Sean Glaze explains why suggestion boxes backfire: employees stop using them when leaders ignore feedback or fail to explain what happens next. Transparency about which ideas you can act on and why keeps people engaged.
So how are surveys and suggestion boxes hurting your team? Well, before I go to do a keynote or deliver a team-building program, I'll often share a customized survey to get information about that organization's culture. The issue is that many of the people who are asked to participate in those surveys don't respond because they've become jaded, because previous suggestions or previous surveys have not delivered any type of responses by their leaders. And so if you want to maintain engagement by your people, if you want them to share something when they see see something that needs to be improved, you as a leader need to always do two things to make sure that they help you instead of hurting you. The first is share appreciation and acknowledgement for the feedback. Let them know that what they have shared via suggestion or survey has been considered and looked at. The second thing is you need to make sure you're very transparent about what actions are being taken as a result of the information that they provided. Maybe you need to let them know that you can't implement anything immediately because of the amount of work that would be required required to do that thing that they're suggesting. But if it's something you can implement immediately, let them know that those changes are a result of what they shared. That's what effective leaders do.
