, measure success, identify trends, and compare data.

Rewarding ideas

Create a spot prize that gives managers the freedom to recognise a particularly innovative idea or suggestion for business improvement.

Recognise staff contribution

By celebrating all productive ideas that employees have suggested, however small, you show that everyone can help shape the way your business is run.

Anonymised feedback

To prevent discussions aren't dominated by the same strong personalities ensure there are enough opportunities for staff to give anonymous feedback. This gives those who may be reluctant to come forward in front of others the chance to voice more meaningful and honest feedback.

When you receive ideas from your employees try to interpret the feedback fairly and objectively. Some feedback is likely to be critical so you should analyse it in terms of the facts presented and avoid letting your feelings or opinions cloud your thinking. By setting up an ideas evaluation process you will add transparency for staff and build their confidence to submit feedback and ideas in the future.

Establishing an ideas evaluation process

The ideas evaluation process you need will depend on the size of your business and the amount of feedback you receive from staff. If volumes of feedback are relatively small you might be able to manage the evaluation process personally.

If you have a larger business, you may need a scheme administrator, who will manage the ideas evaluation process - including communications - and an evaluation team made up of representatives from across your business.

Evaluation criteria for staff feedback

Some evaluation criteria you could use to help you assess employee ideas include:

• cost reduction
• generating business income
• increasing market share
• improving customer service or relations
• improving the working environment or work/life balance
• enhancing the reputation of the business
• improving decision-making or reducing risk
• improving the efficiency of working practices/processes

It's important that you define what these broad criteria mean to your specific business and that you brief your evaluation team accordingly.

If you ask for ideas on a particular area, then you may need more specific evaluation criteria.

It's also important to make sure employees understand that suggestions for small changes are as welcome as big ideas. Sometimes small changes can have a major impact on the way the business operates.

Sorting feedback into actions

When you have received employee feedback you may have quite a bit of sorting to do to identify key themes. Group those suggestions that relate to each other together and place them in categories or subcategories if required. You can then mark whether each idea requires action or not. If an idea is marked as no action, you should outline the reasons for this so you can explain it to staff.

Once you have identified your individual actions you can develop an action plan that will help you plan and implement the ideas for improvement.

Acknowledge staff feedback

Communicate your evaluation of ideas and show the difference the ideas have made to your business.

If you implement any ideas on the back of staff feedback, make sure that you recognise and reward employees whose suggestion it was. This will help generate a positive business culture of engagement and encourage other staff to provide valuable feedback and ideas.

Every business has a range of online channels it uses to communicate with employees. These could be email, an intranet system, blogs, or social networking sites which can all help employees share views, knowledge, and ideas.

What technology is right for your business?

When deciding which technologies are right for your business to facilitate staff feedback, you could consider:

Asking staff

Ask your staff what would them easily communicate with management and colleagues.

Developing clear policies and guidelines

Create and communicate clear guidelines and policy on the use of technology including the accessing of social networking sites and use of language and addressing any misuse of them. See develop a social media policy.

Using collaborative systems

Use internal systems, external tools, collaboration sites or a combination of these mechanisms depending on your aims, technical capabilities and budget.

Involving management

Demonstrate your own support by participating in discussions too and encouraging colleagues to do the same.

Establishing early adopters

Identify and support early adopters who can start encouraging involvement across the rest of your business.

Recognising and rewarding staff

Celebrate ideas, feedback and improvements that come from collaboration through tools and online channels.

Many businesses use employee forums to generate ideas for identifying efficiencies and improving business operations and performance as a whole.

How to establish an employee forum

Different approaches to staff forums work for different businesses. There are a couple of ways to establish an effective employee forum in your business.

Employee board

Establish an employee board with rotating membership where ideas can be generated and debated.

Employee taskforce

Set up an employee taskforce to look at potential solutions for a key business challenge or to streamline operations or processes.

Make sure any initiatives seeking views or ideas from customers are mirrored within your business to give employees the chance to submit their ideas.

If you create a staff forum try to remember the following key points.

Define the role and remit of the staff forum

Have a clear remit for the employee forum with terms of reference that are clearly understood across the business as a whole.

An effective way of creating terms of reference is to involve the forum members at the stage of defining them.

Create clear responsibilities within the staff forum

Set out and ensure there is agreement of key responsibilities for the employees in the forum when establishing it, for example:

• proactively seek views and feedback from employees in their area of the business
• identify where progress has been achieved and communicate this
• run employee focus groups to seek views and opinions
• present and report to managers on relevant feedback from their area of the business
• communicate with people in their area of the business about ideas or issues

Creating clear responsibilities shows you are keen to work with the staff forum and that the employees involved have important roles to fulfil.

