Turn Employee Feedback into Action

Enhancing how a company supports and engages its employees can attract talent, improve retention, spur innovation, and increase customer satisfaction. The problem for many leaders is that when they ask what employees think, they don’t know what to do with what they hear—they often struggle to translate all this input into meaningful insights and concrete actions. A gap between accumulating the information and taking coherent action to respond can diminish the value of employee feedback over time—and if it persists, employees may stop responding.

The authors’ conversations revealed that companies—which together employ more than 2 million people across sectors including technology, financial services, and consumer goods—face seven common challenges. They also identified some innovative strategies for overcoming them. 

1. Making Sense of All That Data.  Paradoxically, the ease of acquiring data threatens its practical value.  Some companies have made more sense of their data by limiting who is authorized to launch new surveys or by constraining the variety of data-collection methods.  Other organizations have embraced a more localized process, trying to temper employee expectations for what each survey can yield. For instance, ‘managers’ feedback survey’.  How can companies acquire centralized insights without accumulating too much data? One solution, used by Microsoft, is to invest in specialized listening teams.
2. Making Sure Employees Feel Heard.  People won’t speak up if they don’t believe their input will be genuinely considered. Many HR executives we interviewed said that “survey fatigue” is a misnomer. Rather, employees experience “inaction fatigue,” and harnessing their voices requires a long-term investment in building and sustaining trust that their feedback will make a difference.
3. Identifying the Actual Underlying Problems.  Although employee surveys often make clear that something needs to change, companies may struggle to identify what lies beneath the feedback.
4. Protecting Employee Privacy.  Leaders face a dilemma with employee-listening programs: They want to ensure confidentiality, but they would benefit if they could follow up with specific employees to learn more about their responses. They consistently need to find out more—to do a more granular analysis of results across various locations, job types, demographics, and so on—without breaking the trust that employee privacy provides.
5. Navigating Conflicting Views.  Gathering feedback from numerous voices rarely results in unanimous agreement. Leaders often find broad differences regarding the best policy to construct or even the most vital issues to resolve.  In the authors’ research leaders commonly employed three elements in these tricky communications: acknowledging the lack of consensus, explaining the decision-making criteria, and demonstrating how various viewpoints influenced the final decision. 
6. Not Burying Bad News.  HR executives have a role to play in ensuring that bad news doesn’t get buried. They should educate leaders on the value of employee surveys and facilitate the translation of feedback into terms that align with strategic goals. 
7. Providing Meaningful Follow-up.  Leaders must also free up resources for middle managers and employees to take on new tasks and initiatives. Perhaps more demanding, leaders may need to shift other initiatives down on the priority list—or even let some go—to address issues that employees have identified as more pressing.  Equally important is communicating what has been done to the entire company.