From Social Distancing to Virtual Togetherness – Feedback Continues to Matter

Starting on March 12^th, one of my favorite sports authors and Twitter follows, Shea Serrano, began offering financial support to people on Twitter whose jobs were in jeopardy as a result of COVID-19. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Shea offer up financial support to people in need on Twitter, but this time around, things were different. He is offering up support to a larger population, and more than a week later, he is still going strong, continuing to give what he can to people in financial distress. Shea is online at least once a day, just reaching out to his followers, checking in and making sure all is okay. If things are not okay, he is there to help.

At work, my office is barren as people have started working from home regularly. We have been using our company communication application to share pictures of our home workspaces and our pets. Every Thursday in our Chicago office, we have a happy hour near the end of the workday. That is no longer an in-person reality, but this important social time together doesn’t have to go away while we work on our social distancing. Instead, we have decided to post pictures of our drinks and even hop into a virtual meeting room to “cheers” with each other.

COVID-19 is changing a lot of things for everyone on the planet

Yet, people are still connecting, communicating, and interacting with each other. Social distancing does not mean social isolation. As our physical, social distance increases, so too does our virtual togetherness. The online connectivity many of us enjoy allows for communication channels to remain open and information, feedback, and sentiment to move around instantly. As always, we are finding ways to create community, to share knowledge, to seek and give comfort, to ask questions, and to share and listen to stories.

As our physical, social distance increases, so too does our virtual togetherness.

Harness your community’s feedback – we’re here to help

In the wake of COVID-19, all organizations have a unique opportunity to harness their community’s feedback regarding the present and future. Feedback from key groups has always been the lifeblood for proactive organizations. Businesses assess their culture and employee engagement; universities care to know how students perceive their professors and learning environment; brands seek to understand the desires of their customers; governments hope their citizens feel safe. Organizations need tools to connect with everyone across their network in real-time now more than ever. Now is not the time as an organization to isolate or quarantine; do not socially distance yourself from your employees, students, customers, community members, etc. but instead, actively connect.

Explorance is here to support you in these unusual times by helping you to connect through experience management actively. Our mantra is “Feedback Matters,” and regardless of what is going on in the world, the mantra doesn’t change. We have a variety of customizable tools that can be used to reach the members of your organization wherever they are to get you feedback on how they are feeling and responding to these unusual times. Regardless of whether you want to prime employee engagement now that your workforce is working from home, understand how online courses are impacting students, or pull together the concerns of your community during these uncertain times, Explorance has a tool to support that work.

Our mantra is “Feedback Matters,” and regardless of what is going on in the world, the mantra doesn’t change.

Experts to help keep your measurement strategy engaging

Also, we have measurement experts who have been building data-driven cultures in organizations from large corporations to non-profits to higher learning institutions for decades. It certainly takes more than a best-in-class experience management platform to gather all the insights necessary to understand what is going on in your population of interest. Explorance subject matter experts can help you keep your measurement strategy engaging while keeping ‘survey fatigue’ to a minimum. Arguably, the most essential elements of effective measurement are uncovering the metrics that matter most to your organization and building a strategy of how best to assess those metrics. It is a daunting task for some, but Explorance consultants are always up for a challenge.

Beyond our tools and our expertise, though, we just want to help. Something I’ve seen in my colleagues (we call ourselves Explorers) more than anything else is that we will go above and beyond to help our clients and our communities in challenging times. One of the biggest value-adds we can offer at a time like this is to help open new communication channels and keep organizations informed about how their community is feeling and reacting to their changing environment.

When the world is changing rapidly around us, and we need to begin to map out the new, less-than-familiar terrain, we are here to help you find your way.

One of the biggest value-adds we can offer at a time like this is to help open new communication channels and keep organizations informed about how their community is feeling and reacting to their changing environment.