Creating a culture of trust where employees feel empowered to share their honest thoughts about the workplace is something insurance giant Aflac prides itself on.

“Every 18 months, we do an enterprise-wide engagement study,” Matthew Owenby, SVP and CHRO at Aflac, said. “From the feedback from that study, we will create…action teams for people who are gonna focus on the themes from the engagement survey.”

These themes include managerial effectiveness, benefits, learning and development, career trajectory, and more, and have resulted in the creation of internal programs that have helped its workers progress in their careers, improve their well-being, and create a positive work environment—a key part of Aflac’s retention strategy.

“We take the time that people utilize to complete our survey very seriously, and we take that feedback we get…extremely seriously,” Owenby said. “Aflac appreciates enormously positive engagement scores defined by a benchmark that we have from our peer group. It is not uncommon for Aflac to have in the high 80s low 90s engagement survey feedback consistently year over year.”

Collecting the data. Aflac recognized that employees may feel uneasy about providing honest feedback, Owenby said, especially if it’s negative. So, the company hired a third-party vendor to conduct the surveys and ensure employees remained anonymous.

“There is no hesitation in providing transparent feedback regarding areas of improvement that may exist in the organization,” Aimee Houston, HR business partner at Aflac, told HR Brew in an email via PR rep Darcy Brito.

Using the data. Once the feedback is collected, Owenby digs into what the organization can do better for its employees and puts a plan in place.

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