Turn Employee Feedback into Action | Harvard Business Review

This new article provides strategies and examples of companies overcoming challenges in turning employee feedback into action. It identifies seven key challenges organizations face when managing employee feedback: making sense of collected data, ensuring employees feel heard, identifying underlying problems, protecting privacy, navigating conflicting views, addressing negative feedback, and providing meaningful follow-up. For instance, Microsoft effectively manages these challenges with specialized listening teams comprising analysts, data scientists, and psychologists. These teams coordinate employee-listening efforts across the organization, partner with HR groups and local business units, and ensure open information flow. Microsoft also publishes company-wide survey results and requires managers to discuss team experiences after each survey. While not every company will have the resources to make extensive investments in employee listening programs like Microsoft’s, the article shares various tactics for organizations of all sizes to overcome these challenges and ensure that collective feedback translates into meaningful action.