How to Use a Feedback Program to Navigate Change in the Warehouse Environment

Very few people actually like change. We become accustomed to our routines and practices, and when something disrupts the norm, it can feel like it’s throwing off everything. 

When your business is making an organizational change, whether it’s big or small, effective two-way communication is essential. Your strategy during a time of change needs to include both sharing facts about the change with your employees and listening to your employees through the feedback they offer.

A meaningful feedback program can help you accomplish both — and navigate change in the least disruptive manner possible.

A Tool for Communicating Change

Whether your company is enacting a rule change enforced by OSHA or going through internal changes to processes, the change itself has a chance to be disruptive. When presented with change of any sort, warehouse workers, like anyone else, want the facts.

To make a change workable in the brain, we have an innate need to understand what’s changing, why it’s changing, how it’s changing, and perhaps most importantly, what it means for us. The bottom line is that employees need clear, transparent, and honest guidance about what’s happening and how it affects them.

Any plans you create for the implementation of a change need to include a strategy for disseminating that information. You’ll certainly want to communicate through in-person meetings, as well as written communication. 

But when you’re working with an employee feedback platform like WorkHound, you can also supplement those communication tools with additional messaging options like weekly broadcasts. Your WorkHound team can help you parse the details you need to share with your warehouse employees and put together effective messaging to send out in these broadcasts to your entire workforce.

You have an added benefit, too — as you listen to your employees and what they’re saying about the change being implemented (which is the next part of this article), you can adjust your messaging moving forward to ensure it clarifies and provides the details being requested.

A Tool for Identifying What Employees Need

It’s all well and good for you to communicate the details of a new process, the fact that a new manager is taking over, or that there’s a new governmental regulation to follow. But once you’ve communicated that information, the success of implementing that change will depend on your employees.

We regularly preach the importance of truly listening to what your employees have to say and making your business decisions based on that information. There’s nothing worse from a business perspective than taking action based solely on an assumption of what’s needed. Assumptions cost time and money.

That’s where step two of the process comes into play: You have to ask your employees what they need and want. 

What details do they wish they had? What problems are they encountering or do they foresee? How do they feel about the change and why it’s being implemented? What can the company do better?

Getting your warehouse employees to a point where they’re willing to come forward with this information is a process. You need to introduce the feedback program from the first days of employment and emphasize how important it is. 

Share with your employees how feedback is used to guide your leadership decisions and actions — and include examples. When employees begin providing feedback, make sure they know you’re listening. Respond to employees with one-time messages related to employee-specific concerns, and share bigger-picture action items with the entire company via broadcasts. Communicating why their feedback is important helps to cultivate a meaningful feedback loop, where employees are willing to share.

Once you’ve built that loop, you’ll hear from them on issues like changes being implemented, both good and bad. Beyond establishing the company’s general desire to hear from your employees, you can also encourage feedback specific to changes and employee needs with notes in your weekly broadcasts, in meetings, and even on signage around your warehouse and in break rooms. 

Hearing from your employees and actually listening to what they have to say can help inform your business strategy as you move forward. Because any successful plan requires the ability to adapt and evolve, getting the details from the employees themselves will provide you with what you need to enact change more effectively. 

Looking for a feedback program to help enhance your company’s internal communication strategy? Book a demo to learn how WorkHound can help!