Invite participants to the staff forum

Although the types of employee forum discussed here are informal bodies, try to have an open and transparent approach to recruiting members of staff. This will be important to the credibility and trust in the staff forum.

You may want to consider an evaluation or election process for the forum eg members of the staff forum could nominate a chairperson on a rotational basis for a certain period of time.

Communicate outputs from the staff forum

It is important to the credibility of the staff forum that you communicate outputs to the rest of the workforce and emphasise the difference it has made to the running of the business. You could outline how a business issue or problem was identified and how the staff forum has worked to provide a suitable solution.

The involvement of trade unions and union and non-union employee representatives can provide a collective voice for all or part of your workforce.

Information and consultation requirements apply to all organisations with at least 50 employees. For more information see how to inform and consult your employees.

Trust, cooperation, and information sharing are essential to the employee voice and the collective voice within your organisation. Your approach to employee and collective voice should support and complement each other.

A genuinely engaged workplace will be a foundation for the more formal process of involvement and consultation.

How to align your collective voice and employee voice

To align your collective voice with employee voice, you could:

Involve union and non-union representatives at an early stage

Invite union and non-union representatives to presentations on business progress and performance before briefings are given more widely to your employees. See work effectively with trade unions and working with non-union representatives.

Include representatives in key discussions

Invite representatives to become involved in meaningful discussions on a broader range of business topics beyond those formally agreed.

Use representative platforms

Ask representatives to canvass their members on ideas for improving your business or responding to a particular challenge. Staff may be more willing to voice their ideas and give more meaningful and honest feedback when using representative platforms.

Work with representatives to implement actions

Invite representatives to presentations on the results from employee surveys and ask them to work with you on plans to address any issues.

Encouraging your staff to voice their ideas and contribute to finding better ways of doing things can have a positive impact on your business performance.

Business advantages of staff feedback and ideas

The business benefits of encouraging regular staff feedback, opinions, and ideas are:

Better connectivity and awareness

You will be more aware and in touch with what is going on at every level of your business. You'll also be in a better position to gauge staff how staff feel at any given moment on what is and what isn't working within your business. You will also be better informed when making key decisions.

Creates an open and honest culture

By encouraging two-way communication with your staff you grow the trust within your business and sow the seeds for an open and honest culture to freely express opinions and ideas. This helps you to address challenges at an early stage, identify opportunities, and promote collaborative working.

Increases productivity

Encouraging staff to voice their opinions and ideas will increase employee engagement, motivation, and productivity. Staff will feel invested in your business and more determined to ensure its success.

Identifies business solutions

Seeking ideas for improvement from a wider section of your organisation can lead to finding solutions to business problems that may otherwise never have been identified.

Promotes collaborative working

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest working environment allows employees to express their concerns and ideas. This creates a workplace culture of collaboration and togetherness enabling teams to work together more effectively and efficiently.

Drives innovation

By encouraging feedback from staff from various backgrounds, working in different areas of your company you are more likely to get a diverse range of ideas that contribute to innovative solutions putting you in a better position to take advantage of business opportunities.

More valued and motivated staff

If staff feel that their opinions matter and their contribution to the business is essential then they will feel valued and motivated to do their very best for the organisation. Seeking staff feedback and ideas also helps to enhance employee recognition. This gives staff pride in their work and motivates them to be more productive.

Helps attract and retain staff

If staff feel valued that their contribution matters it encourages them to stay with the organisation helping to reduce staff turnover and the costs associated with replacing staff that resign. By developing a rich workplace culture where employees are valued and can contribute to key business decisions you will be able to attract the talent that your business needs to grow and thrive.

Supports career development

Employee feedback can help to identify opportunities for career progression and improvement. By regularly asking staff about job satisfaction and career goals employers can better understand the current needs of their employees and then provide the necessary support and guidance to help them progress in their careers.

Improves agility

Regular two-way communication in an open and honest culture develops staff that have the skills and resilience to adapt to change. This makes your business more agile and flexible to make the necessary adjustments to take advantage of opportunities to grow.

Reduces workplace conflict

Developing a culture where open and honest communication between all levels of staff gives employees the tools to address issues before they escalate. When staff don't feel valued or that they can't voice their opinions or ideas then resentment and workplace conflict can easily develop.

In order to encourage your staff to share opinions, ideas and feedback, your employees must be informed about your business, and have a clear understanding of what it does and what it wants to achieve.

