Turn Employee Feedback into Real Results

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

Thanks to a tight labor market recently, a growing number of companies have been trying to listen more to their workers. The idea is to collect employee feedback through pulse surveys, town halls, focus groups, and message boards, and then leaders use that data to improve retention, spur innovation, and serve customers better. But too many firms invest in employee feedback and then don’t act on it. And without a meaningful response, those good intentions can actually do more harm than never asking workers for their perspectives at all.

Today’s guest has researched these dynamics for years, and for executives and senior leaders, he can offer research-proven recommendations to get the most out of the investment they make in listening to their employees.

Ethan Burris is a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and with his McCombs School colleague, Benjamin Thomas, as well as Kate Kisodi and Don Klinghoffer at Microsoft, he wrote the HBR article, “Turn Employee Feedback Into Action.” Ethan, awesome to talk to you about this.

ETHAN BURRIS: Thanks, Curt. So nice to be here.

CURT NICKISCH: What are the big ways that companies get feedback wrong?

ETHAN BURRIS: I don’t know if they get feedback wrong. What we’ve found in a lot of our research is that when they get feedback, it’s really tough and challenging to turn that into substantive action that really makes a difference for how those organizations are run and what the employee experience are. In a lot of ways, the getting the feedback part is the easy part. It’s all the analysis and the challenges of making sense of all that data and then translating the action that becomes the real challenging aspect of this entire employee listening ecosystem.

CURT NICKISCH: What sort of feedback and what size companies are we talking about here?

ETHAN BURRIS: I look at the employee feedback ecosystem as being pretty large. It encompasses lots of different types of data, lots of different types of employee input. Probably most conventionally, everyone thinks of the annual employee survey as one mechanism to get a pulse on your employees, and most companies end up using something like that, but there’s lots of other avenues.

There’s monthly, weekly, daily pulses. There’s specialty surveys around onboarding or exit surveys. There are town halls, focus groups, the water cooler conversations, and every one of those touch points represents an opportunity to learn about employees and their experience in the workplace and then decide how or if you as an executive are going to do anything with that information.

We ended up conducting interviews with about two dozen companies, and these ranged from smaller startup-y types of companies that are about a hundred employees all the way up to those you hear about in the news all the time that have several, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of employees. And to me, some of the remarkable things that came from these interviews is that a lot of the challenges of both getting but then utilizing employee feedback were in some ways quite similar across many of these organizations. And again, this ranged from healthcare to consumer products to technology to government. And so what we tried to do in this research is distill down some of these common challenges that they face, but also some of the avenues that they employed to overcome some of those challenges.

CURT NICKISCH: Is this a failure then of the traditional feedback route of bringing an idea to a manager and having them take that up the chain of command?

ETHAN BURRIS: I study the concept of employee voice, what leads employees to speak up in organizations, how to have honest and candid conversations with your boss about the things that work and the things that don’t, and then ultimately what those managers and leaders decide to do with that information once they get it.

And so I look at this problem in almost three different phases. What leaders can do to create a culture of safety and voice where employees do feel comfortable in speaking up. To me, that’s challenge number one or phase number one is how to set the stage where those conversations actually occur, where employees are willing to dive into those difficult conversations.

How to sell your ideas up the chain of command is the second stage. So even if you create the space for employees to voice their ideas, not all of them are especially adept at framing it in a way that’s going to be easy for managers to receive it. And that opens up a variety of different strategies and you can use to better sell your ideas in the workplace.

Then we start to arrive at what is also an incredibly difficult thing for executives to navigate, which is if you are Microsoft, you have 160,000 employees. You’re going to encounter a lot of ideas that their employees are going to raise. How do you sift through all that information? Not everyone’s going to agree with it. You may understand that there’s a challenge but not necessarily have the solution at hand. What are ways to dive a little bit deeper and get additional insights about what to do to take action on it? There’s all these things that you have to overcome once you have thousands of ideas that are now coming across your plate.

CURT NICKISCH: What are some of the best tactics then for gathering feedback, especially at scale at a company?

ETHAN BURRIS: The very first challenge that we talked through was just making sense of an overwhelming volume of data. For most sizable companies, as I said, they have annual surveys, but there’s a bevy of others that are centrally launched by HR. There’s also many other surveys that individual managers launch themselves, but those are oftentimes not connected back to central HR, and it’s not housed and organized in a way that can be centrally managed. If you are unable to sync all those data together, then you’re missing out on creating a more comprehensive narrative about the employee experience.

