Asking employees what they think is easy. Doing something useful with what they tell you is much harder. That gap between collecting feedback and acting on it was the focus of one of the panel discussions at the Engage Employee Summit: From feedback to force: how employee voice is rewiring engagement.
The panel brought together three people working on employee voice in very different organisations:
They work with very different audiences. Knight Frank's UK workforce covers estate agency, B2B consultancy and a large business services division. Most of ODEON's colleagues work in cinemas and don't have a work email address or phone. Still, the panel agreed on a lot. As Kaz put it, employees are the business, which is easy to forget when cost-cutting begins.
Five years ago, Knight Frank listened to employees in a very traditional way. An external consultant ran a big annual survey, and HR led the process. Results took a couple of months to come back, and leaders then took another couple of months to decide what to do. Employees noticed. "I gave all of this feedback and I've not heard what's being done with it" was a common response.
Now the company runs regular colleague listening through Workday Peakon, under its own campaign name: Let's Be Frank. The biggest change is who owns the process. Leaders and managers now own it, not HR. Each leader has a dashboard of the "people health" of their part of the business, and can track it as closely as they track financial metrics. Leaders choose the problems that matter most to them and track progress over time. That progress shows whether the money spent on people initiatives is paying off.
Kaz saw the same move from her side. Her team took its listening survey from once a year to monthly. When they tried cutting it to every six weeks, there was "an uproar", so they went back to monthly. But asking more often is only half of it. Collecting feedback and then doing nothing with it, she said, is like buying children sweets and then locking them in the cupboard.
The data backs her up. The session chair pointed to last year's Engage for Success survey, which found that organisations that regularly action plan have twice the level of employee engagement of those that don't.
The questions have changed as well. Sanjay noted that surveys used to ask a fixed set of questions. Now they cover wellbeing, DEI, business understanding and capability.
The way results are scored is changing too. In her last corporate role, Kaz moved from employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) to favourability scoring. eNPS uses a scale from -100 to +100, and many people don't understand how it works. Only scores of 9 or 10 count as positive, so colleagues in Norway, Denmark and Finland who gave a 5 because they felt "all right" were dragging the overall score down. A simple favourability scale, with a neutral midpoint, means the same thing to everyone. More importantly, it shows why people feel the way they do, not just how they feel.
No single channel reaches everyone, and every panellist talked about using several. For frontline employees without a work device, Sanjay's advice was to go to where people already are. In a previous role, the people team took iPads to the hubs where frontline staff gathered on their breaks and asked if they'd like to fill in the survey. Discussion groups and manager cascades work too. It takes creativity and resources, but it gets responses.
At ODEON, the latest Peakon survey got a response rate of around 78–80%. A few things made that possible:
Knight Frank's challenge was different. Almost everyone has an email address, so the question was how to hear from people who rarely speak up. Siobhan's answer was to make taking part easy. The survey takes about 15 minutes, or five if you rush, and arrives by email and Teams so people can answer on their phone between meetings. Comments are optional, yet the first rollout produced more than 13,000 of them.
The bigger factor was who promoted it. Before going UK-wide, Knight Frank ran a pilot with very different teams, from vineyards to capital markets to residential sales. The 30 or so leaders in that pilot then championed the rollout to their peers. When a respected colleague says "I found this useful, and here's how I'm using it with my team", that lands far better than another HR initiative from head office. Employees also respond more readily to the people they see every day, who make decisions about their careers.
Sanjay agreed. "Senior leader" means different things to different people. For him it's the executive committee. For cinema staff, it's their general manager or area manager.
Sanjay sets out three parts to closing the feedback loop:
At ODEON, action planning works at several levels. Managers know the business-wide priorities for the next six weeks, and also what matters most locally in their country or cinema.
Kaz added that leaders need to acknowledge uncomfortable findings. "Senior leaders have to leave their ego in their office," she said. It takes courage for a leader to stand up at a town hall and say, "You're right. We need to fix this. We don't know how yet, but we will." Leaders who don't do this lose their teams' respect. Internal communicators have a part to play too: being the honest voice that tells the CEO what they may not want to hear.
To end, the chair asked each panellist what will stop employee voice from becoming a box-ticking exercise.
Siobhan: tie it to the business and measure it. Base the listening on issues that are critical to the business, such as retaining top performers, building skills for new technology, or improving performance. That way it's never seen as a nice-to-have. And what gets measured gets done. Knight Frank set baseline metrics against the UK board's key people priorities, so engagement is tracked and discussed at board level alongside financial performance. "These things are hand and glove," she said. Highly engaged teams deliver more for clients.
Sanjay: culture, capability and judgement. Employees need psychological safety so they can speak openly without it coming back on them. Managers need the toolkits and training to encourage responses and to act on what they hear, because not all of them are natural line managers. And while survey tools and AI can surface trends and themes, it takes people who know the organisation to interpret the data properly and turn it into a real action plan.
Kaz: vulnerability, trust and action. Have the humility to admit when something isn't right. That builds trust, and then you have to do what you said you would.
The chair's conclusion: do these things consistently, deliberately and with people at the heart of it. And measure employee voice the way the business measures everything else, with a people metrics dashboard that carries the same weight as the financial one.
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