Feedback Fueling Change - Aimee Slade, Head of People Operations at Vanilla

Feedback gets gathered everywhere. Quarterly engagement surveys, exit interviews, slack reactions, the occasional anonymous note in someone's inbox. Almost none of it changes anything. That gap between collecting feedback and using it is what Aimee Slade, Head of People Operations at Vanilla, picks apart on Reimagining Company Culture.

Aimee was a founding member at Vanilla, which means she has watched the company go from a handful of people to a full team while trying to keep the culture honest. Her thesis is simple. Feedback is fuel only if there is a real engine attached to it. Most companies have a fuel tank with no engine, then wonder why the car won't move.

Why Most Employee Feedback Programs Stall

The pattern repeats. HR runs a survey. Results land in a deck. Leadership reads the deck, picks one or two themes, and announces a working group. Six months later nobody on the team can say what changed because of the feedback they gave. The next survey arrives. Participation drops. The cycle continues.

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace research shows manager engagement itself dropped five points between 2024 and 2025. If your managers are not engaged, the feedback they collect from their teams will not be acted on either. The problem is structural, not motivational.

Putting DEI at the Center of People Decisions

Aimee is direct about where DEI belongs. It is not a separate workstream or a Q3 initiative. It is the lens applied to comp bands, promotion calibrations, hiring panels, and exit data. When DEI lives in a side committee, it gets crowded out by anything urgent. When it sits inside the operating cadence, it actually shapes outcomes.

That framing maps onto how AllVoices thinks about DEI as an embedded HR discipline rather than an event series. The data on harassment underscores the urgency. EEOC data shows that roughly 90% of people who experience workplace harassment never file a formal complaint. The feedback you actually receive is a fraction of what is happening.

What Belongs in a Real Feedback System?

Three components. First, multiple intake paths so an employee can choose how they want to surface a concern: through a manager, through HR, anonymously, or through a peer. Anonymous reporting matters most for the issues people will not raise face-to-face. Second, a routing layer that gets the feedback to someone who can act. Third, a closeout step where the company tells the team what changed. No closeout means the trust evaporates.

How Often Should Companies Pulse Their Teams?

More often than annually, less often than weekly. Quarterly is the safe default for full engagement surveys. Monthly pulse surveys focused on a single topic work well between full cycles. The cadence matters less than the discipline of acting on what comes back.

Trust as the Operating Currency of a Remote Team

Vanilla is a remote-first company, which Aimee acknowledges sets a higher bar for trust-building. You cannot rely on hallway conversations to flag tension. You cannot read body language in a Slack thread. The company has to make trust an explicit deliverable instead of a side effect of proximity.

The practical version looks like clear escalation rules, manager training on giving direct feedback over video, and a documented commitment to work-life balance that survives quarterly pressure. Companies that try to graft an in-office culture onto a remote workforce break trust faster than they build it.

What Actually Works for Feedback Cultures

Tell Teams What Changed and Why

The single biggest shift is the close-the-loop ritual. After every survey, every focus group, every set of stay interviews, the leader who collected the input sends back a short note: here is what we heard, here is what we are doing, here is what we are not doing and why. Teams forgive bad news. They do not forgive silence.

Separate Listening From Resolution

Most companies fold both into the manager job. That is too much weight. Listening tools (surveys, anonymous channels, skip-levels) sit with HR. Resolution tools (case management, investigations, performance plans) sit with ER and managers together. Mixing them produces feedback fatigue and unresolved cases.

Treat Stay Interviews Like Customer Research

The discipline that goes into customer interviews almost never makes it into stay interviews. Same open questions, same sample, same synthesis. Run them quarterly with twenty employees and you will catch the pattern that the engagement survey will not surface for another year.

Where Employee Relations Fits in a Feedback Culture

Feedback that crosses into harassment, discrimination, or retaliation is no longer feedback. It is an ER case, and it needs the structure of case management workflows that track intake to resolution. The mistake most companies make is letting these reports sit in the same bucket as engagement complaints. The handling is different, the stakes are different, and the legal exposure is different.

How Vera Helps ER Teams Without Replacing Judgment

Vera, the AllVoices AI co-pilot, classifies incoming reports, summarizes long case files, and surfaces patterns across cases. The ER specialist still makes every judgment call, still talks to every party, still writes every closure note. The AI cuts the time spent reading and drafting, which is where most ER teams lose the day.

Frequently Asked Questions About Employee Feedback

What is the difference between engagement and feedback?

Engagement is the outcome you measure. Feedback is one of the inputs that shapes it. A team can give plenty of feedback and still be disengaged if nothing visibly changes because of it.

Should anonymous feedback be a permanent option?

Yes. Anonymity is the only path some employees will use, especially for issues involving a direct manager or a senior leader. The companies that remove it usually see complaint volume crater, which they misread as success.

How do you handle feedback that contradicts itself across teams?

Read it as a signal that the underlying issue is local, not company-wide. Push the resolution to the manager and the local HRBP, not to a corporate-wide policy change.

What is the right response time on a feedback submission?

Acknowledge within twenty-four hours. Resolve in the timeline appropriate to the issue. The acknowledgement is the trust-builder, not the resolution speed.

How do you keep DEI feedback from becoming siloed?

Route it through the same intake and ER workflows as everything else, with tagging that makes the patterns visible. Siloed DEI feedback is what creates the gap between what ERG members say and what leadership thinks is happening.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Aimee's framing of feedback as fuel is useful because it forces a sharper question. What is the engine? For most companies, the answer is missing. Surveys without resolution loops, DEI committees without operating authority, anonymous channels without follow-through: each piece on its own does not move the culture.

The companies that turn feedback into change tend to look the same. They have a single intake layer, real ER capacity behind it, and a discipline of telling teams what happened with their input. None of that requires a massive budget. It requires the operating commitment to actually use what you collect, and the patience to keep doing it for the months it takes for the team to believe the change is real.

See how AllVoices helps people teams turn feedback into resolved cases and visible patterns.