You will only gain meaningful input and ideas from your staff if you effectively communicate key information on how to improve your business. This will help establish an open and honest workplace culture. How you do this will depend on your business.

How to effectively communicate with your staff

To keep your employees informed of what is going on in your business you could consider:

Regular performance updates

Providing regular perfromance updates through the channels you have available eg email, intranet, noticeboards, posters and digital screens around the workplace.

Regular face-to-face business updates

You could host regular meetings where you can share information and give employees the opportunity to ask questions. Consider hybrid meetings so that employees workimg remotely can take part too.

Briefing materials

Equip your managers with briefing materials and support that helps them put business perfromance information into context for their teams.

Regular discussion forums

You could run regular discussion forums with staff that focus on particular topics or issues of interest to your staff. These can be more infromal sessions that enable you get to know your staff beyond just a professional level.

Employee recognition events

You should reward and recognise the efforts of your staff. You could consider hosting one or two events a year to show your appreciation of employees that have gone the extra mile to deliver goals or targets or help colleagues in your business.

Encouraging feedback, opinions, and ideas from your employees can help you to make improvements to your business and discover growth opportunities.

How to encourage staff feedback

There are a number of methods you can use to encourage staff to give their feedback including:

Online feedback form

Provide an online platform perhaps on your company intranet where employees can conveniently post feedback or ideas. To maintain awareness and encourage regular use you could promote the online feedback form in internal email communications or every so often you could request staff feedback or ideas on a specific issue or area of the business.

It is important that you make sure you assign someone to take responsibility for collecting the feedback and reporting on how the business plans to act on it. You should also outline the reasons for ideas that have not been taken forward. See evaluate staff feedback and ideas.

Staff suggestions box

You could encourage staff feedback by having a suggestions box in the workplace where staff can easily submit anonymous feedback. This is particularly useful for staff that don't readily have access to internal email or the company intranet.

Discussions that focus on specific business issues

By posing a question around a particular business theme, issue, or problem you can invite staff views, stimulate discussions, and identify solutions from the feedback. You could do this on a regular basis or as and when a specific issue has been identified and needs to be addressed.

Team briefings

By giving managers a standing agenda for team briefings you can invite questions and feedback from employees within these sessions.

Training for managers

You could provide training and guidance to help managers develop the skills needed to seek and handle feedback from staff.

Staff focus groups

You could hold regular employee focus groups that seek feedback from a cross-section of staff across your business - download guidance on running employee focus groups (DOC, 184K).

Senior management forums

You could create specific sessions during which employees can come and talk to senior managers and express their views or raise issues.

Regular staff surveys

You should conduct regular surveys with your employees, using a core set of questions each time so that you can track responses, measure success, identify trends, and compare data.

Rewarding ideas

Create a spot prize that gives managers the freedom to recognise a particularly innovative idea or suggestion for business improvement.

Recognise staff contribution

By celebrating all productive ideas that employees have suggested, however small, you show that everyone can help shape the way your business is run.

Anonymised feedback

To prevent discussions aren't dominated by the same strong personalities ensure there are enough opportunities for staff to give anonymous feedback. This gives those who may be reluctant to come forward in front of others the chance to voice more meaningful and honest feedback.

When you receive ideas from your employees try to interpret the feedback fairly and objectively. Some feedback is likely to be critical so you should analyse it in terms of the facts presented and avoid letting your feelings or opinions cloud your thinking. By setting up an ideas evaluation process you will add transparency for staff and build their confidence to submit feedback and ideas in the future.

Establishing an ideas evaluation process

The ideas evaluation process you need will depend on the size of your business and the amount of feedback you receive from staff. If volumes of feedback are relatively small you might be able to manage the evaluation process personally.

If you have a larger business, you may need a scheme administrator, who will manage the ideas evaluation process - including communications - and an evaluation team made up of representatives from across your business.

Evaluation criteria for staff feedback

Some evaluation criteria you could use to help you assess employee ideas include:

• cost reduction
• generating business income
• increasing market share
• improving customer service or relations
• improving the working environment or work/life balance
• enhancing the reputation of the business
• improving decision-making or reducing risk
• improving the efficiency of working practices/processes

It's important that you define what these broad criteria mean to your specific business and that you brief your evaluation team accordingly.

If you ask for ideas on a particular area, then you may need more specific evaluation criteria.

It's also important to make sure employees understand that suggestions for small changes are as welcome as big ideas. Sometimes small changes can have a major impact on the way the business operates.

