A short YouTube interview clip ("TRUST Your Employee's Opinion #shorts") where Mike Andes argues that formalized feedback processes can disengage frontline employees. He recommends listening to frontline staff and customers, treating their negative reactions as important data points, and making decisions quickly based on a few key data signals rather than prolonged formal testing or iteration.
Do you have a formalized feedback process or is it just keeping it keeping the ears open and listening?
I think sometimes a formalized process would disengage a frontline staff employee that they would only be able to say that doesn't work. That's all they understand. That does not work. That makes my job harder. And that needs to be a data point. By the time we all sit down and talk about it, we should have already made a decision based upon a few key data points. If a couple of the employees use a system and they're like this is making our life harder, this will not make our jobs faster. Why would I go try to test this across the whole system? And so I think it's more about listening. If you keep your ears open to your frontline staff and your customers, you should be able to figure this out a lot faster than trying to have that formalized process and just constantly be on that iteration of trying to fix it.
