Always Ask for Feedback with Kelli Slade, Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Relias

On a recent episode of Reimagining Company Culture, the conversation turned to building a feedback culture that actually changes behavior. The guest, Kelli Slade, brought direct experience to the topic from their day-to-day work, and the conversation moved past the talking points most People teams have heard a hundred times. This recap pulls the practical thread of the discussion together and translates it into the workflows HR leaders are running today.

Kelli's background sets the context for how Kelli thinks about this work. Kelli is a highly accomplished and results driven Career Development Facilitator and Recruiter with 15+ years experience in the areas of Workforce Development, Training and Assessing, Client Management and relationship building with employees, Colleges and Universities, local and state agencies, communities and organizations. She is recognized as a hands-on partner who collabor. That experience shapes the perspective the episode brings to building a feedback culture that actually changes behavior, and the recap below stays grounded in the workflows leaders are running, not abstractions.

The conversation touches on the basics any People team is already managing, including employee engagement fundamentals. The recap below assumes that grounding and focuses on the operating moves leaders make on top of it.

Most of the framework below holds up across industries and company stages. The specifics vary; the underlying mechanics rarely do.

Why most feedback programs fail before the first survey

Asking for feedback is the easy part. Acting on it is the work most People teams do not have the bandwidth for. The result is the pattern Kelli sees over and over: a great engagement survey, a thoughtful set of action items, and a quiet six months where nothing visible changes. By the time the next survey lands, employees have learned the lesson, feedback goes into a black box.

What separates feedback cultures from feedback theater is closing the loop. Every piece of feedback gets a visible response, even when the response is no. SHRM analysis of declining employee engagement reports that companies with regular feedback mechanisms see 14.9 percent lower turnover, but that benefit only shows up when employees can see action tied to their input.

How leaders work through building a feedback culture that actually changes behavior

How often should HR collect feedback to be useful?

Two layers. Annual or semi-annual deep surveys for trend data. Continuous lightweight pulses, five questions, monthly, for early signals. The deep survey gives you direction. The pulses tell you whether the changes are landing.

Gallup data on leadership and engagement found that as of mid-2025, 32 percent of U.S. employees report being engaged at work. That number does not move on annual cycles. It moves on the weeks between cycles, when managers either follow through on what the survey told them or do not.

What kinds of feedback should HR ignore?

None of it. But not all feedback is data. Anonymous comments without context point to themes; they do not prove a problem. The job of the People team is to triangulate, pulse comments plus exit interviews plus case data plus stay interviews, until a theme has enough corroboration to act on.

Single-source feedback is signal, not evidence. Multi-source convergence is evidence.

What actually works in practice

The pattern across companies that handle building a feedback culture that actually changes behavior well comes down to three operational habits.

• Always tell people what changed. Even if the answer is no, name the request and explain the decision. Silence is what kills survey response rates.
• Measure response rate as a leading indicator. Falling response rates predict falling engagement six months out. They are the canary.
• Tie one manager OKR to feedback follow-through. If managers are not measured on closing the loop, the loop will not close.

None of these are aspirational. They are checklists the strongest People teams run on a cadence, and the consistency is what makes the difference.

What looks like a culture decision from the outside is usually the cumulative effect of those three habits, applied without theatrics.

Where Employee Relations fits

AllVoices employee engagement solution programs work best when the case data, the survey data, and the stay interview data live in the same system. AllVoices pulse surveys surface the early signals. AllVoices employee survey tool provide the depth. AllVoices data and insights dashboard ties the two together and lets HR show leadership exactly where the patterns are emerging.

The companies pulling this off rarely run it on memory. They run it on infrastructure. AllVoices HR case management platform centralizes the case data; AllVoices data and insights dashboard surfaces the patterns nobody catches manually; AllVoices Vera AI co-pilot for ER teams accelerates the response time so the work is finishable. Together they cover the operating layer that this episode keeps pointing at.

How does Employee Relations support a feedback culture?

By making it safe to escalate hard feedback. When employees know there is a AllVoices speak-up hotline channel that protects them, the survey comments get more honest. ER also closes the loop on the most sensitive feedback, the kind that surfaces in a AllVoices employee helpline call rather than an anonymous form.

The supporting research is consistent. Independent analysis from Gallup data on leadership and engagement points the same direction the episode does. The combination of operating discipline and outside data is what gets People leaders past the slogan stage.

For a concrete example of how this plays out at scale, look at Intercom's people-first culture story, which shows the same operational pattern in a real customer environment.

The takeaway holds across companies of different sizes and industries. The teams that turn this episode's lesson into operating practice are the ones that name a target metric, run it on a cadence, and refuse to let activity stand in for outcomes. The metric does not have to be elaborate. It has to be visible to the people who can move it, and reviewed often enough that nothing falls off the radar for a quarter.

The other consistent pattern is that the work compounds. Year one of any of these practices feels like overhead. Year three is when the retention, engagement, and case-data signals start telling a clearly different story. People leaders who hold the line through the early part of the curve tend to be the ones who have the receipts when leadership asks for evidence later.

Frequently Asked Questions About Building A Feedback Culture That Actually Changes Behavior

What's the best frequency for employee feedback surveys?

Most People teams land on a hybrid: one full engagement survey twice a year, a five-question pulse every month, and stay interviews on a rolling basis. The frequency matters less than the cadence of follow-up.

How do you make anonymous feedback actionable?

Cluster the comments by theme and team. A single comment is a data point. Three comments from the same team about the same issue is a signal that warrants a conversation with the manager.

Should managers see their team's individual responses?

Aggregate scores yes, individual responses no. Anonymity has to be defended at the team-size threshold; below five respondents, the report should roll up to the next level.

How do you handle negative feedback about a specific manager?

Treat it like any other case intake. Document, investigate, and follow the same standard you would for a formal complaint. Anonymous manager feedback that points to a pattern is the start of a case, not the end.

What's the ROI of a strong feedback culture?

Multiple SHRM and Gallup datasets put it in the range of 14 to 22 percent lower turnover, plus measurable gains in productivity and discretionary effort. The cost of building it is mostly manager time.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Kelli's point is that feedback culture is not a survey tool. It is a follow-through habit. The companies that get it right are the ones that treat 'what changed because you told us' as the only metric that matters.

Everything else, the platform, the question bank, the dashboards, is supporting infrastructure for that single discipline.

See how AllVoices supports the kind of culture work this episode is about.