Staff at a mid-sized services firm were informed this week that the company’s internal feedback process has been updated to include a Pre-Submission Review Stage, following an audit that found a significant proportion of employee concerns were not the kinds of concerns the company had anticipated receiving.
Under the new system, employees wishing to submit a concern must first complete an eight-question Concern Eligibility Questionnaire before being granted access to the standard feedback form. Questions include whether the concern relates to a matter that is “actionable within the current planning cycle”, whether the concern has been “socialised internally” with at least two colleagues before submission, and whether the employee believes the concern is “likely to be understood by someone who does not share your specific context”.
Concerns that do not meet the eligibility threshold will not be rejected outright. Instead, they will be redirected to a Concern Maturation Pathway — described in company materials as “an opportunity to develop your feedback into something more receivable” before resubmission.
“We absolutely want to hear from our colleagues,” a statement from the People Operations team confirmed. “We just want to hear from them in a format that is useful. The new pre-submission stage helps ensure that the conversation we end up having is a productive one, which benefits everyone.”
The questionnaire, estimated to take between twenty and forty minutes depending on “how many concerns the employee is attempting to combine”, asks staff to categorise their concern under one of fourteen approved concern types. A fifteenth option, listed as “Other”, is available but requires a written justification explaining why none of the fourteen categories apply, which is then reviewed by a panel before the original feedback form is released.
Several employees have reportedly already submitted concerns about the concern form. Those submissions are currently awaiting assessment under the new process.
The rollout follows a wider sector initiative to ensure that employee feedback channels are “efficient, dignified, and proportionate to the level of resource required to process them”. According to company materials, the new system is expected to reduce the number of concerns received by approximately forty per cent, which the company described as “a positive outcome for operational focus”.
Staff have been assured that any concerns submitted via the legacy system during the transition period will be retained and reviewed at a later point in the cycle, subject to availability.
