Chris Roberts: Employee feedback is crucial for engagement and motivation

At ClickThrough Marketing we have always made staff engagement a priority but in the last 18 months, we’ve really stepped up our efforts to drive motivation. We have adopted hybrid and flexible working to allow people to work from wherever they feel most productive and, at the moment, ultimately safe. Of course, not being in the office can lead to lower levels of engagement if not properly managed.

The first thing we have done is invest more heavily in training and hired a head of talent engagement, whose sole focus is to drive the development of our people. Our vision is to accelerate the growth of people and brands, and this hire really reiterates our commitment to this.

We listen to our employees’ feedback. The head of talent engagement role was created as a direct result of staff feedback, but our team have plenty of other opportunities to give their views throughout the quarter, such as through 360 feedback, company meeting breakout sessions and our black box ideas submission process, for which we pay employees £5 for each idea they submit. We always try our best to act on this feedback and at the very least acknowledge the suggestion and discuss people's reasons for submitting.

As well as listening to our staff and providing dedicated training opportunities, we also recognise our team’s under-utilised skills and give our employees the opportunity to grow through working with the leadership team on projects outside of their day-to-day work, from designing our Christmas card, to running a webinar, or even launching our podcast.

Finally, we like to recognise the work and impact our team have and celebrate success, from micro interactions such as high fives in our weekly check-in platform, through to employee-of-the-month awards and bi-annual values awards at our agency quarterly business reviews. Crucially this isn’t just based on top-down feedback, but on peer-to-peer recognition as well.

We remain committed to driving engagement in 2022 and are always looking at how we can do an even better job.

Chris Roberts is a managing director at ClickThrough Marketing