Carol Ngcamphalala June 14, 2023 Employee Engagement 0

Unlocking responsiveness to employee feedback

Change Management Practitioners, Project Managers, Human Resources Practitioners, Organisational Effectiveness Practitioners, Business Change Sponsors, and Managers alike can lose their credibility when there is inadequate or delayed follow-through in response to employee feedback.

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

Empathy is about really listening and accepting the employee feedback for what it is without minimising or dismissing it. As the saying goes, “perception is reality”, whether that perception is well informed or not, well placed or not; the leader needs to be open to accepting their team’s experience expressed through the feedback as their reality. This is the foundation for the leader’s AWARENESS of the change that is expected by the employees.
Integrity is about the leader’s credibility to be trusted with the feedback and their commitment to do something in response through transparent engagement and tangible action. Employees want to be sure that they will not be victimised as a result of sharing their feedback. They also want to know that they are not wasting time with a feedback process that will yield no meaningful results. Integrity is a true test of the leader’s DESIRE to lead and participate in the change required by their team. This does not at all imply that the leader will meet all employee expectations but that they care enough to journey towards the best and most feasible actions with the employees.

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?

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):

Work with Management teams, change Champions, and Human Resources teams to achieve the shift towards meaningful change as guided by the employee engagement survey ( or similar) action plans.
Get alignment with the Change Sponsors (typically HR Executive and the Executive committee) on the overall action plan for the organisation.
Get alignment with each business unit’s Change champions, HR representative, and Executive on the business unit’s specific action plan towards improved engagement score and meaningful impact of the action plan. This includes allocating weighting and responsibility against each committed action item.
Validate and engage employees directly or through Change Champions and Managers to ensure we are hearing the voice of the employee accurately and are keeping them in the loop throughout. This helps to keep the action plan relevant and adaptable because the employee engagement score that was measured and recorded does not stay stagnant until the action plan is implemented or until the next round of surveys.
Perform regular dipstick assessments to measure the impact of the action plan and shifting employee experience and perception.

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:

Lack of clarity on how the change would impact employees, business processes, and ways of work: This meant that the process, tools, and timing for analysis and communicating, and mitigating implied change impacts had to be improved by myself, the project team, and respective business process owners and managers of impacted teams.
Ineffective training: This meant that we had to challenge our training approach, training material, and trainers, as well as how quickly we surfaced training evaluation feedback and responded to it. For example, enhancing the end-user support process proactively was helpful in mitigating training gaps.
Insufficient time allocated for testing and change management activities: This meant proactively negotiating for committing the right business testers, reasonable time to carry out testing, change impact walkthroughs, training, and readiness assessments.
Ineffective support process once the system was implemented: This one gave us a big challenge as evidenced by an ineffective superuser model, support team capacity issues, and unclear responsibilities on some of the logged end-user issues. However, the plan to put additional support for the first two weeks added great value to improving user experience. For example, committing to onsite support and running daily start and end-of-day stand-up meetings with superusers.

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.