Getting Ready to Use the Conversations Feature

Conversations feature (replying to comments) allows you to build stronger connections between your organization and your people. However, it often comes as a surprise to employees because traditional surveys have been a one-way feedback channel. Here we will discuss how you can prepare for and optimize the use of Conversations for your organization.

This article covers:

• Top 5 Reasons to use the Conversations feature (the Why)
•  Check: Are you ready to use Conversations in your organization?
•  5 Best Practices to prepare launching Conversations in your organization

Data informs us that when leaders and managers connect and communicate with their employees, acting with thoughtfulness and care, it improves both employee engagement and confidence in leadership and the organization.

An easy way for leaders to demonstrate that they care about their employees is to acknowledge employee feedback and respond to their survey/pulse comments directly in the platform via the Conversations feature. To learn more about how this feature works, check out this guide on Two-Way Dialogue with Conversations.

Top 5 Reasons to use the Conversations feature

1. Seek clarity or additional information. Sometimes comments can bevague and additional clarification would make them more actionable. Use Conversations to dig deeper and ask questions to get at the core issue.
2. Provide clarity and direction. Especially during times of change, employees will look to leaders to provide reassurance, stability, clarity and direction. Conversations is a useful tool to quickly respond to important concerns and inform people of more formal actions and policies that may be in progress.
3. Address issues of safety, misconduct or harassment. If an employee raises issues of misconduct, safety concerns or harassment, you can quickly connect them to a hotline or other support resources (ie. employee assistance programs) depending on what is appropriate for the situation.
4. Connect people with resources and available tools. As companies grow in size and complexity, it will become harder for employees to be aware of all the resources, tools and information available to them beyond their immediate teams. For example, employees might not be aware of programs that you already have in place or that you’re already working on a solution (that potentially they can help you develop).
5. Acknowledge important feedback. Simply letting the person know they’ve been heard and thanking them for sharing a great idea or crucial feedback can be extremely powerful.

Check: Is your organization ready to use Conversations?

We highly recommend that the Conversations feature is used by companies with more mature feedback practices and action-taking processes. Here are a few questions to ask your leadership team:

Feedback Maturity:

• Are leaders and managers prepared to receive feedback?
• Are leaders and managers willing to connect and communicate more visibly with their employees?
• Have you planned out how Conversations will fit into your action-taking process?

Survey and Action-Taking Maturity:

• Is action-taking decentralized or centralized? This will help determine who has access, and the information needed to respond.
• Have you communicated to (or better yet, shown) your people how Conversations work - reassuring them of their anonymity even when their comments are responded to?
• Would you consider your current action-taking process to be effective? If leaders already struggle with understanding and acting on their results, this feature could create an additional layer of complexity and slow down the process even more.

5 Best Practices to Prepare your Organization for Conversations

So, you’ve decided to use Conversations, but you’ve never done this before. Here are a few steps to encourage good feedback practices and behaviours:

1. In pre-launch survey communications, inform people that specific leaders will be replying to comments. Communicate why you’re doing this. You can use this FAQ for employees to help them understand how it works. When talking about employee anonymity, mention how Conversations maintains employee anonymity. See how you can communicate this via a video. 
2. Train leaders and managers to respond constructively to comments. Share best practices (click here to take a look at the DOs and DON'Ts) on how to respond to comments, especially comments related to a negative score rating.
3. Align leaders to a criterion on deciding which comments to prioritize responding.
4. In your survey results sessions for employees and in follow-up communications explain the rationale for selecting particular comments to respond to and remind them that not every single one will receive a response.
5. Map out where Conversations fit into your action-taking process. The goal here is to make sure that the end goal is to take action while using Conversations as one of the tools to help you facilitate this process.