CURT NICKISCH: What kinds of data are you looking for and what are the pros and cons of some of those?

ETHAN BURRIS: I would say the data fall out into two broad strategic categories. There are those more routine avenues for getting employee feedback. There’s just a general check-in. What’s your experience? How does that trend look like over the last number of months or even the last number of years? If there are new challenges that are trending up, are there ways to then organize activities to kind of meet those specific challenges? But it’s a routine check-in, systematically, at scale.

The second is much more strategically oriented. We have a particular challenge right now in meeting market demand or meeting some operational challenge. What information do executives need from employees to better adapt to that unique situation, even if it’s off-cycle from the other type of cadence?

So this comes up all the time: A new manager takes over a particular business unit. He or she runs an analysis, has an idea in mind about what they would like to do coming in, but they would like to engage their employees before really taking action. So they’ll send out a message or a town hall or a focus group or what have you and proclaim, “I am open to any and all input. I’m brand new here. I’m learning a lot. I’m ready for action. I just need your thoughts and feedback before I start going.”

CURT NICKISCH: Right. Listening tour.

ETHAN BURRIS: Exactly. The classic listening tour. And then employees will open up the floodgates and offer-

CURT NICKISCH: And another thing.

ETHAN BURRIS: Exactly. All their complaints and issues that they’ve been dealing with for the last number of months, it’s coming out right now. But in actuality, that leader already has a strategic vision about what he or she wants to accomplish, and the range of topics that he or she is actually open to acting on is relatively narrow. So they want to come across as being open and inviting to all this feedback. But in actuality, they have quarterly goals that they got to meet.

And in a lot of ways, if they just came out and said, “Hey, I’m new here. Here are my top three priorities. I’m really interested in the feedback here. Of course open to all the rest, but I may get at those topics a bit later.” All of a sudden, you’re setting expectations with employees. They know what type of feedback is really useful and wanted and they also know that some others, whereas it may be important, is not so important right now.

CURT NICKISCH: So now for the hard part. Even if you get the best data in the world, you still have to figure out what to do to implement it, and how to implement it. What do you do next?

ETHAN BURRIS: One of the real powerful challenges that came up, you can glean a lot of insights from survey feedback, but usually those insights pertain to identifying that there is an issue or a problem to address. Most often, from a few short survey items on an annual survey, it doesn’t give you insight for what executives should do to resolve that issue. And so there’s an interim step that often occurs, which is you need more analysis. As an example, one company identified from their surveys that employees felt that there was a lack of career mobility options.

Now, on the surface, that’s obviously alarming for executives. They would like to provide professional development opportunities for their employees. But rather than just simply organizing campaigns or different workshops or insights on career mobility, what they decided to do was to take that survey feedback and follow it up with, frankly, another survey. It was more focus groups. It was more opportunities to then interact with employees.

CURT NICKISCH: Which a lot of companies are nervous about, right? They’re afraid of the follow-up survey fatigue.

ETHAN BURRIS: Of course, because it’s not really the best experience for employees to feel like you stick your neck out and be really honest and candid on a survey. And your reward for that is another survey or getting pinged by HR to participate in a focus group.

CURT NICKISCH: Which may take even more time. You’re like, “I just told you what the problem is. Now you figure it out.” Yeah.

ETHAN BURRIS: But as I said, organizations need that time to peel back the layers of the onion to really figure out the underlying cause for why, in this case, career mobility was an issue. And what they found was it wasn’t for lack of options. There were plenty of developmental workshops, lots of different developmental opportunities and programs. There was actually a lot of jobs that were posted internally. The issue was there was such enormous pressure to deliver current results and current operations that managers didn’t invest in developing a culture of learning and didn’t give their employees the time and the latitude to take a couple of days off and invest in their own careers and their own journeys.

And so what on the surface seemed like a lack of opportunity was really a cultural issue. And there would’ve been no way for those executives to find out that true underlying cause if they simply just took the high-level survey feedback from that first survey and then developed a set of actions.

So the best practice here is to think about what your process is for not just collecting data, but then starting to deliver the feedback back to employees about what you’re going to do. “Hey, we heard this. It’s clear that our lowest performing set of items is around career mobility. In order to dive deep, we’re going to launch this process to learn more. It’s going to take us this amount of time. And at the end of it, we’re going to report back with what we learned more about career mobility and with an initial set of initiatives and actions that we’ll take in order to address it.” With that interim communication process between collecting the data and ultimately taking action, it gives a level of depth in the analysis that executives may not have just from the surface-level survey feedback.

