The Effort-to-Value Ratio: A Smarter Way to Engage with Feedback

In busy health and community organisations, you can’t act on every piece of feedback, and you don’t need to. But you do need a way to decide what’s worth pursuing, and what’s worth pausing on. That’s where the effort-to-value ratio comes in.

It’s a simple but powerful idea: weigh the effort it would take to implement a suggestion against the value it could deliver to your consumers, your team, or your service.

Used well, the effort to value ration can help you:

• Prioritise feedback with the most impact
• Justify pausing low-return suggestions (without discarding them)
• Avoid burnout by focusing on what’s doable and meaningful
• Build a transparent and strategic approach to continuous improvement

How to Think About Effort

Effort isn’t just about time. It includes:

• Cost and resources required
• Complexity of implementation
• Level of change management or communication needed
• Risk or disruption to existing processes
• The skills or systems you’d need to build first

A low-effort suggestion might be as simple as changing signage or adding a new question to your intake form. A high-effort change might involve new staff, new workflows, or governance approvals.

How to Think About Value

Value can be subjective, but often includes:

• Number of consumers affected
• Degree of improvement to safety, access, or experience
• Alignment with strategic goals or accreditation expectations
• Potential to reduce risk or increase efficiency
• Whether the feedback is repeated, urgent, or culturally significant

Some suggestions might seem small but carry high relational value, like adjusting language for inclusivity, or creating a more comfortable and welcoming waiting area.

Why You Should Capture Feedback Even if You Don’t Act (Yet)

Here’s the catch: the effort-to-value ratio can change over time.  Maybe a consumer suggestion felt too hard last year, but now a new funding stream, staff member, or piece of technology makes it much easier. Or maybe an idea didn’t feel worthwhile until more people raised it, showing a growing need.

That’s why it’s so important to record feedback, even if you decide not to act on it immediately. A well-maintained feedback register (formal or informal) becomes a living bank of insight that you can revisit regularly, especially when doing strategic planning or service redesign.

Not all feedback needs an immediate fix, but it all deserves to be heard, respected, and considered through a clear lens. The effort-to-value ratio helps move teams out of reactive mode and into thoughtful, sustainable improvement.

QIP Consulting helps health and community services build realistic, responsive systems for collecting, analysing and acting on consumer feedback. Whether you’re preparing for accreditation or designing your feedback framework from scratch, we can help you embed strategies that work in practice.

Want to make your feedback system smarter, not harder? Let’s talk.