Sorting feedback into actions

When you have received employee feedback you may have quite a bit of sorting to do to identify key themes. Group those suggestions that relate to each other together and place them in categories or subcategories if required. You can then mark whether each idea requires action or not. If an idea is marked as no action, you should outline the reasons for this so you can explain it to staff.

Once you have identified your individual actions you can develop an action plan that will help you plan and implement the ideas for improvement.

Acknowledge staff feedback

Communicate your evaluation of ideas and show the difference the ideas have made to your business.

If you implement any ideas on the back of staff feedback, make sure that you recognise and reward employees whose suggestion it was. This will help generate a positive business culture of engagement and encourage other staff to provide valuable feedback and ideas.

Every business has a range of online channels it uses to communicate with employees. These could be email, an intranet system, blogs, or social networking sites which can all help employees share views, knowledge, and ideas.

What technology is right for your business?

When deciding which technologies are right for your business to facilitate staff feedback, you could consider:

Asking staff

Ask your staff what would them easily communicate with management and colleagues.

Developing clear policies and guidelines

Create and communicate clear guidelines and policy on the use of technology including the accessing of social networking sites and use of language and addressing any misuse of them. See develop a social media policy.

Using collaborative systems

Use internal systems, external tools, collaboration sites or a combination of these mechanisms depending on your aims, technical capabilities and budget.

Involving management

Demonstrate your own support by participating in discussions too and encouraging colleagues to do the same.

Establishing early adopters

Identify and support early adopters who can start encouraging involvement across the rest of your business.

Recognising and rewarding staff

Celebrate ideas, feedback and improvements that come from collaboration through tools and online channels.

Many businesses use employee forums to generate ideas for identifying efficiencies and improving business operations and performance as a whole.

How to establish an employee forum

Different approaches to staff forums work for different businesses. There are a couple of ways to establish an effective employee forum in your business.

Employee board

Establish an employee board with rotating membership where ideas can be generated and debated.

Employee taskforce

Set up an employee taskforce to look at potential solutions for a key business challenge or to streamline operations or processes.

Make sure any initiatives seeking views or ideas from customers are mirrored within your business to give employees the chance to submit their ideas.

If you create a staff forum try to remember the following key points.

Define the role and remit of the staff forum

Have a clear remit for the employee forum with terms of reference that are clearly understood across the business as a whole.

An effective way of creating terms of reference is to involve the forum members at the stage of defining them.

Create clear responsibilities within the staff forum

Set out and ensure there is agreement of key responsibilities for the employees in the forum when establishing it, for example:

• proactively seek views and feedback from employees in their area of the business
• identify where progress has been achieved and communicate this
• run employee focus groups to seek views and opinions
• present and report to managers on relevant feedback from their area of the business
• communicate with people in their area of the business about ideas or issues

Creating clear responsibilities shows you are keen to work with the staff forum and that the employees involved have important roles to fulfil.

Invite participants to the staff forum

Although the types of employee forum discussed here are informal bodies, try to have an open and transparent approach to recruiting members of staff. This will be important to the credibility and trust in the staff forum.

You may want to consider an evaluation or election process for the forum eg members of the staff forum could nominate a chairperson on a rotational basis for a certain period of time.

Communicate outputs from the staff forum

It is important to the credibility of the staff forum that you communicate outputs to the rest of the workforce and emphasise the difference it has made to the running of the business. You could outline how a business issue or problem was identified and how the staff forum has worked to provide a suitable solution.

The involvement of trade unions and union and non-union employee representatives can provide a collective voice for all or part of your workforce.

Information and consultation requirements apply to all organisations with at least 50 employees. For more information see how to inform and consult your employees.

Trust, cooperation, and information sharing are essential to the employee voice and the collective voice within your organisation. Your approach to employee and collective voice should support and complement each other.

A genuinely engaged workplace will be a foundation for the more formal process of involvement and consultation.

How to align your collective voice and employee voice

To align your collective voice with employee voice, you could:

Involve union and non-union representatives at an early stage

Invite union and non-union representatives to presentations on business progress and performance before briefings are given more widely to your employees. See work effectively with trade unions and working with non-union representatives.

Include representatives in key discussions

Invite representatives to become involved in meaningful discussions on a broader range of business topics beyond those formally agreed.

Use representative platforms

Ask representatives to canvass their members on ideas for improving your business or responding to a particular challenge. Staff may be more willing to voice their ideas and give more meaningful and honest feedback when using representative platforms.

Work with representatives to implement actions

Invite representatives to presentations on the results from employee surveys and ask them to work with you on plans to address any issues.