How employee feedback changed in 2025 — and what’s ahead

As we enter 2026, one challenge remains clear for many organizations: collecting employee feedback is easy, but turning it into action is not.

To shed light on how this challenge has been addressed in practice, we spoke with Kristofer Hillhammar, CTO at Winningtemp, about the most significant product updates from 2025.

Customer-driven product updates

At Winningtemp, product decisions are driven by a deep understanding of what organizations need in order to act on employee feedback.

“All of our product decisions are based on getting ‘the best team success ingredients in the world’. That data makes it possible for us to nudge and give proactive action proposals,” says Kristofer.

This culture of feedback also shapes how Winningtemp innovate, as customer feedback plays a central role in shaping the product:

“We let all our customers give feedback and interact with our product roadmap through Winningtemp. We’ve got around 750 collected feedback notes from our customers, and our mission is to sort them into different buckets and understand their problems.”

This approach ensures the product remains relevant, scalable, and aligned with the real challenges organizations will face in 2026 and beyond.

Update 1: Using AI responsibly

With new regulations and growing expectations around AI, many organizations are cautious about how they use intelligent tools in employee listening. Kristofer explains that Winningtemp’s AI strategy has been a major focus this year, with compliance and efficiency at the forefront:

“We are proud of our AI strategy and how we adapt to the EU AI Act to make sure that all of our AI features are compliant, secure, and efficient.”

By ensuring AI is compliant, secure, and trustworthy, Winningtemp has been able to deliver tools that help organizations confidently implement employee feedback.

“We launched AI translation of custom surveys, AI support for constructive comments writing, AI translation of collected comments, AI summaries of free-text answers, and AI-generated commitment proposals for Guided Temperature Meetings.”

These updates help organizations to process multilingual, large-scale feedback more efficiently.

Update 2: A complete view of employee engagement

As Kristofer says,

“There are a lot of listening tools, surveys, and pulse systems available, but few address actionability. It is pretty easy to find, for example, that eNPS goes down or that leadership is weakened. But it can be hard to understand the ‘why’ behind the data and what to do about it.”

In 2025, Winningtemp expanded its listening capabilities to offer a more complete view of engagement across the whole organization.

“We are the first employee engagement tool that really supports listening to matrix organizations and can understand both what drives engagement in the line organization and the cross-functional teams or project teams.”

Thanks to these updates, Winningtemp can now help teams identify the root causes behind engagement trends and take informed action to improve performance.

Update 3: A deeper look into employee data

Winningtemp’s focus on understanding the “why” behind engagement data has led to the development of new deep-dive tools that go beyond superficial trends.

“We have launched deep-dive features like our Focus survey to be able to dig into those details. With free-text answers and comments on very specific questions about ‘the why,’ we get more knowledge. That knowledge, together with science and AI, can give really good, actionable insights. Especially when you also have a team context and a lot of benchmark data,” says Kristofer.

This ensures leaders don’t just see what is happening — they understand why, and know how to respond effectively.

Winningtemp’s plans for 2026

Looking ahead, Kristofer shared three big priorities for 2026:

1. Closing the actionability gap

“We will continue to invest a lot in ‘the why’ behind the numbers and the actionability gap. We will also invest in initiatives that can collect feedback and address the ‘survey fatigue’ issues to find relevant benchmarks.”

2. Rethinking how feedback is collected:

“We will launch a completely new way of collecting employee feedback in 2026 that will be much more effective at finding ‘the why’ behind the numbers than other solutions available on the market today.”

3. More relevant team benchmarks:

“We will also introduce team contexts to be able to give more relevant benchmarks than what’s available today. This is all in line with collecting relevant data and generating actionable insights: backed by science, fueled by data, and driven by AI.”

Together, these priorities reflect what organizations will increasingly need in 2026: faster, more precise insights and clearer guidance on how to act on employee feedback.

If you want to explore how employee listening can become more actionable in practice, learn more here!