Employee surveys are a powerful tool for gathering employee feedback, but collecting employee feedback is only the first step. What you do after the survey closes, including how you review, discuss, and act on feedback, determines whether survey results lead to meaningful improvements or fade into the background.
A review of 53 studies of various organizations by Huebner & Zacher found that taking action on employee survey results leads to higher job satisfaction and engagement over time, whereas failing to act shows little to no improvement.
To turn survey feedback into action, you need to decide who will be responsible for reviewing results, identifying priorities, and driving change. Most successful organizations rely on a mix of top-down leadership decisions and bottom-up input from employees and managers at all levels. Striking the right balance between these approaches can make the difference between surveys that drive lasting change and those that don’t.
At the center of it all is a clear, structured action plan that helps you turn survey feedback into meaningful improvements across your organization.
The importance of post-survey action planning
Creating an employee survey results action plan is one of the most important steps you can take to show employees that their feedback matters. Without a clear plan, it’s easy for valuable insights to be forgotten or ignored — and when employees don’t see follow-through, they’ll lose trust and confidence, making them less likely to share their opinions in the future.
With a well-structured action plan, you can:
- Turn feedback into action. The objective of your employee survey should be to improve the employee experience. An action plan helps you decide what changes to make and how to make them.
- Keep your employees engaged. When employees see that their feedback leads to real improvements, they feel heard and valued. This increases their trust in leadership and willingness to participate in future surveys.
- Create accountability. With clear owners and timelines for follow-up actions, you can make sure survey results drive real impact.
- Align leadership and teams. An action plan helps connect organizational-wide goals with team-level improvements, ensuring changes happen at every level, not just at the top.
Most importantly, your action plan sends a clear message: You’re not just asking for feedback, but you’re committed to acting on it. That’s what builds a culture where employees feel heard, respected, and motivated to contribute. Of course, how you develop and implement that action plan depends on how your organization approaches decision-making. And that usually starts at the top.
Top-down approaches to employee survey results action plans
If your organization has 500 employees or more, it is important to think about how you will address survey results at both the organizational level and within individual teams. Many surveys highlight themes like leadership, professional growth, and internal communication. When the same issues come up across multiple departments, you need a consistent approach to address them.
This is where a top-down approach comes in.
A top-down approach to acting on employee survey results means senior leaders and HR take the lead in reviewing, identifying organization-wide priorities, and setting the overall direction for how your organization will respond. This approach helps align the entire organization with the same goals.
However, a top-down approach does not mean leadership works in isolation. Employee involvement helps ensure that action plans reflect the real challenges employees face daily.
Form a cross-functional working group
One of the most effective ways to involve employees in a top-down process is to form a cross-functional working group. This group brings together individuals from different departments, levels, and locations to help turn survey feedback into meaningful action.
Select who will be in your working group. Form a small team of 8 to 12 employees representing different departments, locations, and job levels — from frontline staff to senior leaders. A mix of perspectives ensures balanced input and reduces the risk of dominant voices taking over.
- Select who will be in your working group. Form a small team of 8 to 12 employees representing different departments, locations, and job levels — from frontline staff to senior leaders. A mix of perspectives ensures balanced input and reduces the risk of dominant voices taking over.
- Set a clear mandate. Give the group a defined purpose and scope, including:
- Responsibilities: Review survey results, identify key engagement drivers and recommend solutions.
- Deliverables: A prioritized action plan with clear owners and deadlines.
- Timeline: Specific deadlines for reviewing results, brainstorming, and finalizing recommendations.
- Involve senior leaders as equal participants. Senior leaders should participate alongside employees, not lead the group. Their role is to share organizational context, contribute ideas, and advocate for the group’s proposals with executive leadership.
- Adapt for larger organizations. For large or global companies, decide whether to:
- Use one central working group for global consistency.
- Create regional or departmental groups to address local needs while aligning with broader company goals.
- Keep communication open and transparent. Regularly update leadership and employees on the group’s progress, and ensure the final action plan is shared broadly so employees see how their feedback leads to action.
Host action planning workshops
Action planning workshops bring employees and leaders together to review survey results, identify key issues, and brainstorm solutions as a group. These collaborative sessions help turn employee feedback into clear, practical actions.
Workshops work best with 20 to 50 participants from different departments and levels. This ensures a good mix of perspectives while keeping the session manageable.
