Tactics for fixing broken comms feedback loops

Collecting employee feedback is something most communicators are familiar with. Getting leaders to act on it is where most feedback loops break down.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington, earlier this month, Brenda Clark, vice president of employee communications and change management at Baker Hughes, said that she got accustomed to walking into meetings with leadership to go over metrics like click-through rates and media hits. But she didn’t have much hard data on employee insights.

“I was pretty much drowning in feedback and starving for insights,” Clark said. “What I wasn’t comfortable with when I came into employee comms was I just didn’t have that data. It was all anecdotal feedback, and it was all just people’s feelings and people’s perceptions.”

She told the audience that she then pushed to bring change management and employee listening under her purview and then ran the company’s first engagement survey to set a baseline. But a baseline alone wouldn’t make leaders act on the data.