Tuning In to Talent: How Comcast Uses Continuous Employee Feedback to Boost Engagement and Retention

A Time-Tested Partnership

Comcast's partnership with Perceptyx spans many years and reflects a long-term commitment to employee feedback. One early challenge was mapping Comcast's complex organizational structure. "The most complicated thing was our very complex reporting hierarchy," Dan Fiedler, Comcast's Director of Employee Engagement, recalled. This complexity was due to the large and diverse nature of Comcast's workforce, spanning corporate employees who were largely desk-bound, in-office and virtual, to front-line workers across various field locations. Despite these initial hurdles, teams for both organizations persevered. "It took us a couple of months to get it where we wanted, but now we just send updated annual data files to the Perceptyx team, and they make sure it's updated on that side."

Over time, this long-standing partnership has allowed Comcast to develop a sophisticated employee feedback strategy that addresses the complexities of its organizational structure. Fortunately, the flexibility of Perceptyx’s People Insights Platform allowed for detailed mapping and insightful reporting. Annie Geckle, Manager of Employee Engagement, highlighted a key benefit: "The self-service survey capability has been really helpful, and we use that a lot to answer specific, targeted questions about business outcomes."

This partnership has evolved over time, with Perceptyx making continuous improvements to meet the organization's changing needs. "One thing I really liked that went over well is the upgrade of the user interface to its current look and feel," said Fiedler. "That was good for us, and we've gotten positive feedback from our clients within Comcast." The enhanced performance has not only improved user experience (UX) but also increased the efficiency of data collection and analysis, allowing Comcast to act on employee feedback more quickly and effectively to address business concerns like turnover.

Using Feedback to Develop Leaders

Comcast has also leveraged Perceptyx's platform to implement various feedback mechanisms for leadership development. "We've run learning and development self-reflections via the platform," said Geckle, "where we have a cohort going through different coaching programs as new managers or as managers, and they're asked to reflect on their abilities before and after, based on what they learned in the program."

This approach to leadership development aligns feedback with concrete actions, fostering a culture of continuous improvement among Comcast's leadership. The company has also used the insights gained from these programs to refine their leadership training curriculum. "We're able to identify gaps in our leadership development programs and make real-time adjustments to ensure we're addressing the most pressing needs of our managers," Fiedler noted. "We're focusing on performance metrics but incrementally bringing 'lead' people metrics to the forefront."

Geckle elaborated on the practical applications of this integration: "The organization built our findings about development into a power app, U-Learn. We didn't just ask HR what skills you need. We used the Perceptyx platform to ask business leaders and people in operations, sales, all throughout the company, 'What skills do you need and what skills does your team need to keep growing our business in the future?' And then we put together a quarterly skill-based learning strategy." The platform also accounted for different roles within the organization. "There are three different tracks within the system," Geckle said. "So you can be an individual contributor, a people leader/manager, or a leader of leaders. And so, we use all the data from these tracks to inform the strategy for developing our people and our talent through this year and into next year."

The survey revealed some surprising insights about skill needs across different levels of the organization. "Data literacy was massive," Fiedler said. "But it was more of a key from managers than it was from the individuals. The managers were saying, 'No, I really want my team to really understand digital or data literacy.' And the leaders above them were like, 'You know, I need my managers — if I'm a director, I need my managers to upskill on critical thinking and data literacy.” This multi-level approach to skill assessment uncovered a range of priorities. "We were able to identify these pockets which again surprised even our U-Learn team."

This data-driven approach to skill development has allowed Comcast to align their learning and development initiatives more closely with actual business needs, ensuring that employees at all levels are equipped with the skills necessary to drive the company's growth and success. Geckle said, "Thanks to employee feedback, we put together a quarterly skill-based learning strategy where in Q1, we focus on critical thinking. In Q2, there's a focus on a different one to two skills. Q4 will be data literacy."

A Focus on Employee Turnover Metrics

Comcast's focus on reducing turnover has been significantly informed by Perceptyx's detailed insights. The platform's ability to provide nuanced data analysis has allowed the company to identify key trends and take targeted action to improve retention.

