15 Ways to Implement Employee Listening

Your employees are the heart of your organization. Disgruntled or disengaged employees can cause major issues across your business. They are less efficient, more prone to errors, and, worst of all, are more likely to cause your happy employees to leave. On average, replacing an employee costs 6-9 months of an employee's salary. 

What if you could solve issues before they became a problem? Save your happy employees from leaving? Or, even just reengaging your disengaged employees. Sadly, only 64% of companies have an employee feedback program.

Employee listening is more than just an organizational checkbox. It’s a mindset and a set of repeatable actions that show employees that you’re invested in them and care. In this guide, we’ll walk you through 15 practical strategies to help you embed listening into your culture.

Understanding the Importance of Employee Listening

Organizations that collect feedback from their employees regularly report higher employee engagement and lower turnover from their employees. Gallup found that companies with highly engaged employees are usually 23% more profitable than others.

Building an amazing company culture isn’t an exact science, and no two companies are alike. While there is no exact playbook for you to follow, there are some important tactics that you can try.

Establish Clear Channels for Feedback

While employees love to get feedback, they also love to give feedback. Clear feedback channels create vital opportunities for employees to share their thoughts and feelings. Making sure that your employees know where to find them, how to use them, and what will be done with that information is essential to any employee listening strategy.

For feedback channels to work, employees need to feel safe that their feedback won’t cause retaliation from the company. Having multiple feedback channels (confidential and public options) can give employees the option to speak publicly about issues or to raise concerns in private.

Conduct Regular Surveys

Employee surveys are one of the quickest ways to gather feedback from your employees. They can also have a strong impact on employee engagement. Inc. found that employees who feel heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to do their best work. 

Surveys allow your employees to share open and honest feedback about the company, culture, and work-life balance. The most common criticism of surveys is low response rates. A lot of companies will utilize their recognition program to incentivize employees to take and complete the survey through a challenge.

Embrace Open-Door Policies

Open-door policies are about creating a safe environment for employees to share their concerns and feedback in a private setting. Open-door policies are valuable because they help normalize upward feedback, can surface issues earlier, and reinforce to employees the value of speaking up and providing input.

A lot of companies say that they have open-door policies, but employees don’t use them. Open-door policies fail because employees fear retaliation, they’re not confident that it’ll lead to actual change, or leadership seems too busy or unapproachable. Whenever an employee comes in to discuss an issue or concern, managers should make sure the employees feel like their voices are welcomed and heard. This doesn’t mean that everything will be acted upon right away, but employees should know that their concern has been heard.

Implement Listening Sessions

Listening sessions are an opportunity for you to gather qualitative group feedback about the company culture. Whether you’re in-person, hybrid, or virtual, these sessions allow employees to share ideas, concerns, or experiences in a more open-ended way. It also allows HR to ask probing questions to better understand the context and situation around what happened.

Listening sessions allow employees a forum to have a real conversation about company topics that they care about. 

Benefits of Listening Sessions

Listening sessions provide a more personalized experience. They allow HR to understand factors like emotion, body language, and tone that can get lost in a survey. It also allows HR to dig down and explore topics that employees want to discuss. For example, in your survey, you have three questions about Growth Plans and three questions about Benefits; however, in the listening session, employees want to spend 75% of the time talking about benefits. Benefits might be a deeper issue to cover.

Another benefit of listening sessions is that they’re flexible. You can run sessions company-wide, by department, or by topic (e.g., DEI, onboarding, wellness). They can be formal or casual, anonymous or face-to-face.

How to Conduct Them Effectively

Keep the group size small (ideally under 10) to allow for depth. Open with ground rules (confidentiality, respect, no retaliation), then let the conversation flow. Actively listen. Take notes. Don’t interrupt. And most importantly, follow up afterward—either with a summary of themes or with visible action. Employees need to know you weren’t just there to check a box.

Remember that the ultimate goal of a listening session is to - LISTEN. These sessions shouldn’t be used as a way to justify policy decisions or defend decisions by the company. It should be a time for you to gather information about how employees are feeling and then, after the session, determine how best to change (or stand by) a decision and how to communicate that.