A skilled facilitator, either internal or external, helps guide the process. The facilitator’s role is to:
- Keep the discussion focused on survey results and key themes
- Create space for all employees to contribute, not just the loudest voices
- Lead the group toward realistic, prioritized actions
A successful workshop should result in:
- Five or six priority actions that address key engagement drivers
- Clear ownership for each action
- A timeline for implementation
- Alignment between leadership and employees on next steps
⭐ Workshop activity: Participative Management
One way to make action planning workshops more impactful is to use real survey results as the starting point. Bring in the bottom three scoring areas from your latest engagement survey. Topics like career growth, learning, or wellness often show up, and they offer valuable entry points for honest conversation and creative problem solving.
After reviewing survey results, you identify the three lowest scoring areas—let’s say career growth, learning, and wellness. Now, bring these into an action planning workshop and ask employees these two key questions:
- Why do you think this scored low?
- What would you recommend we do to improve it?
As people share, themes begin to emerge. Around career growth, for example, employees might say they don’t know what roles exist internally, what skills are required, or when opportunities become available. HR may be able to provide context or gather ideas that directly influence future programs and policies. These workshops often surface practical ideas, while also highlighting roadblocks employees face.
While this type of structured, leadership-supported process works well for addressing organizational-wide issues, it is not always enough to solve challenges within individual teams. That is where a bottom-up approach comes in.
Bottom-up approaches to employee survey results action plans
A bottom-up approach focuses on giving individual teams and departments the flexibility to review their survey results and develop tailored action plans that directly address their specific challenges. Some issues (like leadership communication or career development) might show up across the whole organization. Other concerns are often unique to specific teams or functions. For example, what frustrates your sales team may ultimately differ from what’s holding back your IT department.
This is why a one-size-fits-all approach does not work when acting on survey results. By allowing managers and employees to create team-specific action plans, you ensure the solutions actually fit the daily reality of each group.
To support this, you can:
- Provide a simple process for managers to follow. This could include step-by-step guides, templates for documenting action plans, and sample agendas for team discussions.
- Encourage team-led discussions. Give managers tips on how to hold open, honest conversations about survey feedback with their teams. When employees feel comfortable speaking up, they are more likely to get feedback that leads to real business improvement.
- Track and celebrate progress. Regularly check in on how teams are following through on their plans. Recognize teams that make meaningful changes based on employee feedback.
When you combine top-down and bottom-up approaches to acting on employee input, you create a system where employees and leaders work together to drive change.
How taking action drives success at American Eagle Financial Credit Union
At American Eagle Financial Credit Union, leaders and employees worked together to turn survey feedback into meaningful change. With the support of WorkTango Action Plans, their focus on collaborative action led to:
- 100% improvement in leaders taking action on employee survey feedback
- 18-point increase in employee survey participation
- 12-point increase in employee engagement
- 23-point increase in action scores (from 43 to 66)
By making action planning a clear priority — and ensuring both leaders and employees had defined roles in reviewing feedback and shaping solutions — American Eagle built a culture of transparency, accountability, and trust.
When you give both leadership and employees a role in shaping and acting on survey results, you create a balanced process that drives real improvements. But even the best plans can fall apart without a few key practices to keep everything on track.
Best practices for responding to employee survey results
Once your action plans are in place, it is important to follow a transparent, organized process to keep everything moving forward.
Here are best practices to follow as you put your plans into action:
- Share survey results quickly. Employees should hear what you learned and what will happen next soon after the survey closes.
- Use technology to manage action plans. A centralized tool can help you assign owners, track progress, and keep leadership and employees aligned.
- Assign clear ownership. Each action item should have someone responsible for driving it forward.
- Check progress regularly. Schedule regular reviews to assess what has been completed, what’s behind schedule, and where adjustments are needed.
- Communicate updates along the way. Keep employees in the loop so they can see how their feedback is turning into tangible change.
- Celebrate progress. When employee feedback directly leads to improvements, make sure you recognize those wins.
- Restart the process. Employee feedback isn’t one-and-done. After you take action, follow up with another survey to check progress, gather new insights, and keep the conversation going. Continuous feedback and action create a culture of improvement where employees know their voices matter.
Staying organized and transparent not only helps you follow through on survey results but also builds trust in the process and encourages employees to keep sharing honest feedback in the future.
