Acknowledging comments

Knowing you’re being listened to is an essential part of any conversation. It’s no wonder then, that sharing feedback confidentially – as is the norm with employee engagement surveys – often doesn’t feel like a dialogue that will lead to action.

Taking the time to raise an issue you care about and not knowing if anyone has read your words can be very disheartening. Yet, in history, those gathering the feedback have had little choice.

At Peakon we set out to change this with the acknowledgments option. We now see that this simple tool is one of the biggest drivers of high participation in survey rounds, and also how the quality of feedback (the level of detail, and helpfulness) can be greatly improved when acknowledgments show people they are being listened to.  

This article covers:

• How to acknowledge
• Filtering acknowledged comments

How to acknowledge

When comments appear on the Dashboard or under Comments, you will have the ability to choose from one of five responses by clicking Acknowledge:

• Great idea
• Thanks for sharing
• I agree
•  Working on it
• Would love to talk in person

Note that, after a survey round closes, managers will still be able to acknowledge and respond to comments, and they will also be able to interact with comments from past rounds at any point in time, as long as they have access to them.

The employee that provided the feedback will be emailed with one of the acknowledgments selected (reminding them that their feedback remains confidential). Once a comment has been acknowledged, it is not possible to undo this action. The employee will have already received the email notification through a randomly generated delay, to further protect the employee's identity. However, employees will not have an option to reply back directly to the Manager. If the employee replies to the email itself, they will not receive a reply, because it is an automated no-reply email.

If an employee is answering the survey through kiosk mode and they do not have an email address on the system, they will not be able to receive an email notification, however, a manager can still acknowledge the comment.

Filtering acknowledged comments

From within the comments page, you can have a quick view of comments that have been acknowledged or not by selecting "Acknowledged"  at the top of your screen and then selecting either "Only comments I’ve acknowledged" or "Only comments I haven't acknowledged".

It is only possible to filter by conversations you have acknowledged yourself, however, you will be able to see how many acknowledgments a comment has.