Don’t just reserve them for moments of crisis or change. Regular listening sessions help you stay ahead of brewing issues and give employees a stake in the company’s direction.

Utilize Employee Resource Groups

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are one of the most authentic ways to gather feedback from your employees. ERGs are voluntary, employee-led groups built around shared interests or identities. Some common ERGs are: Women, Veterans, Working Parents, or Remote Workers.

ERGs are an excellent way to create a psychologically safe space for underrepresented groups to candidly share feedback and their experiences. These groups are great for amplifying voices that aren’t comfortable in traditional channels, catching early trends into cultural issues, and co-create solutions with your employees.

Leverage Technology for Feedback

ERGs and listening groups are great for qualitative feedback, however, they’re limited in their ability to scale. In today’s modern workforce, HR teams are dealing with remote and hybrid teams, multiple locations, and rapidly changing culture dynamics through growth or downsizing. 

Leveraging technology to capture the employee voice can be a great way to augment your listening strategy. Surveys are a great starting point for utilizing technology, but there’s more you can do. Tools like Internal Comms allow you to send feedback requests to employees across multiple channels. The Nectar Recognition platform allows you to track the core values commonly used so you can listen for what is being recognized consistently.

Encourage Manager-Employee One-on-Ones

Most employees have a regular 1:1 with their manager. Some have it weekly, others monthly, and some have it ad-hoc. The manager-employee 1:1 is one of the most commonly used listening methods and powerful feedback loops in your entire organization. Employee who meet regularly with their manager are more likely to be engaged.

Your employees want and appreciate feedback. In fact, 83% of employees say they appreciate all kinds of feedback - positive and negative feedback. They also found that the highest rated managers were those who gave the “right amount” of feedback (8.6 out of 10), especially when compared to managers who gave no feedback at all (4.2 out of 10).

Here are some best practices for creating the perfect 1:1:

1. Train managers on the importance of this - HR needs to set the expectation that this is a behavior that has to happen. This isn’t a “nice-to-have” option.
2. Hold them weekly or bi-weekly - Regular 1:1s help provide support for the employee. It allows the manager time to remove roadblocks for the employee from their previous meeting, too.
3. Provide a structure - Give your managers a suggested agenda, prompts, and training on what questions to ask.
4. Make it a two-way conversation - 1:1s shouldn’t just be about status updates and projects. They should be an opportunity to discuss concerns, feedback, and their growth plans while working at the company.
5. Create accountability - Use different tools to track the frequency and success of 1:1s. Managers can shout out employees or even give them a spot award for hitting performance goals 
6. Talk about non-work items - Understand your employees' interests and what they love outside of work. Gallup found that the highest-engaged employees were ones who connected to their managers about their lives outside of work.

Analyze Exit Interviews

Seeing an employee leave can be sad; other times, it’s happy. Each time, though, is an opportunity to gather feedback from the employee. These exit interviews provide employees an avenue to give raw, honest feedback that they might not have felt safe to share while still working at the company. 

Companies can use these interviews to identify patterns that might be appearing before they become systemic issues. For example, if several employees are leaving because of better health insurance, it might be time to reevaluate your health care provider.

It’s important to note that exit interviews often surface raw feelings from former employees. Sometimes those feelings are ones of fondness and gratitude for the growth they experienced there. Othertimes, those feelings are ones of frustration and even pain. For each exit interview, it’s generally best practice to use a reputable 3rd party if you can’t; use someone from HR or the People Team - never their direct manager.

Promote a Culture of Recognition

A culture of recognition is a culture of listening. Every time an employee gives or receives recognition, it lets them know that they’re seen, valued, and their contribution matters.

