Employee Suggestion Box: You’re Using It WRONG! + 5 Best Tools

Building a culture of continuous improvement is probably something you hear on repeat.

Although there is no denying that companies are trying to achieve better business outcomes through employee feedback, it’s debatable whether they are using the most effective methods or not.

As a well-intentioned attempt to build a culture of continuous improvement, some companies use employee suggestion boxes.

However, we think that implementing a solid feedback process through suggestion boxes can be tricky and it requires a comprehensive approach.

To make change happen, you need an effective strategy while collecting employee suggestions. Especially if you have embraced hybrid or remote working with a workforce that is scattered across the globe.

To make a tangible difference through employee feedback, consider implementing a digital employee suggestion box.

By leveraging technology, you can collect useful ideas from your employees and track the feedback to create actionable goals.

So, without further ado, let’s start explaining how to use employee suggestion boxes correctly!

You Need A Game-Changing Feedback Solution!

Seamlessly integrate feedback into daily operations and ensure real-time engagement. Teamflect offers anonymous feedback options, customizable feedback templates, and 360-degree feedback capabilities and allows you to create tangible change through employee feedback.

To enhance employee engagement and efficiency, explore Teamflect today!

What Is An Employee Suggestion Box?

An employee suggestion box can be an incredibly useful tool depending on how you are implementing it. Suggestion boxes allow you to collect employee feedback about company practices that need improvement.

An employee suggestion box can be implemented as a physical box and placed in a location that’s easy to access like a break room. It can also be used digitally through forms that can be submitted online.

Your employees can share their feedback anonymously through these suggestion boxes. This eliminates the pressure of providing candid feedback.

Although providing feedback through a suggestion box sounds like a brilliant idea, it requires a solid strategy so you can create change.

You need to be able to track the anonymous feedback to improve your organizational practices. Otherwise, the feedback won’t be impactful and your employees may feel like sharing their opinions was a waste of time.

By tracking employee feedback, you can easily identify what needs improvement to boost morale, efficiency, and, employee engagement.

Tracking employee feedback will also allow you to consider all opinions and this can contribute to building a more inclusive workplace.

An employee suggestion box can be incredibly powerful when implemented the right way. It can create a positive work environment where your employees feel appreciated.

What Are The Types Of Suggestion Boxes?

As we said previously, there are two types of suggestion boxes. Let’s explore them in more detail!

Digital Employee Suggestion Boxes

Digital employee suggestion boxes allow for seamless feedback collection. Here are the key benefits of using a digital suggestion box:

1. Accessible and Convenient: Digital employee suggestion boxes allow your employees to submit their feedback from any location as long as they have an internet connection. Employees who work remotely or in a hybrid setting will benefit from this convenience.

Moreover, anonymous feedback can be submitted through smart devices. The accessible and convenient nature of digital employee suggestion boxes makes them better alternatives than physical ones.

2. Real-time Feedback: Digital suggestion boxes allow you to provide real-time feedback to your employees and recognize their ideas right away.

In contrast with physical employee suggestion boxes, the digital ones will create a sense of responsiveness in your company and improve transparency.

3. Provides Richer Context: Digital platforms allow users to send multimedia files like images, documents, and videos to exemplify and support their ideas.

4. Facilitates Data Analysis: Digital tools can help you track and analyze the trends, and themes regarding employee feedback as well as monitor how successful the implemented suggestions have been.

The data analysis will help you make more informed decisions and achieve better results when it comes to improving employee engagement, morale, and efficiency.

Physical Suggestion Boxes

You can place the physical employee suggestion boxes in areas where everyone has access such as breakrooms and lobbies. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using physical suggestion boxes:

1. Minimal Technological Barriers: Using physical suggestion boxes can be more convenient for employees who are less proficient in technology since employees can simply write down their ideas on a piece of paper and drop them into the suggestion box.

2. Traditional And More Familiar: It’s the traditional and old approach to collecting employee feedback. For organizations with a more traditional culture, physical suggestion boxes can be more appropriate since they might align better with their cultural norms.

3. Absence of Analytics Tools: Physical employee suggestion boxes lack built-in analytics tools. As we expressed earlier, the lack of seamless data analysis can lead to suboptimal results when it comes to improving company-wide practices.

