Dealing with unconstructive comments

Positioning Peakon correctly with your employees at the onset is an important step in mitigating unconstructive feedback that you may receive. However, unconstructive and trivial comments do appear from time to time: "Avocados are too ripe", "No oat milk, only almond milk in the kitchen" etc. Breaking this type of mentality without telling employees how to answer is the desired outcome.

If unconstructive comments start to become a problem, consider the following:

Reassess the questions being asked

If custom driver and open-ended questions are being asked, reassess whether the questions themselves are constructive. Poorly formulated questions can lead to poorly formulated comments being left.

Reposition Peakon and what it's intended for. This may involve:

• Sending out communications.
• Training managers on how to deal with unconstructive comments, for example, can the employee themselves take the initiative to cultivate the change they seek? Start a supporting and constructive conversation that encourages the employee to take steps toward creating the desired outcome they seek (see Advice for using Peakon's conversation feature most effectively).
• Creating a video with messaging from senior leadership.
• Adding a explanatory sentence in the custom text box of the survey email.

It's also worth remembering the following when dealing with unconstructive comments:

• Use the Highlighted comments to sort through the most impactful comments.
• Not all comments require a reaction. It's not always necessary to react to each comment.
• Some employees simply want to vent, albeit about seemingly trivial things. Respect this. For them, simply having an outlet to vent and knowing that while nothing might come of the comment, the fact that it's being read in itself can be quite satisfactory for them.
• It's worse to have an employee who is unmotivated to give feedback.