Key takeaways:
- Persistence and collaboration are key: Continuously involve different stakeholders and align actions with your organizational culture to address employee feedback effectively.
- Focus on engagement drivers: Prioritize actions that significantly impact engagement, rather than solely fixing low-scoring items, to maximize the effectiveness of initiatives.
- Empower managers for ownership: Enable managers by crafting action plans with their team members to increase transparency for acting on feedback.
Employee Experience (EX) leaders recognize the importance of prioritizing employee feedback to drive positive change and enhance EX throughout their organizations. However, turning feedback into actionable initiatives can be a daunting task.
In a recent Employee Experience Board leadership panel on enhancing your EX strategy through employee listening, our Board Members shared insights on effectively translating employee feedback into actions that benefit both employees and your organization.
Let’s dive into the initiatives senior EX leaders shared for turning employee feedback into actions for a positive workplace experience.
Prioritize Employee Feedback
Julie Flores, AVP of HR Communications and Employee Experience at Chubb, discussed the significance of persistence and collaboration in addressing employee feedback.
Sometimes it takes a village, and it’s a matter of involving different stakeholders and people who have influence within the organization to cast a light on it.
Julie Flores, AVP of HR Communications and Employee Experience at Chubb
She highlighted that it often takes multiple feedback cycles before it resonates with higher levels of the organization.
“Sometimes it takes a village, and it’s a matter of involving different stakeholders and people who have influence within the organization to cast a light on it,” Julie said.
She also stressed the importance of aligning actions with your organizational culture.
“It’s worth looking at your culture and how you define what’s most important in terms of what you’re trying to build in your culture,” Julie added. “It might be worth getting some quick wins to show the population that you are taking their feedback seriously and acting upon it.”
Focus on Drivers of Engagement in Employee Feedback
Dannielle Brown, Senior Vice President and Employee Experience Manager at M&T Bank, shared a valuable lesson she learned in employee surveys about focusing on drivers of engagement rather than solely fixating on low-scoring items.
“Everybody wanted to go after the lowest-scoring item, because we didn’t see low numbers,” Dannielle said. “But we had to work on the drivers of engagement and which ones are most related to people’s engagement and try to focus people on improving those.”
By prioritizing actions that significantly impact engagement, she explained how organizations can maximize the effectiveness of their initiatives.
Dannielle also emphasized the importance of asking strategic questions that align feedback with organizational goals, guiding M&T Bank’s enterprise-wide and team-specific action plans.
Empower Managers to Drive Ownership of Acting on Employee Feedback
Zoe Kasper, AVP of Employee Experience at Lincoln Financial Group, highlighted the importance of empowering managers to take ownership of action planning.
“One thing we’re going to try to shift this year is move away from cumbersome and structured action planning processes and ask managers to co-create action plans with their team members in the flow of their regular meetings and work,” Zoe said. “We want them to focus on the things that are in their control as managers and as a team.”
Zoe said EX teams can foster a sense of ownership and commitment to driving change at the grassroots level by providing managers with autonomy and support.
One thing we’re going to try to shift this year is move away from cumbersome and structured action planning processes and ask managers to co-create action plans with their team members in the flow of their regular meetings and work.
Zoe Kasper, AVP of Employee Experience at Lincoln Financial Group
Establish Transparent Communication and Accountability
Our members also emphasized the crucial role of transparent communication in fostering a culture of accountability.
Dannielle discussed the importance of structured action planning at both enterprise-wide and manager levels. At the organizational level, she said it’s key for EX teams to ensure transparent communication follows after every survey.
“A survey never happens without a communication going out after it saying what the results are and what we’re doing about it,” Dannielle said. “That is a given, whether it’s a small enough division with 30 people or whether that’s a bank-wide survey.”
She added that her team has also produced infographics and videos highlighting progress since the last survey.
One thing we’re considering is making action planning an EPO for managers now — not their score of engagement, but whether they actually take the time to meet with their team and put an action plan in place, so there’s more accountability for it.
Dannielle Brown, Senior Vice President and Employee Experience Manager at M&T Bank
At the manager level, Dannielle said her team provides guidance for conducting one-hour action planning debriefs with teams, stressing the importance of debriefs and accountability for driving change.
She explained how her team is considering making action planning an essential performance objective (EPO) for managers to ensure accountability.
“We struggle to understand how much action planning is actually happening, because it’s not easy to track in our system,” Dannielle noted. “One thing we’re considering is making action planning an EPO for managers now — not their score of engagement, but whether they actually take the time to meet with their team and put an action plan in place, so there’s more accountability for it.”
Zoe also discussed best practices at Lincoln Financial Group. Her team conducted surveys during “Feedback Fridays” to gauge employee engagement and participation in action planning sessions with managers.
These surveys provided valuable insights into which areas of the organization are actively engaged in action planning.
She explained that quarterly updates are also used to communicate progress based on survey feedback and other listening efforts. The feedback from these surveys also helps raise awareness for Lincoln Financial Group’s tools and offerings.
“We use these quarterly communications to help them connect the dots between the focus areas that have been identified and the resources and programs that we have available that maybe they’re not using to their fullest extent,” Zoe said.
Set Clear Manager Expectations for Their Roles in Action Planning
Julie discussed the importance of setting clear expectations for managers regarding their role in the feedback-to-action process.
She noted that providing managers with guidance and tools, such as toolkits and communication templates, enables them to engage with their teams and drive meaningful change effectively.
“If a department did a small pulse survey, that manager has a better sense of what latitude they have to jump on and act upon that feedback,” Julie said. “But if you send a corporate-wide engagement survey, sometimes your managers need a bit of an understanding of what you’re looking for from them to do with this data and to what extent they can act upon it.”
Understanding your organization’s culture and the extent of its autonomy empowers managers to create environments conducive to employee engagement and satisfaction.
Gain More Insights from Senior EX Leaders on Turning Employee Feedback into Action
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