Leveraging Employee Feedback In Change Strategies

Even the best leadership teams get surprised by resistance. Not because they’re doing something wrong, but because 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲. When leaders don’t have structured ways to surface what’s really happening, change gets slower, harder, and more painful than it needs to be. Allison Wright and I once worked with a leadership team that had no listening posts to hear how a large transformation was shaping their employees' daily lives. When we set them up, here’s what leaders discovered: ⏳ Employees were working late nights, struggling to keep up. 🤷♂️ Decision-making was painfully slow at every level. 🚧 Each day felt exhausting due to a lack of direction. Without realizing it, leaders had created an environment where change was burning people out instead of moving them forward. But once they saw the full picture, they were able to take action. They: ✅ Gave employees their time back by reprioritizing work. ✅ Clarified decision-making to remove roadblocks. ✅ Rebuilt trust by acting on feedback. Want to uncover hidden risks before they slow you down? Start with these three steps: 1️⃣ Create listening posts. Don’t assume silence is agreement. Use pulse surveys, focus groups, skip-level meetings, or informal check-ins to surface real feedback. 2️⃣ Ask the uncomfortable questions. Instead of “Is this working?” try: "What’s frustrating about this change?" and/or "Where are we slowing you down instead of enabling you?" 3️⃣ Act on what you hear. Employees don’t expect perfection, but they do expect leaders to acknowledge pain points and take action. Even small adjustments rebuild trust. The best leaders don’t just drive change, they expand their visibility. What’s helped you uncover blind spots in change? #ChangeLeadership #Change #Leadership #Blindspots #Visibility

How can you tell if your employee listening programs are any good? At Google, we had a simple question we used to evaluate our own programs: Is the employee feedback representative, constructive, heard and considered? Let’s unpack each principle: 1️⃣ Representative: Are you hearing from a true cross-section of your workforce? Can leaders trust the data? Effective listening goes beyond the usual survey respondents. It actively seeks out diverse perspectives across demographics, departments, tenure, and management levels. When feedback is representative, you gain a holistic understanding of your organization's pulse, enabling more inclusive and impactful decisions. When it’s not, your results won’t have enough credibility to effect change. 2️⃣ Constructive: Is the feedback you're gathering actionable and solution-oriented? Will leaders know how to utilize the data? While it's essential to have channels for critical and negative feedback, you must ensure that it's shared in a way that helps turn insights into actionable improvements. “Employees are unhappy” is not a constructive insight, but  “High-performing employees were twice as likely to be dissatisfied with their opportunities for internal mobility” is much better. 3️⃣ Heard: Do your employees know their feedback is being used?   Acknowledging receipt of feedback is crucial. Simple communication, like "we've received your input and are reviewing it," can significantly boost trust and encourage continued participation. Silence, on the other hand, can breed cynicism. Always share feedback back. It doesn’t have to be question-by-question results (great if it is though!)--but at least share what the key lessons are that leaders have taken away from the feedback. 4️⃣ Considered: Do employees understand how their feedback was evaluated? If their feedback brought change? If not, why? Employees need to see that their feedback is genuinely taken into account. This doesn't mean every suggestion will be implemented. Still, it does mean transparently communicating how feedback is being analyzed, what themes are emerging, and how it's influencing programs and policies. When employees see that their input makes a difference, they become more invested. When they don’t, they become cynical, which can lead to distrust of leaders and undercut business performance. 👩💻 Hi, I'm Mary Kate Stimmler, PhD, and I write about using social science to build great workplaces and careers. (Image created by Whisk/Gemini Labs)

I don’t know what all those gauges and readouts on an airplane dashboard mean, but I do know that I want the pilots flying the aircraft to see them. Otherwise, they’d be flying around the globe pressing buttons and throwing switches on hunches and guesses. It’s the same with change activation. If a business wants its initiatives to actually, you know, work, they need the gauges and readouts of change: two-way feedback loops. Too many transformation strategies stall mid-air because they're missing one critical piece: live feedback from the ground. 🚫 Not the kind that comes 90 days later in a spreadsheet from HR. 🚫 Not the kind that’s missing in a thousand unanswered surveys. 🚫 Not the kind that's too late, showing up in exit interviews from disgruntled employees already moving on to greener pastures. I’m talking about real, instant, interactive, informal feedback. The kind that can be used to course-correct in real time. I call this the “Triple I” strategy: Instant  Interactive  Informal Here's the thing about feedback: 🧭 It’s a compass. It surfaces what people are thinking right now — what they’re confused about, excited by, or flat-out resisting. 📈 It’s a growth engine. It helps teams learn faster and build smarter next time. If they already know that job security is a major concern for one group, why go through the pain of rediscovering that from scratch during the next initiative? 🧠 It’s organizational memory. A well-run feedback system captures insights that can be used again and again. No need to keep asking the same questions if the answers have already been documented. But here’s the challenge: Most companies don’t have the time, tools, or energy to conduct 1:1s, focus groups, and in-person interviews across tens of thousands of people. And survey fatigue is real. You can only send so many Surveymonkey forms before people start auto-clicking “neutral.” Instead, tap into an activity people already do several times every day: interacting with content. When change comms or capability building initiatives are embedded into a change activation platform with built-in interactive functionality, something magical is unlocked: ✅ Questions get asked  ✅ Concerns are shared  ✅ Colleagues respond to each other  ✅ Change champions emerge organically  ✅ A real-time pulse on what is and isn't resonating emerges  Even better? The data is captured automatically. Comment data becomes reports visualized in-platform with sentiment analysis layered on top. Visibility into what’s trending by audience, location, and job level — across the entire organization — without running a single survey. Access to 24/7, large-scale feedback *that doesn’t feel like feedback.* No forms. No follow-ups. Just natural interaction with change content and powerful data to guide your next move. That’s the kind of loop that fuels real agility and speed. Because strategy without feedback isn’t agile - it’s flying blind.