How To Use The Suggestion Box Effectively

To maximize the impact of your employee suggestion box, you can consider applying these essential tips:

1. Be Open To Suggestions

To create a workplace that is genuinely open to improvement, you need to encourage a judgment-free atmosphere.

Be explicit when it comes to your openness to receiving employee feedback and make it clear that all ideas and suggestions are welcome, including the unconventional ones.

2. Provide Guidance And Be Transparent

To ensure that your employees clearly understand how to use the suggestion box, you need to guide them regarding the submission process, provide information about anonymity, and confidentiality as well as when to expect responses to their suggestions.

Make sure to talk about how anonymous and confidential their suggestions will be. This is one of the most important tips when it comes to implementing an employee suggestion box process.

If you don’t share this information transparently and honestly, your employees will lose interest in the idea of providing feedback to improve company practices.

3. Request Elaborate Suggestions

You are doing your part in implementing a well-designed employee suggestion box procedure but your employees also need to take the feedback-sharing process seriously to create tangible results.

To encourage well-thought-out suggestions, you can ask your employees to clearly define the problem.

You can also let them know that you expect to hear about the potential solutions to these problems and the challenges that may slow down the process of implementing change.

4. Reward The Best Suggestions

To reinforce elaborate submissions, you can recognize and reward your employees who come up with great ideas. You need to clearly express how you will evaluate the submissions.

This will allow your employees to understand you are using fair and structured criteria to pick exceptional ideas and encourage them to put more thought into their suggestions.

5. Make Sure It’s Easy-to-use

To increase participation make sure your anonymous suggestion box tool is user-friendly. Pick a digital platform that is easy to use and intuitive. The submission process should be straightforward and include minimal steps to complete.

You can test the digital tool with a diverse group of employees including the ones who are not proficient in technology.

The digital employee suggestion box platform of your choice should also be accessible on smart devices because this improves the convenience of the suggestion process and encourages employees to make suggestions.

An Alternative To Employee Suggestion Boxes: Pulse Surveys

Employee suggestion boxes are useful but they require more time to collect and analyze employee feedback.

Pulse surveys are great tools that provide instant employee feedback about specific processes and for this reason, you can also consider implementing pulse surveys into your feedback-sharing routine.

If you opt for pulse surveys to gather employee feedback, you need to consider Teamflect which is a survey software for Microsoft Teams.

Teamflect not only offers the best performance management experience inside Microsoft software but also allows you to check the employee pulse through its pulse survey capabilities.

We highlighted the importance of data analytics when it comes to building a culture of continuous improvement through employee suggestion boxes. The same logic applies to pulse surveys as another employee feedback tool.

The data analytics will help you in decision-making and creating a strategy that actually works. Thankfully, Teamflect offers extensive Power BI reports that assist organizations in achieving their desired business outcomes.

Here are the key features of Teamflect that will simplify your feedback-sharing and performance management:

• The best pulse survey tool for Microsoft Teams
•  Easy to navigate dashboard
•  360-degree feedback
•  Task management
•  OKR management
•  Customizable feedback templates
•  Customizable performance review template gallery

Best Digital Suggestion Box Tools

Digital employee suggestion boxes will provide you with the advantages listed below:

• They are easy to use.
•  You can access the data from anywhere.
•  They allow you to analyze the data.
•  Environmentally friendly.

Here are our picks that can make a real difference in terms of streamlining your employee feedback process:

1. Teamflect

The point of implementing a digital employee suggestion box tool is to make sure that you are continuously evolving as a company.

So, you’ll need a comprehensive feedback tool with a feedback module that both supports anonymous employee feedback and 360-degree feedback.

As a robust feedback software, Teamflect covers a variety of ways of collecting employee feedback. It not only allows you to gather feedback as an employee suggestion box tool, but also covers other areas of feedback-sharing with its customizable feedback templates, pulse surveys, and engagement surveys.

