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Using AI-Powered Actions in Hive

Category: Actions | Type: Overview & FAQs

Turning your team's feedback into an action plan

Hive Actions helps you go from feedback to a plan - with AI drafting the starting point and you making every decision.

This article is for line managers who have access to their own team's results.

  • Create an action from a suggestion and refine it before anyone else sees it
  • Already know what you want to do? Hive drafts the steps to get there
  • Act on both survey results and Open Door feedback
  • Share suggestions with your team to shape the plan together

What you'll find in this guide:

How Hive Actions works

Hive Actions is where feedback becomes a plan. An action is the thing you're going to change or improve — for example, "Make it clearer how decisions get made in our team."

Underneath each action sit tasks: the practical steps that get you there, with owners and deadlines.

Actions live alongside your team's feedback, so anyone following the action can see what prompted it and track progress against it.

Most managers don't struggle to care about their results. They struggle with the blank page — knowing which of the twenty things in front of them is actually worth doing something about, and how to start. So Hive gives you a running start. Based on your team's specific feedback, it suggests:

  • Action directions — a small number of realistic, manager-level things you could focus on
  • Tasks — practical steps to deliver the action, drafted once you've chosen a direction
  • "Why this action?" — a short explanation linking the suggestion to what your team actually said

Nothing is applied automatically. Suggestions are exactly that. Nothing is created, published, shared or added to your plan until you choose it. You can ignore every suggestion Hive offers and write your own action from scratch — that's a perfectly good outcome.


Where the suggestions come from

Suggestions are grounded in your team's own feedback, not generic best practice. Hive looks at:

  • Key Drivers — the questions with the strongest statistical relationship to your team's overall engagement. These are the areas where improvement is most likely to move the needle.
  • Low-scoring questions — where your team has told you something isn't working
  • High-scoring questions — strengths worth protecting or building on
  • Free-text comments — the themes and sentiment behind the scores
  • Open Door submissions — feedback your team has raised outside of a survey

Creating an action from a suggestion
  1. Open your team's results and click the Hive AI icon next to any question.
  2. Review the suggested actions. Each one shows a short "Why this action?" explanation.
  3. Select the action you want to explore. This creates a draft action.
  4. Review the suggested tasks. Add, remove, reword or reorder them so they reflect how your team actually works.
  5. Set owners and deadlines against each task.
  6. When you're happy, add followers to share the action with stakeholders.

Short demo


When you already know what you want to do

Sometimes you don't need help deciding - you need help getting started.

If you've already worked out what you want to change, create your own action and describe it. Hive will draft the tasks to deliver it, based on your action and your team's feedback.

The tasks behave exactly like suggested ones: add, remove, reword, reorder, or ignore them completely and write your own. Same as anywhere else in Hive Actions — it drafts, you decide.

This is useful when:

  • Your team has already agreed what to focus on and you need to turn that into a plan
  • Something came up in a one-to-one that your survey results don't cover
  • You want to act on a commitment you've already made to your team

Editing, replacing or rejecting a suggestion

Every part of a suggestion is editable:

  • Reword the action title
  • Delete tasks that don't apply, and add your own
  • Change the focus entirely — keep the suggestion as a starting point and rewrite it
  • Dismiss the suggestion and create your own action instead

Hive keeps suggestions relevant to your feedback and realistic for what you can actually influence as a manager. In practice you'll rarely notice this — it's there to stop suggestions drifting somewhere unhelpful, not to limit sensible edits.


Acting on Open Door feedback

Not all feedback arrives at survey close. Open Door lets your team raise things whenever they need to, which means the response often needs to be quicker and more specific than a quarterly action plan.

Hive can suggest actions from Open Door feedback in the same way it does from survey results — the difference is the rhythm. A survey action might be a three-month improvement. An Open Door action is often a single, timely response to something someone has raised.

A few things worth holding in mind:

  • Respond to the substance, not just the submission. A suggestion helps you decide what to do; it doesn't replace acknowledging that someone spoke up.
  • Confidentiality is preserved. Suggestions are generated from the content of feedback, never from anything that identifies who submitted it.
  • Small and prompt often beats large and delayed. If someone raises something in week one, a visible response in week two matters more than a perfect plan in month three.

Sharing suggestions with your team

Action plans built with a team land better than plans handed to a team. Suggestions are a useful way to open that conversation, because they give people something concrete to react to.

A simple approach:

  1. Review the suggestions privately first. Discard anything that clearly doesn't fit your team's context.
  2. Bring two or three to a team meeting. Share the feedback behind them and the "Why this action?" explanation - so when someone asks why this and not the thing they raised, you have an answer.
  3. Be transparent that they're AI-generated suggestions. Something like: "Hive has looked at our feedback and suggested a few areas we could focus on. Nothing's decided — I want to know which of these feels right to you, and what's missing."
  4. Let the team shape the tasks. They usually know which practical steps will and won't work.
  5. Create the action, refine it, then add followers so everyone can see the plan and track progress.

Being open about AI being involved builds trust rather than undermining it. What matters to your team is that a person read their feedback and made a considered decision about what to do next.


Good practice for managers
  • One or two actions beats five. A completed action is worth more than a full plan that stalls.
  • Pick a Key Driver where you can. That's where effort translates into the biggest shift.
  • Close the loop. Tell your team what you're doing and why — even if the answer is "not this time, and here's the reason."
  • Don't outsource the judgement. Hive drafts. You decide.

FAQs

Can my team see the suggestions I didn't pick?
 No. Suggestions are visible only to you until you choose to create and share an action.

I can't see any suggestions- is something wrong?
 AI suggestions aren't switched on for every organisation. Your HR admin can check the position with your Hive Account Manager. Everything else in Hive Actions works as normal.

My team is small - will I still get suggestions?
 Suggestions are generated within your organisation's confidentiality thresholds. If your team is below that threshold, you won't see team-level results or suggestions — this protects the confidentiality of the people who responded. Your HR admin can tell you where the threshold is set.

Can Hive see individual responses when generating suggestions?
 Suggestions are generated from your team's aggregated feedback within Hive's confidentiality thresholds. You'll never be shown, and Hive will never surface, anything that identifies an individual.

What if I don't agree with any of the suggestions?
 Create your own action instead — Hive will still draft the tasks. Suggestions are a starting point, not a shortlist you have to choose from.

Can I edit an action after I've shared it?
 Yes. Actions can be updated after followers are added — but it's worth getting the shape right first, so your team sees a settled plan rather than a moving one.

Does using suggestions mean I've done my action planning?
 Not on its own. The value comes from the conversation with your team and the follow-through — the suggestion just saves you the blank page.