"For the past several years, what we've really seen is that the largest gap between those who stay and those who leave is in engagement," Geckle said. "We can draw a conclusion there that engagement is not only a good predictor of turnover but it's also really important to retention."

This insight has driven strategic initiatives aimed at enhancing employee retention, particularly among front-line employees. Fiedler emphasized the importance of these workers: "Roughly half of our employees are on the front lines. These are the techs that are climbing the poles or installing cable in customers' homes, these are the customer service agents, these are the retail associates, our dispatchers, our warehouse people. And we do place a high priority on attracting and retaining this talent."

Geckle further elaborated on the survey process: "In May of each year, we run 'Your Voice,' our annual engagement survey. Six months later, in November and December, we take a look back and see what our employees who are still with the company said, and what those who have voluntarily terminated since the survey have said and see if there's any differences or any interesting insights that we can glean from the data between those two different populations."

This longitudinal approach has proven particularly valuable in understanding the dynamics of employee retention. "You can look at it from both ways," Geckle noted. "A few years ago, during the Great Resignation, when we were really concerned about turnover, you could kind of lean on the drivers of engagement to ensure that you are keeping your people engaged and satisfied."

The team has leveraged Perceptyx's analytics to identify key drivers of turnover and implement targeted interventions. "We can slice the data and see what is driving those groups between the employees who stayed with Comcast and those who chose to leave," Geckle said. This detailed analysis has enabled Comcast to address specific pain points and enhance employee retention strategies. Key initiatives include new programs to promote internal talent mobility and development, as well as targeted training for people leaders to improve their relationships with team members. Geckle emphasized the impact of these changes, noting, "We're seeing these improvements reflected directly in our engagement scores."

The Role of eNPS in Confidential Employee Feedback

A key component of Comcast's employee listening strategy is the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). The granularity of eNPS allows Comcast to gain deeper insights into employee sentiment and identify areas for improvement more precisely. However, Annie Geckle cautioned about the nuances of interpreting eNPS results: "We see a lot of value in the eNPS program, but it’s actually quite a challenge when we use it as a metric in a lot of ways. Because we have to be very clear on what we're measuring. It's not really a measurement of your supervisor, although some employees feel that it is being used that way. It’s intended as a measurement of your reflection on the company."

Geckle further explained that while the numerical score is important, the real value lies in the accompanying comments: "The number is important, and it's interesting when you see what moves the needle on that number. But the whole story is in the comments. So that's where I get most of the benefit and stuff from it."

Comcast has been careful to use eNPS as a tool for improvement rather than a punitive measure. "As a company that's driven by metrics of every possible sort, we don't want leaders teaching to the test," said Fielder. We don't want employees saying, 'I'm rating this a 10 because I don't want my leader to be negatively impacted.'" Instead, they've focused on using eNPS as a conversation starter. "When I've had refresh meetings with teams, I say, don't look at a low score as something bad. The low score should be the trigger for the conversation, right? Because the scores are low for a reason. So obviously, there's something that's impacting the experience which translates to engagement and the employee experience, customer experience. So what's going on, and how could we collectively solve it? Which I think is the main strength of the program."

This approach has yielded impressive results. Comcast has consistently achieved high participation rates in their confidential eNPS surveys — and in their listening events more broadly. "We have a 90% response rate in the annual survey this year for the second year in a row, and eNPS is 80-ish percent now," Geckle reported. "February was 87%. August is usually our lowest participation because it's the summer, and last August it was 83%. Our people love to tell us how they feel."

Comcast has also been responsive to feedback about the survey process itself. "As a result of employee feedback, we've switched the NPS to quarterly," Fiedler said. "And that's because the feedback from leaders and from HR partners was that we sometimes don't have enough time to keep that continuous feedback loop going."

Empowering Teams with Agile Listening Capabilities

The People Insights Platform has significantly enhanced Comcast's ability to maintain a continuous conversation at scale with its people. This agile listening capability enables leaders to respond quickly to emerging issues by gathering targeted feedback whenever needed.

Geckle highlighted the impact of the platform’s flexibility: "The ability to quickly create and launch surveys has been really helpful, and we use that a lot as we think about business outcomes. We've put together a skill survey where we help our learning and development team figure out how they should focus their strategy on upskilling the business for the following year. We've done that now for two years in a row."

