With 20,000 people currently off work due to mental health illness[1], health and wellbeing is at the top of the agenda for employees.
Improving mental health isn’t just a personal issue. At work, performance and wellbeing are aided when employees are happy, content, and feel they trust management enough to give feedback, ask for help or raise their concerns when necessary.
However, concerningly there is a significant gap in the trust employees have for those that are senior to them.
In fact, recent research conducted by Personio found that whilst trust between employees is strong, only 64% claim to trust their CEO, whilst just 71% can say the same for senior leadership. The transparency needed to foster the kind of working culture that benefits mental health and wellbeing is lacking in many UK organisations.
Employee satisfaction, mental health and wellbeing hinges upon the trust between business leaders and their employees.
But how can SMEs set themselves up for success?
The fundamental importance of feedback
Collecting feedback is a great way for management to engage with their staff on a range of topics – including job satisfaction, wellbeing and productivity. But despite its value, only (28%) currently feel as though they are given the chance to feed back to leadership on their experiences.
This is an easy problem to fix. There are numerous ways to temperature check the mood and feelings of employees – whether it be through regular pulse surveys, anonymous suggestion boxes or skip level meetings allowing junior staff to get exposure and quality time with management.
Working to create and implement feedback collection processes, through multiple channels, that meet the needs of their organisation and their staff is of vital importance. This doesn’t have to be a large or expensive task – simple, small steps have the potential to make a huge difference to workplace culture as well as employee engagement and wellbeing.
Insight and action are two very different things
Whilst collecting feedback is a crucial step to helping employees feel heard, it means very little if it is not listened to and actioned.
Business leaders must demonstrate they are listening to and acting upon employee feedback – but at the moment they are falling short. Our research found that almost four in ten (38%) of the employees we surveyed do not believe that their leaders listen to and act on their feedback.
Constantly asking employees for feedback, with no actionable insight or results, is not going to improve engagement or trust, and could even risk worsening it. So feedback collection does not go far enough – business leaders, with the support of HR, need to be visible and deliberate in turning the insights employees give them into action.
Again this requires evolution, not revolution. Simple proactive steps like holding company meetings to discuss feedback, pain points and plan for improvements can make all the difference.
In addition, reviewing feedback and using it to inform company-wide, strategic decisions such as the provision of management training, changes to benefits packages or flexible working arrangements for staff who balance parental responsibilities is a great way to turn insight into action. Communicating to staff about how you’ve implemented these changes and policies in line with feed back and preferences speaks volumes in showing you’re listening.
Actionable dialogue through the feedback process is critical to building the trust and transparency needed to create an engaged and motivated workplace, and a company culture that is focused on wellbeing. Whether it be around issues such as stress, balancing work and home life or workload management, business leaders need to ensure they are constantly listening to, and visibly acting upon, the feedback and concerns of their employees.
[1] Department for Work and Pensions statistics, March 2024,
Article Attributed to Pete Cooper, Director of People Partners & DEI at Personio, Europe’s leading HR software company for small and mid-sized businesses