Adjusting to the Feedback Culture: The User’s Guide You Need
Your trucking carrier has decided to take the leap in 2022, moving from soliciting feedback in biannual surveys to operating a continuous program to improve your company’s feedback culture. But now what?
Congratulations! You’ve taken step 1. Understanding that your drivers need a consistent mechanism for providing their insights and concerns is a key part of changing your overall culture as a business.
But it’s also natural to wonder how to get it done. The good news is, following some basic steps will help you get on solid footing when it comes to building and maintaining a feedback culture.
To help answer your questions and get you on the path to success, we polled the team here at WorkHound to gather our best suggestions.
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4 Tips for Building a Winning Feedback Culture
With any type of change, whether it’s in business or life in general, there’s some level of friction involved. After all, we get comfortable with the status quo, so making changes can be challenging.
Establishing a feedback program is no exception. You’re revolutionizing the way that your drivers will communicate feedback and then utilizing their insights to inform your strategy. While that’s definitely a positive, it’s still important to prepare your team as the culture changes.
Start here:
1. Focus on Quick Wins
Obviously, you want your company’s feedback program to be a success in the long run. You want to gather insights into your drivers’ wants and needs that will help your company both hire and retain drivers in the future. That’s the big picture.
But as you’re getting started, it’s important to also focus on smaller things.
“The first thing that we talk about with new customers is earning trust and that can happen through quick wins,” says Melissa Harrison, Account Manager at WorkHound. “This is about looking for the first efforts that drivers give in sharing their feedback and looking for ways to positively reinforce their feedback right away. That demonstrates to drivers that you are taking their feedback seriously and intend to act on it, and ultimately result in more feedback.”
2. Remember That Consistency Is Key
This one may sound trite, but it’s absolutely true. In order to go from simply establishing a feedback program to actually investing in a feedback culture, you have to make a habit out of checking in and acting on feedback. For the customers who see the most success, this is about making a daily routine out of checking the WorkHound dashboard.
“Consistency is key,” Harrison says. “Every WorkHound customer has a dedicated customer success manager responsible for ensuring that the company sees results. Customers who see the most success are dedicating time to weekly meetings with our team and investing their efforts in driving change on behalf of workers.”
3. Get Buy-in Across the Board
If your C-suite wasn’t directly involved in the decision to move forward with a feedback program, it’s important to bring them into the fold quickly. Having the buy-in of executive leadership is essential for being able to turn feedback into meaningful action on a large scale.
“Our team does a great job educating companies, including making sure you have buy-in from the top down,” Harrison says. “Having their commitment will empower everyone who reviews feedback to make the changes necessary to truly have an impact. This helps build confidence in your workers that their feedback is being taken seriously.”
Don’t stop with buy-in from the executive level, though. The companies that have the most success with feedback programs are those that truly “dive in” to building a feedback culture at every level of the business. An all-hands-on-deck approach, you might say.
“Get as many people involved in the feedback as possible,” Harrison says. “The companies that don’t do well are those that require one or two people to read and handle the feedback in a silo. Our customers who’ve experienced the most success have developed a cross-functional team of folks who can help oversee that feedback is acted on in their individual departments.”
4. View Feedback as a Gift
It’s true: Not every piece of feedback will be positive. But it’s also true that every piece of feedback can be a positive for your company.
“Feedback is often viewed as either a gift or as a curse,” Harrison says. “You can view feedback in either way, but if you’re only expecting that it will be bad, you will miss out on real and meaningful opportunities to repair relationships with drivers. Viewing all feedback, good or bad, as a gift is a way to make an impact not only for your company but on the industry as a whole.”
When you partner with WorkHound to create a feedback program for your drivers, you gain a full team of people invested in making your program a success. Want to learn about a trucking company that is mastering its feedback program? Learn all about the companies who are experiencing WorkHound retention success here.