Your recognition strategy can promote listening by:

• Reinforcing positive behaviors in real time - When employees are recognized and praised in real time for their actions, it reinforces that they're seen by those around them. Combine peer-to-peer shoutouts with a shout-out from your manager or even the CEO, and that’ll reinforce those behaviors quickly.
• Creating two-way visibility - As shoutouts go into the feed, teammates, managers, and executives can see what contributions you’re making. 
• Empowers everyone to be “listeners” - Establishing a culture of recognition enables everyone to recognize each other. Look for the people who are consistently recognizing others. They’re your culture multipliers.
• Engrain feedback as part of the daily culture - Create rituals around recognition. Share out community recognition highlights, give extra points for hitting streaks, or utilize monthly employee nominations.

Involve Employees in Decision Making

Involving your employees doesn’t mean that you’re running decisions by them before rolling them out. It means bringing them along with you through the process so that they’re already bought in when you do make that decision. By involving them in the process, it helps:

• Build ownership and buy-in - Employees are more willing to support what they helped create. By giving them a seat at the table, it can help with rollouts of new policies or changes.
• Uncover blind spots - Each area and level of the business has unique challenges in its role. When you include employees from all across the business, they can help you spot issues that leadership doesn’t know about.
• Boosts trust and transparency - Involving employees early on and throughout the process helps them feel like partners and that their voice is heard. In fact, employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.

Use Anonymous Feedback Tools

Not every employee feels comfortable sharing feedback openly. Having anonymous feedback channels allows employees a safe space to talk about workplace bias, burnout, poor leadership, or a variety of other sensitive topics. Employees should feel confident that their feedback truly is anonymous and they won’t receive retaliation for speaking up. It helps employees bring to light issues that they’re afraid to say out loud.

Anonymous feedback tools are valuable when used effectively. Some best practices are:

• Choose the right tools - Evaluate the right platform for your team. Identify which features are most important to you to receive anonymous feedback and communicate with employees.
• Use them regularly - Anonymous feedback shouldn’t be used only after a crisis. You can utilize it as part of your normal feedback rhythm with employees.
• Don’t just collect - It’s vital that employees feel like their concerns are heard, and closing the feedback loop is one of the best ways to do that. Share out what you’re hearing with employees, what you’re changing, and the timeframe for it.
• Combine anonymous channels with open channels - Anonymity shouldn’t be a crutch, but a trust-building tool. Mix in anonymous channels with open feedback channels to give employees the ability to share feedback publicly or anonymously.

Encourage Peer Feedback

Employee listening should involve top-down feedback, bottom-up feedback, and side-to-side feedback. An untapped resource for feedback is peer-to-peer feedback. Nearly 80% of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged. This gives you a perspective from the individuals who work with them daily and understand their strengths, weaknesses, and areas that impact the team. 

Provide Training for Leaders

Listening is not a passive skill. It’s one that requires practice, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence. While it may come “easy” for some managers, it is one that should be taught (and practiced) by everyone in the organization. 

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Managers are often the front line of employee feedback. They handle the 1:1s, performance reviews, and field concerns from employees. If your managers aren’t listening to their employees, you’ve lost one of the most direct employee listening channels in your company.

Measure and Act on Feedback

Companies will go through all of this work to gather feedback and understand the issues affecting their employees the most. However, only 8% of employees strongly agree that their organization takes action on the feedback.

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It’s a huge missed opportunity to have listened and collected feedback, but failed to measure and act on it. Look for common trends and themes uncovered from the surveys, listening groups, ERGs, and other channels and put them into an action plan. You won’t be able to fix everything all at once, but you can report back to employees on what you’ve heard and how you’re tackling it.

Communicate Outcomes to Employees

Lastly, it’s essential to close the loop with your employees. Trust and confidence that anything will change is shattered if employees feel that their feedback goes into a black hole. Even though these issues are important to employees, they can still get lost in the noise. Establish a multi-channel communication plan to reach employees and surface the information to them. Because it can take multiple times of hearing something for it to actually stick, it’s important to have a consistent cadence of comms.

Listening isn't just an HR initiative. It should be a foundational principle at any organization. Effective listening doesn’t happen by accident. It takes structure, intention, and follow-through. While it is a deliberate choice to be a good listener, it doesn’t take a massive budget or huge HR team to accomplish. Small changes like improved 1:1s, acting on survey data, and communicating what you’re hearing to employees can show them that their voice matters.

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