Building a feedback culture is not easy, but it’s essential, according to Quantum Workplace Founder and CEO Greg Harris. It requires a mindset, discipline, and muscle memory in order for your teams to recognize it.
Harris and his team work with human resource departments nationwide, including places like Domino’s, DSW, Scooter’s, Redfin, and more.
Research shows that when employees receive more frequent feedback, they’re two times more engaged, three times less likely to apply or seek other jobs, and 1.4 times more likely to stay at an organization.
The tech company offers a suite of AI-powered performance software tools to amplify effective employee engagement and performance management efforts.
Feedback builds trust, and that happens through employee listening—provided via Quantum Workplace’s engagement and pulse surveys.
Employee engagement is defined as “strength of the mental and emotional connection employees feel toward the workplace.”
“Pulse surveys are topical, point-in-time surveys that happen year-round and are driven by real-time needs. We don’t want to begin solving a problem until we better understand what the problem is,” Harris said.
“It’s why every time you go to Panera, you know, on your receipt you have a survey card. The smarter an organization is about their perceptions of who their customers are, the better it’s going to be able to meet their needs. The smarter an organization is about what their employees’ thoughts and feelings are, the more they’re going to be able to meet their needs,” Harris said.
Quantum Workplace makes it easy to measure what matters, and keeps things simple for companies to create and launch a survey. It was named by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest-growing private companies for the past six years.
Additionally, Harris, who hands the CEO role to Joe Holland this month, invented the “Best Places to Work” contest that is ran in partnership with various local businesses, and held in 43 regional markets and five industry-wide markets.
When a team conducts an annual employee engagement assessment, they’ll receive hundreds of opinions, and normally, a few themes will rise to the top.
“If I can hone in all my employees on those one or two things, then I’m increasing the trust that they have. I’m increasing the visibility that we have over what matters most.”
He says that companies begin to understand the feeling of winning when their engagement levels are at around 80%—in other words, the sweet spot.
“You feel that. An organization feels that difference when they’re at 80. It feels like you’re winning,” Harris said. “There’s just more energy. There’s more joy. You see it in the results.” Employees feel connected to the company’s mission, goals, and values.
Relationships and consistency are key drivers of success. The recipe to becoming a company with top quartile employee engagement levels is a mix of very relational concepts, he said.
“It’s the relationships that managers have with their employers. It’s the quality of the communication that comes in flow throughout an organization, from senior leaders to middle managers, to individual contributors,” Harris said. Consistency in every chat, email, or meeting every day is a difference-maker.
Of the 11,000 companies that Quantum Workplace collects annual engagement data from, Harris recognizes an overall trend. “We’re kind of in a no-man’s land, kind of this ‘meh’ period,” he said.
“Three years ago, engagement was at all-time highs, according to our metrics. About 80% of the American workplace was of a high level of engagement,” he said.
Contextually, he said American employees right now (as of April 2025) are engaged at around 74.5%. “We’re not at all-time lows, we’re not at all-time highs, but sometimes that’s the sticky middle.”
He continued, “When you’re at all-time lows, everybody rallies…when you’re at an all-time high, again, you get a little comfy and cozy, and employees start asking for free pet insurance and more ping-pong tables.”
Engagement drives advocacy. You see it when your employees rave repeatedly about their valued workplace to anyone within hearing distance.
Committed employees also drive effort to go the extra mile. “Do they have the agility? Do they have the perseverance to keep focused, to keep committed, even when something isn’t going perfectly, even when they get some bad feedback at work, even when the success metrics aren’t quite where they want?”
Simply put, engaged employees aren’t quiet quitting, nor do they plan to leave anytime soon. Resenteeism, when employees show up to work physically, but mentally they’re elsewhere, would never cross an engaged employee’s mind.
Harris acknowledges that it’s so much more fun to work in a crowd of happy people, but you could also have happy people that are disengaged.
“There are times when we love our work, we admire our work, we respect the process, but we also see it as work, and we know that it’s not all lollipops and rainbows, but we respect that,” he said.
Harris recently advised a CEO who felt something was off at his company. They had recently implemented reduction in forces (RIF) at the manager level.
Retention was declining while turnovers were climbing. “More people are quitting and we just feel like we’re in a funk,” the CEO told Harris.
So, what was wrong? When employees lose the person they were getting coaching from, it causes a reduction in relational equity, he said.
The most successful businesses have leaders who continually communicate the purpose and vision of their organization.
Harris’ advice to the struggling CEO? “Increase the frequency with which you are communicating strategy, because you can’t rely on as many managers anymore to funnel that information down.You should not assume that those 1,200 employees know what matters and what’s most important today,” he said.
“We need consistency of trust, visibility from senior leaders, and communication talent. Those are the ingredients. At the end of the day, this quantitative thing called employee engagement is a report card on leadership effectiveness,” Harris said.
For more information, visit quantumworkplace.com.
This article originally appeared in the June/July 2025 issue of B2B Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
