We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift in the employee-company dynamic. Every week it seems that there’s a new headline about employees taking to public forums to expose their workplace for wrongdoings.

Why is this? Are they simply disgruntled, or have a chip on their shoulder? Or is there something more? We can gain some insight from the #AppleToo website when they say, “We’ve exhausted all internal avenues. We’ve talked with our leadership. We’ve gone to the People team. We’ve escalated through Business Conduct. Nothing has changed.” Or in Susan Fowler’s blog post where she writes, “The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done. …there was really nothing I could do. There was nothing any of us could do. We all gave up on Uber HR and our managers after that.” And there are many others that read the same.

The common cause? A lack of listening and a lack of taking action on reported issues. It’s ultimately because of a breakdown in how organizations manage their employee feedback. Employees who were unable to see their issues resolved within the walls of their workplace have gone outside it to get some kind of justice.

This has resulted in a shift in the power dynamic, from organizations who were able to overlook feedback and simply force out employees, to employees having the voice to expose these practices on public forums.

With this shift going on, then, what are organizations going to do about improving their employee feedback systems? What will the future after this shift look like?

At AllVoices, we’ve been watching this landscape changing, and here’s where we see it going: 

Prediction #1: Employee Feedback Platforms

Every organization will be sourcing, tracking, and resolving their employee feedback through a centralized platform. HR departments have to evolve away from Word docs, spreadsheets, and tracking across multiple sources. As organizations begin to realize the value of gathering feedback, they’ll realize that their old systems don’t work.

Employee feedback platforms can offer features like centralization, so while organizations may have different methods of collecting feedback, they can all be gathered in one place. They also offer the ability to easily assign cases and centralized tracking. Platforms can also offer automation around collecting feedback—for example, quarterly pulse surveys—which helps with efficiency. Finally, since it’s gathering all this data, it can offer analytics and the ability to gain insights around where reports are coming from, if there are any patterns, and how the organization is improving in resolving reports, allowing for more data-informed decision making.

Prediction #2: Better Efficiency and Standardization

Organizations committed to listening to their employees will see that they not only have to change the culture, they have to change the systems—and that issues of employees not seeing their concerns resolved may originate in these inefficient processes. This could be due to old systems, or it could be due to the increased workload of HR departments, as one report found that 64% of HR professionals are experiencing increases in workload from the past year.

As more teams work remotely, organizations will prioritize standardization, especially discrimination and harassment don’t end because the work is remote. A New York Times article details that harassment is still an issue through remote channels because “without standards about how to communicate or behave on Slack, Zoom, email or any other remote platform, it’s difficult for employees to know what to do when they feel uncomfortable, and for employers to hold employees accountable.”

More efficient and standardized systems can also provide better data collection and tracking. According to a report by Deloitte, companies say that the biggest barrier to efficiently using analytics is that “there is no centralized approach to capturing and analyzing data for our company’s use.”

Prediction #3: Increased Integration

For many organizations, a single whistleblower hotline was the only way to report feedback. Or maybe that and a yearly engagement survey. Many organizations have been using single initiatives, or a few siloed initiatives that may have produced results, but most likely weren’t providing methods of feedback that employees would really use. In the future, we’ll see these tools and initiatives be added to, and be much more integrated with one another in a comprehensive employee feedback approach.

We’ll also see feedback become much more integrated into the culture, and the conversation around giving feedback normalized. “You have to integrate the behaviors you want into your team’s daily routines in order to normalize those behaviors within the organization’s culture,” writes Ed Batista in the Harvard Business Review. “If feedback is something that happens only at unusual times (such as a performance review or when something’s gone wrong), it’ll never really be an organic part of the organizational culture.” 

Prediction #4: Employees Lead the Way

Since power is shifting to the employee, we’ll see organizations recognizing that power, and involving employees in the feedback process. Organizations would be hard-pressed not to include employees, as early buy-in creates better results. In fact, McKinsey finds that “employee engagement as early as the planning process emerges as a key success factor,” and that organizations that “broke down their change process into clearly defined smaller initiatives…say that staff members were entirely or very able to participate in shaping those change initiatives.”

We’ll continue to see employees lead the way in advocating for and insisting upon tools or resources that allow them to provide continuous, transparent, and honest feedback. One rousing suggestion from employees that organizations can implement? Institute anonymous feedback. We’ve found in our research that upwards of 85% of employees are more likely to give feedback through truly anonymous channels.

The Future Is…?

We’re watching the future being built today: not just of employee feedback, but of employee-employer dynamics. It’s up to your organization if you want to make the commitment to be part of a better future for both employers and employees alike.