The reality for most HR teams is that collecting employee feedback is often much easier than acting on it.
But why?
What are the barriers keeping HR teams from acting on employee feedback?
In Stribe’s Big HR Check-in Report 2025–2026, HR professionals told us something revealing.
On the surface, leadership support looks relatively healthy. But when you dig deeper, a gap begins to appear.
Support often exists in theory, but not always in practice.
When we asked HR leaders were asked how supported they feel by their leadership team on people and culture priorities:
At first glance, this seems encouraging. Nearly two thirds of HR professionals feel supported.
But the detail tells a more complicated story. Only 22% feel very supported.
That means the majority of HR teams are operating in a middle ground – where leadership broadly agrees that people and culture matter, but the backing isn’t always strong enough to drive meaningful change.
To understand why acting on feedback can feel difficult, we asked HR what their biggest barrier is when trying to implement change based on employee feedback.
Three themes stood out:
Together, budget and leadership support account for 60% of the barriers HR faces when trying to act on employee insight.
This is where the leadership gap becomes clearer. Organisations increasingly want HR to:
… But those expectations don’t always come with the authority, resources or backing needed to follow through. HR often knows what needs to change, however organisations aren’t always ready to make it happen.
This gap creates a difficult position for HR teams.
On one hand, they are responsible for encouraging employees to share honest feedback. On the other, they may know that not everything raised can realistically be addressed.
Over time, this tension creates a few risks:
If organisations collect feedback but struggle to act on it, surveys can slowly lose credibility.
Employees begin to feel that feedback is requested more out of routine than genuine intent to change.
HR often sits between employees raising concerns and leadership deciding what action is possible.
When support from the top is inconsistent, HR can feel responsible for solving problems without the authority to fix them.
Trust doesn’t disappear overnight. But when employees repeatedly share feedback without seeing visible outcomes, participation and honesty gradually decline.
Collecting employee feedback is the easy part.
Responding to it sometimes requires uncomfortable decisions, such as:
Without visible leadership backing, HR teams often struggle to move from insight to action.
The good news is that this gap is fixable.
Based on our report findings, organisations can make employee feedback far more effective with a few practical shifts.
It’s easy for leadership teams to agree that culture matters. The real shift happens when leaders actively take ownership of employee feedback and the changes it requires.
Employee insight needs to reach the people who can act on it. When feedback stays within HR alone, its impact is naturally limited.
Not every piece of feedback can lead to immediate change. But employees respond well to clarity and transparency about what will and won’t happen next.
When leaders back HR – with time, resources and authority – employee voice stops being a data exercise and starts becoming a driver of real change.
For many organisations heading into 2026, the biggest opportunity isn’t launching new feedback tools.
It’s strengthening the leadership support behind the feedback they already collect.
If you’d like to explore more insights from the research, you can read the full findings in Stribe’s Big HR Check-in Report.
About the author
Starting out her early career as a journalist, Jade Madeley is an accomplished content writer with 8+ years’ experience across business, personal finance, SaaS, human resources and employee engagement. Working with Stribe, she crafts insightful content that brings complex HR topics to life and drives meaningful action.
