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Employee engagement and participation remain among the greatest contributors to organisational change success. This employee engagement and participation is achieved by soliciting employee feedback and involving them in identifying proposed solutions and the future state of the change (Prosci, 2020).

On the other hand, it takes a leader’s courage, empathy, and integrity to be responsive to employee feedback. In this article, I would like to share my thoughts on ensuring a successful response to employee feedback. This is based on work I have completed in multiple organisations over the years, focusing on collecting and actioning employee feedback. Surveys, focus groups, one-one-interviews, polls, and workshops were the key methods used for feedback collection.

The feedback related to leadership alignment, change readiness assessments, employee engagement, team alignment, culture change, and post-change implementation reviews is typically part of the Change Management scope. I have found that a leader’s empathy and integrity are vital to enabling the most effective response to employee feedback, including creating the required psychological safety for employees to provide honest feedback.

When this happens, we can succeed in building a positive change culture that gives credibility back to the leaders who are naturally entrusted with driving change and enabling a great employee experience. Ultimately, the leader’s empathy and integrity go a long way in making the most of employee feedback to drive meaningful change.

Definitions of Empathy and Integrity

The Challenge

When we invest time and resources to collect employee feedback, we must equally be willing to commit time and resources to take the right actions in response to employee feedback.

Balancing perspectives

On the other side of the employee feedback collection tools and processes, an expectant employee is waiting in hope or to test the credibility of the feedback collection process and that of the leaders involved.

The employee’s perspective

Most often, employees have asked me the following telling questions…

• Can we trust you as the Change Management Practitioner to be credible?
• Are the project and business leaders really interested in hearing the truth and taking the right actions?
• Will honest feedback not get me into trouble?
• Why should I trust this feedback process?
• What will be different this time?
• Will there be meaningful action?

The leader’s perspective

On the other hand, leaders have asked me the following questions….

• How will you ensure there is minimal disruption to productivity and customer service?
• Is there a benchmark to use as a base?
• How will we balance confidentiality and transparency when reviewing the feedback?
• What is the best method to collect the feedback?
• What will be the next steps after feedback collection?
• How will we prioritise the implied actions and manage expectations realistically?

I have found that these two perspectives require an intentional effort to set the right positioning and follow through with the feedback process. Leaders who go first at showing empathy towards the employees’ perspective gain their trust and can even challenge employees where there is unreasonable resistance. Such leaders create psychological safety for honest feedback and meaningful action and can support their teams better during the change journey.

On the contrary, leaders who are defensive and not open to understanding employee views struggle the most to take employees on a change journey with them. Much “kicking and screaming” is the order of the day as the feedback is collected, discussed, and actioned, which essentially is a lack of employee buy-in.

Projects and initiatives where employee feedback was collected

Project type 1: The first project type I would like to reference relates to improving the credibility of the employee engagement survey process.

In facilitating and reviewing employee feedback to ensure clarity and traction on engagement survey action plans, I found that:

• There was a general low confidence in the value of the employee engagement survey,
• There was no visibility of the required actions plans, and
• There was no effective tracking of the action plan implementation.

As per the global norm, a 70% employee engagement level is what most organisations will target as a minimum. I found that striking a balance between quantitative or qualitative feedback analysis and action planning is key. For example, what is the weighting associated with what employees regard as drivers of low engagement? Do we address only what the majority of employees tell us, or do we look at the impact of what the minority tells us as well? I can emphasise the following key learnings from projects relating to employee engagement surveys and similar initiatives (i.e. organisational culture and team effectiveness related):

Project type 2: The second project type I would like to reference relates to improving change readiness confidence and post-implementation experience for system & process operating model change projects. 

Typically for this type of project, a change readiness assessment, and post-implementation assessment are common change management activities to solicit employee feedback.

In one such project that was being implemented in a phased approach, I started with post-implementation review focus groups and introduced changes in readiness assessment surveys and debrief focus groups. This is a process I have used in many similar projects across many organisations.

In fact, in many such projects, the use of a “RAG” (red, amber, green) status measurement method of some sort against a set readiness go/no-go checklist or criteria to assess project and people & business change readiness is common. In my experience, this is often coupled with an employee readiness survey and/or focus groups. The big question is always around how much of the employee feedback will influence the go/no-go decision. In my experience, each organisation’s level of change management maturity and people-centric culture will determine how much of such feedback will drive the project readiness decision. Unfortunately, when we don’t make time to mitigate and respond appropriately in time, we are forced to make time for post-implementation fixes.

Improving change readiness confidence was a key focus, with the goal of moving from 65% to at least 80% change readiness as we progressed from one project to another. In the first and only project where we achieved an 82% change readiness confidence, active and visible leadership was a key enabler. This included the Managing Director and Superusers (mainly managers of impacted teams) involvement in employee awareness communication, change impact clarity, and testing.

In all other projects, we stayed between 65% to 75% readiness confidence. Causes of this lower change readiness confidence related to:

The last example I’d like to cite is a small-scale system implementation project that had been implemented without much employee participation and effective change management. For this one, we conducted a post-implementation review to understand the following:

• Employee experience and perception leading up to and post the change implementation.
• What is working well versus what is not working well with embedding the intended changes.
• Causes of poor adoption.
• Best way forward to improve the next steps in the change journey overall.

The leader was interested in improving employee engagement and morale as they believed that the recent change implementation was not well received. Focus groups, surveys, and workshops were used to facilitate employee participation and feedback and to craft a roadmap to improve the change journey going forward.

Across many of the teams I worked with, I still found the common thread. Leaders who leaned into the feedback process with an open mind, empathy, and integrity gave us the most progress in rebuilding trust, getting action plans implemented, and supporting and taking employees on the change journey.