Most organisations these days recognise the importance of creating a dialogue with their staff and using the insights they gather to drive business improvements and increase employee engagement. Understanding and acting on employee feedback can help improve staff satisfaction, loyalty and retention and even inspire ideas for improved processes or new product or service offerings. And of course more engaged staff are usually more productive and motivated to provide a better service to customers.

However, to succeed, communication has to be constantly available and framed as a genuinely two-way dialogue. You have to generate a candid conversation that involves all of your people. And to do it properly you need to move beyond the traditional annual employee survey that has historically been used to gather staff feedback and support engagement. This is just too infrequent, top-down and resource-intensive for today’s fast-moving world.

That’s why an increasing number of organisations are turning to technology, especially online communities, to underpin a more frequent, deeper conversation with their staff.

An online community can be incredibly powerful, making it easy for staff to share feedback and best practice, learn from each other and interact with their peers. They can take part in surveys, quick polls and discussions and submit ideas for changes and improvements. And all of this can be done wherever they are, whatever device they are using and whenever they want, fitting around their working and private lives.

But simply building a community and sending out login details will not encourage people to take part. How do you start and maintain this digital dialogue? It can appear daunting, but in truth the digital world is not all that different to the physical one, and many of the same techniques that help drive engagement there are useful online. Here are eight suggestions to ensure your community thrives:

1. Involve your people from the start
Design the community around your employee needs and how they work. Have a steering committee that involves staff from the very beginning by getting them to participate in visualising the direction and goals. Include a wide cross section of employees including all departments, management levels and generations.  Be sure to involve those that might not be highly digitally literate.

2. Communicate the Vision
Encourage senior management to show that the new community has their full backing. They should present the vision of the system to all staff, explaining why it is being created, the difference it will make and the benefits to staff and to the business as a whole. Make it clear that this is an additional engagement channel rather than replacing those that are already available. Keep people informed of the progress of the system, and take the time to answer any queries/allay any fears that may arise.

3. Appoint champions/beta users
Appoint a team of beta users to trial the system and use their feedback to adapt and make improvements. Ensure that these early users span different departments and demographics and work closely with them to listen to their views. When the community goes live they can then act as champions for the system, encouraging others to contribute and become active, and providing basic support to anyone that needs it.

4. Embed the online community within the organisation
Make the community easy to use and central to processes and operations so that employees automatically begin to use it. For example, look at running regular surveys through the community to encourage usage, and create departmental forums to discuss relevant issues.

5. Make it easy to use
Most employees will use social media in their private lives – and they will expect the same intuitive interface and simplicity from your community. Therefore design it with this in mind, and above all ensure people can login from all their devices – laptop, phone and tablet. That extends the community to those that either don’t have access to a PC during their working day, or people that want to contribute during non-working hours.

6. Keep refreshing the content
Populate the system with content before launch and keep it updated as nothing puts people off more than visiting an empty forum with out of date threads. Encourage champions to start debates and set up new forums around particular interests, departments or business challenges. With this in mind go for a gradual ‘soft’ roll-out that starts by building content with selected groups, rather than going for a ‘big bang’ launch to the entire workforce at once.

7. Be responsive
Above all, when staff do engage, give feedback or suggestions, respond in a timely, public way so that those who have participated feel their effort is being acknowledged. If you are implementing their suggestions then update them regularly on progress, and if not, explain the reasons why. Being heard and getting a response is critical if staff are to continue to contribute to the community.

8. Set goals and track progress
Have measurable goals for the launch and subsequent growth. Track usage and activity as well as outcomes and benefits, metrics on areas such surveys completed, suggestions submitted and the number of threads for best practice sharing give an indication of the level of activity. Qualitative feedback about how easy or useful the system has been, whether changes and improvements have been instigated as a result of feedback and whether best practice sharing is helping staff manage their challenges gives an insight into the real difference that is being made.

Creating a successful employee feedback community and ensuring it is active and useful takes careful planning and requires ongoing commitment and effort.  But the hard work can pay off if you can deliver benefits such as a more engaged, productive workforce that is loyal and eager to help the business succeed.