CURT NICKISCH: You made a really interesting point in the article that what a lot of HR executives think is survey fatigue is actually inaction fatigue.

ETHAN BURRIS: Most every employee I’ve talked to, not only do they have ideas of what could be better, let’s face it, work is also full of challenges and problems. And so they want avenues to overcome those and perform better. And so they have feedback to give. They’re not tired of giving the feedback. They’re tired of giving the feedback and having nothing be done about it. And so some of the most successful organizations routinely have response rates for their surveys in the mid-nineties, which is absolutely amazing. But it’s because they’ve invested not just in getting employees to fill out the survey. They’ve also invested in a process for analyzing that feedback, for communicating those results, and for developing a set of action plans that tie to that feedback. And then they can tell employees, “Here’s what we heard and here’s what we’re doing.” And that’s pretty invigorating.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, the communication is key, and it sounds like you’re a fan of more transparency about the process than less.

ETHAN BURRIS: Oftentimes when I tell executives that if they’re expecting their employees to be candid and transparent about their own experience and you’re asking them to fill out a survey, then those very same executives also need to be transparent and candid about the process and what they’re doing with that feedback. It’s very much a two-way communication street. You can’t expect employees to communicate to you all the time and then be a little bit cagey about what you’re doing with that information once they do.

CURT NICKISCH: It sounds like that is the key danger if you collect feedback and don’t act on it or don’t visibly address it and integrate it into what you do.

ETHAN BURRIS: Just to touch on that real quick, this goes back to some academic research that my colleague Jim Detert – he’s now at University of Virginia – he and I worked on a number of years ago. What we found is that the relationship between voice, between employees speaking up and speaking up more often, that relationship between that and employee satisfaction and ultimately turnover is relatively flat.

There’s not a strong direct relationship between the more employees speak up, then everything gets better and employees decide to stay. What we found is it’s highly dependent on how managers respond. If they have the resources to act on that employee feedback, if they actually look for making changes, then when employees speak up, because their managers are responsive, employees are satisfied and they’re more likely to stay.

But if employees speak up a lot and managers don’t respond to their feedback, it’s not that things just stay the same. Employees feel worse than if they never offered their feedback in the first place. And so we actually found attrition rates even higher than in organizations where employees just don’t speak up at all. There’s a catch-22 here. If you’re an executive and you would like to hear from your employees, it requires you to then follow up with what you’re doing based on that feedback.

CURT NICKISCH: Now, one reason a lot of executives or senior leaders are ambivalent about asking for feedback is because of that pressure they have to do something. And part of that is knowing that if you hear employee concerns, you also know that there may be a lot of tensions there. You’re not going to be able to make everyone happy. Let’s just take return to the office as an example. How can you make sure that people feel heard even when you don’t end up using all of their ideas or to please everybody?

ETHAN BURRIS: I do think there’s two qualitatively different categories when you’re talking about enabling employees to feel heard. The first is around policies or issues where, by and large, it’s not terribly controversial. In those cases, simply acknowledging and reflecting back the themes that you heard from all employee feedback is a nice thing to do. That type of feedback is, I won’t say easier, because you still have to think through your communications plan for both conveying that you heard it and conveying what you’re going to do, but it’s easier in the sense that the feedback was consistent from employees.

It’s qualitatively different when you’re getting feedback around a theme and roughly half the people or 60/40 agree with the issue at hand and the other half don’t. Return to work is a prime example of that. We have a number of staff who love the flexibility about being able to work from home, and yet at the same time, we also have a number of other staff that do come to campus, and when they show up on campus, it’s a little bit deflating when you’re the only person in the office, and so that presents a little bit of a tension there.

Once again, that simple acknowledgment of this is a very divisive issue. No matter what we ultimately decide to do, it’s not going to fully satisfy a significant portion of an employee population that we care deeply about. Simply acknowledging that as a challenge doesn’t reduce or completely resolve the tension, but it can often create some level of acknowledgment that executives and the company does need to do something. It’s just not going to make everyone fully happy.

And so that acknowledgment is step number one. Step number two is an explanation or an account for, well, what are the criteria by which you’re trying to optimize in making any decision? What are your values? What are your rules? What are the strategic priorities? And again, as a set of executives, you have to be transparent and candid and quite precise about those criteria. What’s really important right now for this issue that could be relevant for making a decision?

