5 ways to boost your Teamgage submission rate

Congratulations! You’ve decided to engage your employees and you’re giving them the opportunity to have their say. Hopefully you’re using Teamgage, but even if you’re not, here’s some advice to improve your employee submission rates:

Tip 1: Get your CEO and Senior Leadership team involved

We believe that any effort to engage your employees should have active involvement from the CEO and Senior Leadership team. This helps shape the type of questions asked and aligns them with the overall strategy.

At Teamgage we've had many clients successfully use their CEO to introduce employees to our product through a welcome email or letter, and to outline:

• why the employee feedback is so important
• what it will be used for
• how it aligns with the goals and strategy of the organisation

Not only does this help make the employee aware of the opportunity to provide feedback, it also ensures they know the importance of why they should actually do it!

Tip 2: Create a mini marketing strategy aimed at your employees

The very best submission rates for Teamgage invariably come from our clients that really market our product internally and make use of their communication channels. Their places of work have explanation posters with a message from the CEO, they send lots of timely reminder emails asking for feedback and generally try to get their employees excited about the opportunity they're being given.

If ever you have the chance to sell the benefits of your feedback project in person, take it! This could be within their regular team meetings, during a site visit or even a company-wide gathering. For example, here's our team on stage at our client's annual employee conference, explaining to everyone what Teamgage is and why they were being asked for regular feedback.

Tip 3: Eliminate the black hole

Regardless of the feedback project being an ongoing one like Teamgage, or a one-off piece like an annual survey, it’s so important to show employees that their voice has been heard.

Use whatever communication channels you have to say thanks and tell your employees what is happening with the feedback e.g. Thanks for your feedback. Since our launch in X we've understood that Y is important to you, which is why we're so excited to announce that we are now doing Z. Even if you're not ready to action any of the feedback right now, it's still better to say thanks and to tell employees this, rather than say nothing at all.

As Teamgage provides ongoing real-time team reports, we also encourage Managers to meet with their teams to discuss the latest results together. This again allows employees to see their feedback is being heard and provides an opportunity to expand on their ideas and comments further.

This could also be a great time to leverage the input gained at the start from your CEO, to create an update message from them on how things have gone.

Tip 4: Learn from and reward those with the best submission rates

Rewarding those teams who are most active or achieve the greatest improvements can really help with submission rates. Simple rewards like a team lunch or even just acknowledgement of great work in company-wide communications can be a great motivator. It can also can create the FOMO factor in other teams if they feel that their voice isn't being heard as strongly as others.

As Teamgage allows all teams and divisions to be benchmarked, many of our clients follow up with those teams that have the highest submission rates to understand why and to spread best practice.

Tip 5: Make sure your employee submission rate includes everybody!

The submission rate for your employee engagement project might be as high as 100%, but does that include ALL of your employees? Quite often it’s really hard to gain feedback from those employees that are remote from your head office, or that don’t have corporate devices or even an email address!

However, their feedback is invaluable so please go the extra mile to make sure they are engaged too. In fact, some of the most important and innovative ideas generated by employees using Teamgage have come from employees like construction workers, nurses and aged care staff, who have had a great idea and then used our feedback kiosk and submission card options to submit. Even if that option isn't available to you, It could also be as simple as a Senior Leader letting employees know their feedback and ideas are welcome.

For more information on increasing your employee submission rates, get in touch.

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