Congratulations. You’ve run an employee engagement survey and received detailed feedback from your people. Now, the real work begins — translating insights into action.

It’s natural to be eager to jump right in and start making changes. After all, your employees took the time to share their thoughts, and you want to show them you’re listening.

However, if you move too quickly without deeply understanding what the results of your employee engagement survey are telling you, you risk creating as many new problems as you fix.

It’s important to approach this with the same thoughtful mindset you’d use when developing your company’s next quarterly financial plan.

By following these eight steps, you can ensure your response to survey feedback is meaningful, well-communicated, and creates lasting, positive change.

1. Review your survey results thoroughly

Start by reviewing your results at a high level. Executive presence when reviewing the data leads to increased buy-in from the leadership team, supporting the organization’s goal and making positive changes based on feedback.

Look at data across demographics to identify disparities in employee experience. A department or location demographic can help you pinpoint disparities in employee experience. When you take this more granular look at data, executives get a clearer picture of what employees are telling them. Demographics extend beyond race and gender to include various unique and creative categories, such as:

• Planned Tenure: How long do employees plan on working for the organization? This can range from “1 More Year” to “5-10 More Years.”
• Employee Net Promoter Score(eNPS): How likely are employees to recommend the organization as a place to work to family and friends, on a scale from 0 to10?
• Employee Resource Group (ERG) Membership: Are employees part of an Employee Resource Group? The options are simply “Yes” or “No.”
• Performance Rating: What is the performance rating of employees? This can be used to assess the experience of top performers and identify patterns among low performers. Understanding whether your high performers are happy and likely to stay, and whether low performers lack visibility or clarity, is crucial.

• Ask yourself:

  • Do departments or other key demographic groups experience the workplace differently?
  • What are the biggest gaps between employee perceptions and reality?
  • What strengths can you build upon?

2. Reflect on the feedback

Survey results provide invaluable insight into your company culture and leadership. Some feedback may be difficult to hear, but the most effective leaders embrace it as an opportunity to learn and improve.

Encourage leaders to take time to absorb and process employee feedback before responding. This reflection period allows leaders to process feedback with an open mind and avoid reactive decision-making.

Questions to consider:

• Which feedback aligns with my own observations, and which surprises me?
• How might employees interpret our response — or lack of response — to this feedback? What steps can we take to show we are truly listening?
• What feedback feels most difficult to address? What barriers might be preventing action, and how can we overcome them?
• What strengths are emerging from the feedback? How can we amplify these to reinforce a positive workplace culture?

“The way you communicate your survey results sets the tone for how engaged employees will be in the process”

3. Align leadership & set intentions

Once leaders have had time for reflection, it’s time to align on priorities. What key themes emerged? What changes will have the most meaningful impact?

Key questions for leadership:

• What kind of culture do we want to foster?
• Do our current policies and practices support that culture?
• How do our survey results align with our company’s strategic goals?

Establishing shared intentions helps ensure that your response is strategic and aligned with your organization’s long-term goals.

4. Communicate transparently

Your employees are eager to learn about your results and what’s next. The way you communicate your survey results sets the tone for how engaged employees will be in the process.

Best practices for transparent communication:

• Start with a message from senior leadership summarizing key insights.
• Thank employees for their participation and reaffirm your commitment to action.
• Outline next steps with a clear expected timeline. Including how employees can stay involved.
• Leaders at all levels take the opportunity to discuss results transparently with their teams in a way that encourages open conversations by inviting employees to continue to share their perspectives.

5. Conduct Listening Sessions

Numbers tell a critical part of the story, but change happens through conversations. Conduct listening sessions to deepen your understanding of employee feedback and involve them in the solution-building process.

Tips for effective listening sessions:

• Reinforce trust by ensuring employees that discussions will remain within the group.
• Keep sessions informal and open-ended to encourage honest feedback.
• Ask employees what improvements would have the biggest impact on their experience.
• Gather real examples of when efforts are working well and build on those successes.

