The Feedback Loop Is Broken. Here’s How HR Leaders Can Fix It

In today’s high-stakes environment where culture shifts can hit the bottom line overnight, slow responses to employee listening are a liability. Shortly after surveying, organizations should close the feedback loop with a clear, “Here’s what we heard from you. Here’s what we’ll do about it.” But the reality is, nearly three-quarters of organizations don’t have clear action steps for their surveys, and 52% of employees feel their feedback is ignored. When employee feedback isn’t addressed or acted on, the resulting insight-to-action gap opens organizations up to preventable performance dips and reputational damage.  

Why the Insight-to-Action Gap Is Growing  

Unfortunately, many HR teams collect feedback without converting it into next steps or communicating their findings. This frustrates employees and trains them not to expect results. So, it’s not surprising that many employees only provide surface-level survey input or don’t respond at all. In a recent survey conducted across multiple industries, Seramount researchers discovered 34% of employees aren’t completely honest in their responses. When survey participation drops or responses get more guarded, engagement scores mask what’s really going on with your workforce—leaving business leaders vulnerable to emerging performance risks. 

Two reasons the insight-to-action gap persists: 

• Slow analysis and reporting: Feedback is outdated by the time results are manually analyzed and shared, making it hard to respond in real time. 
• Action planning bottlenecks: Without clear next steps, good intentions stall after results are shared. Even with clear insights, teams often lack the time or stakeholder buy-in to act on them. 

Employee listening shouldn’t just be a pulse check.  It should be a strategic lever to measure and improve how your business runs. In many companies, employee feedback has highlighted innovation opportunities, surfaced process misalignment, and exposed gaps in the brand promise. Whether your next initiative is feedback-driven or not, it’s almost impossible to improve operations if you lose credibility with your workforce.  

If employees can’t trust you to follow up on their feedback, they’ll wonder if it’s worth their time to answer the next time you ask for input. Employees who trust their organization are 260% more motivated to work and 41% less likely to be absent. However, the employees who disengage from listening efforts eventually pull away from their work, too. That slide from broken trust to disengagement shows up as slower decision-making, lower effort, and higher turnover among top performers. 

Three Steps HR Leaders Can Take to Close the Gap 

When they feel heard, employees are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work. Organizations that act on their feedback see higher employee motivation, stronger alignment to business goals, and measurable productivity improvements over time. Employees don’t expect every suggestion to become policy, but they do expect acknowledgment and visible progress after taking the time to share their input.  

Here’s how to put this in practice: 

1. Tie every listening effort to a business priority. Frame insights in terms your leaders care about such as customer experience, innovation, or risk to demonstrate how feedback impacts business outcomes. 
2. Make “closing the feedback loop” non-negotiable. Set a standard cadence for reporting at the company and team level: what we heard, what we’re doing, what’s still in progress, and why. 
3. Equip managers with the right capabilities. Give managers clear summaries with talking points to explain corporate decisions and department-specific findings to make communications more relevant to their teams. 

Seramount’s Assess360 partnership provides the research-backed recommendations and hands-on support organizations need to effectively close the insight-to-action gap. HR leaders collaborate with our dedicated team of talent experts to interpret feedback, design next steps aligned with your business priorities, and communicate those plans back to your employees. We work alongside your team from assessment through implementation to transform your insights into coordinated actions tailored to your unique context.  

Here are a few follow-up practices we recommend after gathering employee feedback: 

When follow-up is built into your listening strategy, it becomes a powerful performance lever. Closing the feedback loop creates the competitive advantage HR leaders need to lead their organization through change.