5 Tips on How to Act on Employee Survey Results

Acting on results (to drive positive change) is the whole point of running employee surveys.

And employee feedback is only as useful as what you do with it:

So, why is to so difficult?

When I talk to HR managers, I often hear how discouraging it feels is to spend weeks designing a perfect survey only to feel overwhelmed about either:

• the amount of results coming in
• being the only one in charge of doing something about the feedback

Then, it’s like a snowball effect:

👉 The whole quarter or year passes by since your survey and not much has been done OR

👉 You try to implement some actions, but it’s been hard to follow through on them AND

👉 Your employees feel nothing is changing and don’t feel heard. Why should they even bother giving feedback in your future surveys? Your participation rate drops and employees are disappointed.

That’s tough, but I think it comes down to having a clear process from the get-go.

Here’s where I think things often “break down”:

• There might process for designing and running a survey, but not for translating results into actions
• Results are often complex and it takes time and knowledge to interpret them
• There’s no clear overview of what needs to be done or who is in charge
• You don’t know whether what you implemented worked because there’s no tracking of progress and the effectiveness of initiatives
• Initiatives are often too ambitious or large making them hard to achieve

The good news is that many of these things can be fixed with a better-defined process.

So, here I’ve curated five tips on how to improve it and make sure you’re not alone in the humongous task of acting on survey results.

Here’s a sneak peak:

1. Mindset shift

What’s the problem?

HR Managers are often responsible for not only running employee surveys, but also of acting on the feedback. And it makes little sense when you think about it, especially for large companies.

For instance, how can you (as an HR leader) act on a specific feedback that concerns one of your regional managers in another country? Or when it’s about safety issues in one of your factories? Or about benefits package in one of your branches? You can and should support, but you can’t act alone. And that’s a problem.

How to change it?

The only way to tackle this is to switch the mindset:

From: Running employee surveys being an HR-only initiative

To: Seeing surveys as part of company-wide employee listening project that deserves its own strategy and process.

The only way for to make a change is when leaders across departments take initiative and act autonomously while HR is there to support, manage the process, and see it through.

Example: Leschago, a 140-year old global logistics company, approaches employee listening as a cross-department, collaborative initiative. It is based in Bremen, but is active in 24 countries and has 4,000 employees, yet they recognize the importance of acting on survey results in unison. After 84% of their employees participated in their latest survey, the team leads sat together to brainstorm solutions.

2. Involve leadership from the start

What’s the problem?

Leaders are busy and it’s hard to involve them and add tasks to their to-do list, especially when it’s unclear for them why it’s crucial and how they can get involved.

How to change it?

The only way to drive change is to make leaders part of the entire employee listening strategy:

• Sell it internally - show them why you’re running the surveys, what you’re hoping to get, how it can help them engage their teams, and what the risks of not doing anything are
• Make them creators - bring them into the process of designing a survey to foster ownership from the start. They can think of questions to ask based on insights they’re hoping to get
• Facilitate access to survey results - give them access to results and help them personalize their dashboards. Tools like Honestly offer role-based user access (for regional managers for example) and customized dashboards for people to see the results of the highest interest.

• Make it easier for them to act on feedback - support them in the process between results and setting up actions. For example, Honestly just launched a new feature in their tool called Initiatives. It makes it easy to start a new initiative (in the context of specific survey question), assign an owner and track its progress in a Kanban-style board like this:

Example

After your survey is finished, plan a meeting with the leadership team to: 1. Discuss results, 2. Jointly look into solutions. Those meetings are more effective when there’s a dedicated moderator (HR manager or an Agile Coach) to make sure the conversation is constructive, focused on tangible solutions, and has clear next steps with assigned ownership.

3. Make your actions specific

What’s the problem

When employees share their insights in a survey, they’re highlighting pain points or areas where they believe change is needed. One of the most common mistakes I see in HR and organizational feedback follow-ups is being too general. Vague actions often lack the specificity needed to drive change.

If leadership responds with vague measures, it can lead to frustration, disengagement, and a perception that their feedback wasn’t taken seriously.

How to change it

Take time to define your actions.

Well-defined actions demonstrate that you’ve listened and are taking tangible steps toward improvement.

Poorly defined actions like “Make the workplace friendlier” fail because they don’t clarify what’s actually being changed or who is responsible.

On the other hand, specific actions like “Introduce a weekly peer recognition system starting next month” not only set a clear goal but also make it possible to track progress and evaluate the results.

Example

Let’s look at some bad examples and then explore how they can be improved:

In each of these examples, the vague action doesn’t provide a clear path forward. There’s no accountability or timeline. The improved actions, however, specify the what, when, and how, making it easier for HR or management to implement and monitor the change.

4. Make sure your initiatives are actionable

What’s the problem

Even if your actions are descriptive, they can still fall through if there’s no timeline, clear ownership, and focus on impact.

How to change it

Make sure your actions are not only as concrete and detailed as possible, but also measurable, time-bound and have an owner who is responsible for driving them.

This way they provide clear expectations and allow you to measure progress effectively. They also build trust between employees and leadership. Employees are more likely to feel heard when they see their feedback transformed into tangible steps, which can lead to higher morale and more engagement in future surveys.

• Be Specific: Avoid broad terms like “improve” or “increase.” Instead, describe the specific change or behavior you want to see.
• Set a Timeline: Every action should have a deadline or time frame to ensure accountability. We also have an additional field to highlight the importance (due date).
• Assign Responsibility: Ensure it’s clear who is responsible for implementing the action.
• Focus on Impact: Think about how the action will address the core issue. Will it lead to measurable improvements?

Example

At Honestly, we use our new Initiative feature to make sure our actions are specific, time-bound, and have clear ownership.

When we add a new initiative, we try to describe it in detail, assign an owner, add a deadline, and provide notes with next steps.

5. Track progress

What’s the problem

Defining actions well is only part of the equation. Another one is following up on them. Without this important step, it’s impossible to say what worked and how it impacted your metrics.

When I talk to HR Managers, I sometimes realize that if actions are not repeatedly tracked, it might indicate a deeper problem such as lack of resources of low commitment from the leadership. If this is the case, I recommend to address it early on, even before designing your survey.

How to change it

Make sure you document your actions in a way that’s transparent and leaders have a full access to. Then, set up regular check-ins to monitor the progress of your initiatives. It’s important to attach each action to a metric so that you can track it over time.

In Honestly, you can add initiatives that are directly linked to survey questions which means that if you run the survey again, you’ll be able to monitor how the metric changed over time:

Example

Here’s what I practice with my Honestly customer success team:

• Regular Check-Ins: Set up bi-weekly or monthly check-ins to monitor the implementation of our actions.
• Feedback Loop: Ask my team if they’ve noticed improvements after the measures have been put in place.
• KPI Tracking: For certain actions, I track relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) like employee engagement scores, turnover rates, or feedback from follow-up surveys.

Final Words

When conducting employee surveys, gathering feedback is only the first step. The real impact comes from how you act on that feedback.

If there are three core takeaways, it would be those:

• Addressing feedback is only possible when it’s a collaborative effort between HR managers to enforce the process and leaders who can actually implement concrete actions where it’s most necessary.
• Poorly defined or vague actions often result in little to no improvement. In contrast, clear, concrete actions provide a roadmap to real progress, helping to address the core issues raised by employees and driving organizational change.
• When actions are defined, it’s important to link them to specific KPIs you want to impact as well as monitor and follow up on their progress regularly