Provide clarity and direction during periods of emergency and abrupt change. During times of emergency, where confusion, fear, and even panic may set in, employees will look to their leaders to provide reassurance, stability, clarity, and direction. Leadership visibility, timely communication, and over-communication are even more crucial under these conditions. Comment Replies is a helpful tool to quickly respond to important concerns and to inform people of more formal actions and policies that may be underway.

Connect people with disparate sources of tools and information. As companies grow in size and complexity, it will become harder for employees to be aware of all resources and information available to them beyond their immediate teams. For example, employees might not be aware of programs that you already have in place (e.g., manager training programs) or that you’re already working on that they can be a part of crafting (e.g., developing an employee resource group).

Address issues related to misconduct, safety, or harassment. If an employee raises issues of misconduct, safety concerns, or harassment, you can quickly connect them to a hotline, or your employee assistance program depending on what is appropriate for the situation.

Seek clarity or additional information. Sometimes comments are vague and additional clarification would make them more actionable. While an employee cannot respond to your comment, you can ask them to come forward if they’re comfortable to provide more insight into their idea or provide an anonymous forum for elaborating.

Simply acknowledge important feedback. Letting the person know they’ve been heard and something will be done about it can be extremely powerful.
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Are employees trained on how to give actionable feedback? If employees leave comments that are combative, replying to them won’t help.

Are leaders and managers prepared to receive feedback?

Are leaders and managers willing to connect and communicate more visibly with their employees?

Would you consider your current action taking process to be effective? If leaders already struggle with understanding and acting on their results, this feature could create an additional layer of complexity and slow down the process even more. The aim of the survey should still be to take action, and Comment Replies shouldn’t detract from that.

Is action taking decentralized or centralized? This will help determine who has access, and the information needed, to respond.

Does your organization already share comments with reports? You’ll reap the more of the benefits of Comment Replies if other employees can also see the leader’s responses in shared reports.
If you feel Comment Replies is not quite right for you based on your answers to the above questions you could consider starting an “Ask Me Anything” or AMA question in the survey this way, leaders can start by replying to questions people have specifically asked that they want a response to in an open channel. This can help build your culture of feedback.

We recommend that Account Administrators enable Comment Replies before launching a survey so that employees are appropriately notified that their comments can be replied to.

In your pre-launch survey communications, inform people that specific leaders will be able to reply to comments and link to our FAQs for employees.

Hold training sessions with Comment Repliers - we’ve created this Quick tip to help you get started - and explain your overall strategy for how this fits into your action-taking process.

In your survey results sessions for employees and in follow-up communications explain the rationale for selecting particular comments to respond to and remind them that not every single one will receive a response.