This has proven particularly valuable in rapidly changing situations. Geckle noted, "We've run a lot of pulse surveys to address specific needs. We've did some COVID-related surveys, which seems like forever ago, but was important for business outcomes."

The platform's flexibility and ease of use makes it easier for people leaders to access and action employee feedback results across the organization. "It really enables us to do more with our surveys," Geckle said. "If somebody from the business wants to gather feedback from their employees, we can quickly set up something that's more robust than basic forms, but less resource-intensive than a full-scale survey. Our team maintains control over the survey administration, ensuring data quality and consistency."

Fiedler added, "The ability to link different surveys, whether connecting smaller, targeted surveys or integrating them with our larger listening initiatives, is really powerful."

These capabilities have fundamentally changed how different parts of the organization engage with employee feedback. "We've had an established survey feedback program for a long time, and feedback is part of our culture," Geckle said. "Being able to use the platform to continuously listen and respond to business needs quickly with targeted surveys has added a lot of value to our listening strategy."

The Power of Comment Analysis

Comcast has leveraged Perceptyx's robust comment analysis capabilities to gain even deeper insights into employee sentiment and concerns. The team uses this qualitative data to supplement their quantitative findings and provide richer context and employee understanding to leadership. "We use comment analysis a lot, and the theming as well. We track themes over time," Geckle explained. This feature has allowed the team to identify emerging trends and concerns among employees quickly. "Each eNPS survey generates around 150,000 comments, and Perceptyx’s tools make it easy to get to the heart of what employees are saying."

The comment analysis feature has proven particularly valuable in understanding the nuances of employee sentiment that might not be captured in numerical scores alone. Fiedler elaborated on this point: "Our comments are often long and detailed. 'These are the 10 things, point number 1, 2, 3, and so on' of what's going on. To have comments that are over a thousand characters is not uncommon and does present a fun challenge for us when we're reading, because we're reading all of these comments with a combination of good and bad."

This depth of qualitative feedback has allowed Comcast to gain insights that might otherwise have been missed. Geckle provided an example: "We can see some of the common threads between those things. For example, something that comes out in the exit survey as a primary reason for leaving, for example, stress levels, things like that. We can see it in both places, not only in the engagement drivers in the survey itself but also in the exit survey." The Perceptyx platform’s ability to cross-reference themes across different types of surveys has enabled Comcast to develop a more holistic understanding of their employees' experiences and concerns, leading to more targeted and effective interventions.

Insights That Drive Business Outcomes

The insights gained from Perceptyx have directly contributed to tangible business outcomes for Comcast. "We saw scores from one of our business units decline while all the others were showing increases in engagement," Geckle recalled. "And we just had our regroup meeting with them last week. They really leaned in to action planning and were able to see a lot of improvement this year, they saw rebounds."

These improvements were not just in survey scores but in quantifiable business performance. By focusing on areas identified through employee feedback, such as compensation, leadership development, and career growth opportunities, Comcast has seen significant improvements in employee retention and performance.

"Tying that back to the kind of analysis that brought us here, as we have looked at our drivers of engagement over the years, the top driver of engagement, regardless of group, is confidence in survey action," Geckle explained. This insight has driven a company-wide focus on not just collecting feedback, but visibly acting on it, then communicating the results of those actions.

A Partnership Built for the Future

As Comcast continues to evolve and grow, its partnership with Perceptyx remains a cornerstone of its employee engagement strategy. The company is exploring new ways to leverage the platform's capabilities, using artificial intelligence for more advanced comment analysis and predictive analytics for turnover risk and volunteering to pilot other innovative platform features.

"I'd like to think that we help you as much as you help us," Fiedler concluded. "And Perceptyx has certainly been a true partner and a big help to us for over 10 years now."

In partnering with Perceptyx, Comcast has addressed the ongoing challenge of maintaining high engagement across a large, diverse workforce while establishing a robust foundation for continued success. The platform's insights have empowered Comcast to make data-driven decisions that positively impact both employee engagement and bottom-line business outcomes, underscoring the invaluable role of long-term, comprehensive employee feedback in shaping the future of the organization.