These sessions reinforce that employee voices matter and provide crucial insights that survey data alone can’t capture.

6. Identify focus areas for improvement & establish specific plans

Rather than try to fix everything at once, prioritize one or two focus areas. This ensures efforts are targeted and impactful. Often, one area is identified as an organization-wide focus with the second area specifically relating to department/leader level results. The best strategies focus on how management is leading.

For example, survey results that reflect improvement opportunities in communication may indicate a need for meaningful dialogue (asking questions, being present, eye contact) rather than a need for more meetings and emails.

Here are some key steps:

• Define specific and challenging yet attainable goals for improvement
• Document commitments and communicate them clearly
• Assign accountability partners (such as managers or HR business partners) to track progress
• Establish a timeline for evaluating success

7. Take action

Now, it’s time to put your plan into motion. The groundwork you’ve laid ensures that changes are strategic, data-driven, and informed by employee input.

Action leads to trust. Employees will be watching to see if leadership follows through on commitments. Be intentional about keeping your workforce updated and engaged throughout the year.

8. Measure progress and keep the feedback loop open

Continuous improvement is key. You may need to adjust and correct course as you go, and that’s okay. Regularly check in with employees to gauge how changes are landing.

Here are some ways to track progress:

• Conduct pulse surveys to measure targeted areas
• Host follow-up listening sessions to gather ongoing feedback
• Discuss progress in team meetings by asking questions, such as:

• • Are you experiencing improvement in this area?
  • What is working? What are examples of where this is happening well?
  • What additional ideas for improvement would you recommend?

Your CSM is here to help you strengthen that connection and keep your feedback loop thriving. Reach out for resources or guidance today about how to listen now, or discuss your survey strategy with your CSM today. 

Not a customer already? Built on more than 30 years of research and used by every company on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work ForⓇ List, our employee engagement platform will help you drive positive change to your company culture. Learn more today.

How to avoid employee survey fatigue

1. Thank people

Your people are busy, but they care about their work, workplace and teammates so much that they took the time to provide feedback on the experiences they’re having. Thank them like you would if they had handed you their survey as they walked out of a meeting.

This is so critical because it demonstrates you value their time and their feedback. The power of the “thank you” is doubled because it will both ensure they continue to provide feedback in the future and encourage more people to participate the next time they’re invited.

2. Communicate

After a survey closes, maybe as part of the thank you in #1, let people know what will happen next…and then make sure to follow through.

3. Create links between surveys and programs

This is the single most powerful thing you can do to eliminate survey fatigue. Nothing causes people to stop responding to surveys more than a feeling that no one does anything with the feedback.

What’s important to remember here is not whether you think you’re acting on this feedback, but whether your people think so. Ensure they know how new programs and procedures relate back to feedback that was provided.

4. Leverage data from multiple sources

It’s a best practice to leverage more than one source of data to inform your people programs and practices. (For the record, adding the ���[�ʘ���® Trust Index® survey into your employee engagement and talent management strategies is a best practice, too. It allows you to quantify your employee experience and hopefully earn Certification as a great workplace... bonus!)

In creating connections between the results of your different surveys, you’ll demonstrate that you’re listening, that collecting feedback will be an ongoing process, and that you’re committed to better understanding and focusing on the areas most important to creating a great employee experience for everyone.

5. Get specific

You can optimize the analytics of the Trust Index survey by adding custom elements to take a pulse on the concepts, behaviors, or populations(s) that you identified as noteworthy from previous surveys, or to set baselines for future comparison.

Doing this ensures that in a single survey you will get a sharper view into the employee experience. You'll also earn recognition as ���[�ʘ���-Certified™, and benchmark your culture against our proven For All™ Model and Methodology. 

Getting specific also helps you check in on whether any changes you’ve made or actions you’ve taken based on previous feedback are having the impact you expected. 

If you would like to discuss how to create a company culture where feedback drives action at your company, please reach out. We'd love to help.