Here’s why Teamflect distinguishes itself as a great tool that promotes a strong feedback culture in organizations:

• Anonymous feedback-sharing: Teamflect understands the importance of anonymity in feedback-sharing. Therefore, we offer feedback modules that allow you to adjust the visibility of feedback results.
•  Integrates feedback into daily workflows: Teamflect integrates your feedback-sharing into your daily workflow which means that your employees can send feedback in real-time without leaving Microsoft Teams. This convenience while sharing feedback will improve participation.
•  Offers an extensive feedback template library: Teamflect facilitates feedback-sharing with its customizable feedback templates.
•  360-Degree Feedback Capability: Teamflect’s 360-degree feedback capabilities allow you to share your insights to improve company procedures and practices by incorporating multiple perspectives into the process.
•  Rich and Flexible Reporting: Teamflect provides rich and flexible reports for all its feedback modules. These reports offer insights into feedback exchanges, identify areas for improvement, and enable organizations to take swift and informed actions.

Teamflect’s comprehensive features make it an incredible tool for organizations looking to use the power of feedback to create growth and improvement.

Pricing:

• The free version is available for up to 10 users
• Teamflect Pro: $6.50

G2 rating: 4.8

2. Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback offers feedback exchange capabilities that can help you build a culture of continuous improvement. It provides you with a wide array of survey options and streamlines the feedback process by prioritizing anonymity.

• Prioritize respondent anonymity and allows you to collect candid feedback.
• You can access its surveys in multiple languages which accomodate diverse preferences.
• It allows you to use 100 customizable templates tailored for a variety of industries.
• Zonka Feedback enables customization and creation of anonymous feedback surveys that are aligned with your brand’s values which can improve engagement and lead to tailored feedback-sharing.

Pricing:

• Starts at $49/month.
• Free version and free plan are available.

G2 Rating: 4.7/5

3. Typeform

Typeform incorporates a user-centric approach to collecting anonymous feedback by offering interactive and engaging survey experiences. Its conversational interface and various question formats improve user engagement and ensure anonymity.

• Its conversational survey interface helps engaging the feedback providers by making feedback-sharing more interactive.
• Typeform includes diverse question formats such as multiple-choice, open-ended, and rating scales which contributes to feedback richness.
• You can apply conditional logic to personalize the survey experience according to the responses.
• It also integrates with various tools which improves its functionality and makes it easier for you to analyze the feedback.

Pricing

• Free plan is available.
• Basic plan starts at $25/month

G2 Rating: 4.5/5

4. Assembly

Assembly offers intuitive solutions that include rearrangement of questions to make the feedback objectives more specific. You can share your forms among individuals or larger groups seamlessly.

• It lets you highlight your team’s achievements through its recognition capabilities and create anonymous feedback surveys simultaneously.
• You can visualize the response data through its scannable charts or download the data as CSV files to analyze it.
• Assembly allows you to create forms that are aligned with your brand with its customization capabilities. These capabilities include customer satisfaction surveys, customer service surveys, and, product surveys.
• It lets you reorder the questions within surveys which improves customization.
• Integrates with various tools to facilitate data management and feedback analysis.

Pricing

• Standard plan starts from $4.50
• Free version available

G2 Rating: 4.8/5

5. WorkTango

As an exceptional anonymous suggestion box tool, WorkTango is designed to incorporate actionable insights from employee feedback. It focuses on building open communication channels and streamlining feedback-sharing.

• Allows you to conduct pulse surveys to make real-time adjustments in employee engagement.
• Gives you access to reporting tools for comprehensive analysis and progress tracking to support decision-making.
• You can collect feedback in multiple languages which contributes to inclusivity and gathering culturally diverse perspectives.

Pricing

Available on request

G2 Rating

4.6/5

In A Nutshell

Being open to improvement as a company will distinguish you from your competitors but only if you are implementing the right feedback strategies.

As we mentioned in the article, you need to create a judgment-free environment to collect candid feedback which will encourage well-thought-out suggestions and ultimately help you build a culture of continuous improvement.

To create tangible results through feedback, you can opt for pulse surveys or employee suggestion boxes.

The great news is that Teamflect offers both! As a comprehensive feedback and performance management tool tailored for Microsoft Teams, Teamflect will streamline your feedback-sharing!

With Teamflect you can turn your genuine desire to make improvements into actionable strategies and create the ideal work environment where your employees are thriving!

Try Teamflect for free today and make a difference through employee feedback!