If your organization has an insights engine in place – the right combination of people, technology, and processes to optimize access to and visibility of insights – then you know the vital role it plays in empowering stakeholders to make decisions that drive customer-centric growth. Key aspects of an effective insights engine include continuous improvement of insights delivery and expanding and reinforcing stakeholder buy-in, both of which can be enhanced by incorporating positive feedback loops.

The power of positive feedback loops

A feedback loop uses system outputs as inputs – applying feedback to make improvements. Feedback loops can be negative, focusing on feedback from clients and customers (to ultimately achieve positive outcomes); or positive, operating on employee feedback.

For example, remote work models and the technology supporting them are now ubiquitous in many industries, yet employees and teams might be struggling as traditional policies and practices governing meetings, communications, and other interactions no longer quite fit.

To apply a positive feedback loop to the problem, a company would solicit employee feedback around the topic and use the results to guide policy changes; communicate the changes and the rationales to everyone; and solicit follow-up feedback later to gauge the effectiveness of the changes and identify opportunities for fine-tuning.

In broad terms, positive feedback loops benefit a company and its employees by nurturing a culture of collaboration and respect. When employees see their input leading to change, they feel valued, which increases job satisfaction and strengthens motivation. Their feedback can lead to a better employee experience and improvements to operational efficiencies, a win for both employees and the organization.

What does any of this have to do with research and insights teams specifically? The more deeply engaged stakeholders are with insights, the more they will apply them to their decision-making, and the more value the organization will derive from those insights. Building positive feedback loops into the insights engine helps create and reinforce collaborative engagement.

 

Incorporating positive feedback loops: What you need to know

It’s possible to use both formal and informal processes to build positive feedback loops and funnel employee feedback into decisions about operations and company culture. As you think about incorporating feedback loops within the insights engine, keep these four main considerations in mind:

1. Ongoing input mechanisms. Your stakeholders must be able to provide feedback on an ongoing basis so that your team can use that feedback to make iterative changes. Continuous streams of data provide visibility into the impact of changes and illuminate evolving conditions, e.g., changes in the competitive landscape for a product.
2. Analysis. This is what the insights team does best – transform data into insights that point to specific actions. Measure the impact of changes based on feedback to determine what’s working well and what can be improved.
3. Act on what you learn. Implement changes promptly before conditions shift to maximize the positive impact and be able to discern the impact.
4. Communicate about the changes. Demonstrating that feedback is taken seriously and credibly rewards stakeholders’ engagement and helps keep them invested.

 

Using feedback loops to optimize your insights engine

The basic principles that govern other insights projects apply to your feedback loops as well.

You’ll want to start with what you want to accomplish. What are your primary goals? Most fundamentally, you want to achieve continuous improvement of insights delivery and optimize stakeholder buy-in. Keep these objectives in mind as you choose and refine specific feedback mechanisms and when analyzing results.

Drilling down a bit, consider what we know about the characteristics of a well-deployed insights engine. In the highest-performing companies, the insights team is independent and reports directly to the C-suite, positioning it to work effectively as a peer with other functional areas. As a true partner, you help functional teams use research to inform and support their activities (as opposed to the traditional model in which teams might feel they are working reactively to deliver insights based on line manager requests).

An effective insights team uses that partner role to promote the operational best practices that ensure their insights drive business success. Chief among these are fostering experimentation, maintaining a forward-looking orientation, and focusing on action.

 

Four tips for insights engine feedback loops

Below, find four recommendations on how to optimize your insights engine feedback loop.

 

1. Encourage comments and questions at every opportunity

Use your company’s knowledge management platform to encourage and facilitate self-service use of insights resources by stakeholders and make a point of inviting questions and comments. The resulting feedback is data that gets funneled into the feedback loop system. Meanwhile, monitor the conversations and offer timely acknowledgment of what’s said, affirming users aren’t dropping their input into a void and encouraging them to continue engaging.

 

2. Leverage analytics for visibility into usage

If your knowledge management platform offers analytics, these can be incorporated into feedback loops. Data about views, interactions, activities performed by specific members, and search term reports can all provide visibility into how insights are – and are not – being used. What are people looking for? What is getting the most and the least traffic? Where are the knowledge gaps to be addressed?

 

3. Expand the toolbox and take advantage of variety

Just as employee feedback programs use a range of information gathering methods, you can create a variety of ongoing and ad hoc mechanisms to solicit stakeholder feedback. Different channels and modes will appeal to different people.

For example, consider sending out mini polls with one or two questions to learn more about how stakeholders are using different resources. Convene periodic or occasional discussion groups, asynchronous or in real-time, to gather in-depth feedback. Pose questions in your knowledge management platform to get input about topics stakeholders want to discuss:

• Which insights deliverables have they found to be most valuable?
• Which could have worked better?
• How easy is it for them to access relevant insights when they need them?
• What do they wish they had at their fingertips?

 

4. Act and communicate

Report back to stakeholders what you are learning through the feedback loops and the actions taken in response. Make clear that information and insights should flow in both directions. Partnership, collaboration, and transparency are all values that will reinforce the intention and the impact of your insights engine and the feedback loops built into it.

 

Harnessing employee feedback for a better insights engine

Collecting feedback and analyzing it to distill insights that guide decisions and drive growth – that’s the insights team’s forte, right? And while it’s just as important for you as for any other team to maximize the value of what you’re doing, it can be challenging to spare the bandwidth to deploy your team’s capabilities on its own behalf. By building positive feedback loops into your insights engine, you create an ongoing process for improvement and a framework for that process to evolve with the business and stakeholders’ changing needs.