And then thirdly, when it actually comes to explaining the policies you ultimately adopt, tying that policy back to those important decision-making criteria at least provides an explanation and an account for why. Going back to some classic research in the area, there’s a distinction between what’s called distributive justice. That is the decision to distribute resources or the decision to distribute a policy. And there’s certainly fairness judgment based on just what was decided. But this research also pointed to a different type of fairness or justice that all people attend to, and that’s the notion of the procedures by which those decisions are made. And if they understand how and why decisions are made the way they are, even if the distribution or the ultimate decisions are not “fair,” there is some grace or at least some understanding that is given.

CURT NICKISCH: Just to carry the return to work example through here, you might come out with a decision saying, “Hey, we want employees back at three days a week in the office, and we know that’s harder for commutes for some, and that’s tough because we value quality of life. But we think that for the type of work we’re doing, collaboration is important and we want people to feel productive and have a good quality of life in the office, and that’s why we’ve made the decision.” Is that how you would suggest talking it through?

ETHAN BURRIS: Yeah. So, it starts with what are the strategic priorities and values of the organization. It could very well be that through the time of the pandemic, and even the couple of years coming out of it, that we placed a stronger priority importance for physical health, well-being, and a level of adaptivity when your kids are at home and stuff like that. But there can also be an acknowledgement that today and the challenges we’re facing right now bring a whole host of different priorities for how we organize our work, and whereas we do value a level of flexibility, there is also a value of collaboration and productivity that we may need to invest more in now than what we did even a couple of years ago.

And so it’s starting to bring in that narrative of what is important now and why now and why is that different from before? Because I have seen some organizations pretty clumsily announce their return to work policy, and it was largely disconnected from decisions they had made in the past or even the values that they have historically held for their employees. And that tends to ring empty for employees when they see a disconnect in those explanations versus how you’ve acted in the past. So providing some rationale for why now that is steeped in a logic and makes sense for the realities that the company is facing at the moment, not everyone may agree with it, but at least they understand.

CURT NICKISCH: Let’s close with underlining the benefits of doing this and doing it right. What does good look like? What do you want the people listening to this episode to really have in their heads and be shooting for?

ETHAN BURRIS: To me, at the end of the day, I’m an academic, so I like to think in terms of concepts and measures. I think ultimately, at the end of the day, what looks like success is this concept of alignment. Organizations are big and they’re messy and they’re attacking challenges for which there are no current solutions. That’s what makes work fun. But in order to do that successfully, executives often have the power and authority to make policy and take action. It’s just that they don’t often interact with customers as much as the lower-level employees. They aren’t the ones responsible for carrying out operations like the lower-level employees, so they need the insights from that group in order to make adaptive decisions on their own.

Now, employees, they may encounter lots of issues, they may understand some of the changes that need to be made in order to make the organization more successful. It’s just they don’t have the power and authority to make unilateral decisions on their own. They need their executives’ help. And so it creates this both tension but also a dynamic that is open for possibility and fruitfulness there.

And so what success looks like is that alignment between executives who are setting policy and the strategy of the organization and then those responsible for carrying it out. And when those folks are aligned and it’s going in the right direction, you see both success for the organization in terms of financial and operational outcomes, but also a sense of thriving for employees that they see their ideas considered and acted upon.

And so that concept of alignment, it continues to come back to me as at least a good descriptor of what success looks like. Now, how you measure it, that’s where it gets fun. There are things like how safe and worthwhile do employees feel that they can speak up in the workplace? Well, if those responses dip, then executives know that they’re probably missing out on some ideas that their employees have.

When employees do speak up, do they feel heard? Do they feel engaged? Do they feel invigorated, even if their ideas are not all implemented? Well, that employee sentiment is also important. For executives, do they feel like they’re getting useful input that is pushing forward their business, that’s pushing forward their insight about what needs to be done a little bit differently moving forward? If they feel like they can or should make decisions largely disconnected from their employees, that’s not a good signal. And so it’s these small, subtle cues that to me roll up into that concept of alignment that allows for both adaptive decision-making for executives, but also a sense of purpose and meaning for the employees.

CURT NICKISCH: Ethan, thanks so much for coming on the show to share your research and these insights with us.

ETHAN BURRIS: Thanks so much for having me. It was a joy.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Ethan Burris, professor at the McCombs School of Business and coauthor of the HBR article, Turn Employee Feedback Into Action.

And we have more for you to act on. We have nearly 1000 episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at HBR.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back on Tuesday with our next episode. I’m Curt Nickisch.