Building an employee listening program that works

What are your employees experiencing during their workday? Leaders can’t always be aware of what challenges their employees may be facing. Add in a remote or hybrid workforce, and it gets even more difficult.  In order for your workforce to have a positive employee experience, they need to be heard.

Thus the importance of employee listening.

Employee listening is all about how you round up and understand the employee experience. Through performance reviews, requesting feedback, sending out polls and surveys, as well as being open to new ideas, companies are better able to interpret – and act on – the needs of their employees and ultimately boost employee engagement, motivation, commitment, and morale. 

We know that employee engagement is crucial to the success of a company, so how can you ensure your organization is working towards your objectives?

By listening. A lot.

Having a meaningful employee listening program in place not only gives you data-driven insights into your employees’ experience, but you will also be able to make impactful decisions that drive engagement of your employees, and in turn, business, forward.

So… how do you do it? Here are three ways to jumpstart meaningful employee listening and seek out the essential conversations about your employee’s workplace experience.

Key Insights

• A successful employee listening program requires continuous, real-time feedback to address concerns quickly and keep employees engaged.
• Offering a variety of feedback formats, including pulse surveys and focus groups, helps reach employees in ways that suit their preferences and prevents survey fatigue.
• Targeted questions, tailored to specific roles or departments, lead to more relevant insights and ensure employees feel their voices are heard.
• Leveraging AI-powered sentiment analysis can help identify hidden patterns in feedback and predict areas of concern, so you can act before issues escalate.
• Combining traditional methods like exit interviews and suggestion boxes with advanced tools like feedback platforms ensures no voice is left unheard.
• Using the right software makes feedback collection easier and helps you turn data into actionable insights, driving engagement and positive change.

Build better polls and surveys

Offer a variety of formats

Just like how we can tune out repetitive ads, sending out the same survey format over and over again can lead to lower response rates. To keep employees engaged, it’s important to not only switch up your survey formats but also embrace multi-channel feedback collection, making it easier for employees to share their insights in ways that suit them best.

Multi-Channel Feedback

Employees today are diverse in how they communicate. Whether it’s through email surveys, mobile apps, in-person focus groups, or even video feedback, you need to meet them where they are. By offering feedback options across these channels, you’ll capture a broader range of voices and ensure employees feel heard, especially those working remotely or on the front lines. Digital feedback platforms can also allow for real-time responses, helping maintain a continuous listening strategy that goes beyond one-time surveys.

Pulse Surveys & Annual Engagement Surveys

Short, frequent pulse surveys are a great way to capture real-time insights and act on them quickly without overwhelming employees, thus avoiding survey fatigue. For a more comprehensive view of your workforce, an annual engagement survey can provide deeper data on overall satisfaction, culture alignment, and engagement.

AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis

Incorporating AI-powered sentiment analysis into your feedback collection strategy can reveal even more. These tools analyze not just the responses but the emotional tone behind them, uncovering hidden patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. This allows you to respond more effectively to the concerns that matter most.

Fresh Formats to Try

In addition to varying the channels, try mixing up the actual survey formats. Different approaches can re-engage employees who may have grown tired of traditional methods. Here are a few to consider:

• Radio buttons
• 1-5 ratings
• Rankings
• Stars or emoji polls
• Picture polls
• One-question open text

One-on-One Meetings & Focus Groups

Sometimes, you need to go beyond surveys. One-on-one meetings between managers and employees offer personal insights that surveys might miss. Meanwhile, employee focus groups provide an opportunity for deeper discussions on specific topics, generating in-depth feedback that can complement your survey data.

Stay Interviews & Exit Interviews

It’s also valuable to learn from both those who stay and those who leave. Stay interviews with high-performing employees can help you understand what keeps them engaged and what could be improved. Similarly, exit interviews provide structured feedback from departing employees, helping you identify turnover causes and areas to improve.

Suggestion Boxes & ERGs

For more candid feedback, traditional suggestion boxes, whether physical or digital, still play a role in gathering anonymous input. In addition, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can provide feedback from underrepresented or specific employee groups, ensuring all voices in the organization are heard.

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Ask the right questions in your employee engagement surveys

By asking deeper, relevant questions of your workforce you can better understand what they are thinking as they will be more likely to take part.  And by avoiding certain phrases and poll types, you can lower your chances of turning your employees off to even taking them. 

Targeted Listening

The key to impactful surveys is asking the right questions, targeted at the right employees. A targeted listening approach—where questions are role-specific or region-specific—helps uncover unique challenges that might not surface in a generic, company-wide survey. When employees see questions relevant to their day-to-day work, they’re more engaged and more likely to provide valuable insights. Tools like Firstup allow you to segment your surveys by role, department, or location, ensuring you’re reaching the right people with the right questions, every time.

Role of AI and Data

Leveraging AI-driven analytics can take this a step further by analyzing previous survey responses to predict areas where you should focus your next round of questions. With AI tools, you can preemptively identify areas of concern, allowing you to act faster and address issues before they escalate. This ensures your surveys consistently address the most pressing concerns of your workforce.

Some good poll questions to ask:

• When have you felt most valued and appreciated? The opposite?
• What aspects of the company culture do you appreciate most? What do you wish were different?
• What resources, benefits, and approaches to work are you finding most helpful right now? What needs attention?
• Do you feel you have opportunities for growth and encouragement to explore them?
• If you could change something about work right now, what would it be?
• Do you have an idea for a poll?

What you should avoid when drawing up poll questions:

• Coercive/leading questions that make it clear that one of the answers is the “right” one. Example: “How awesome are we?”
• Ambiguous questions that can’t really be answered. Example: “Are we the best company that does/makes this?” 
• Assumptive/loaded questions. Example: “Why aren’t you married yet?”
• Negative questions. Example: “I don’t enjoy working from home. True or False?”

Target your surveys to specific audiences

Ever received a survey at work about a project or department you had nothing to do with? Those certainly aren’t helpful to management or employees! So, you should avoid sending generic all-company polls out when possible. You will want to have segmented targets that you can directly communicate with about certain topics that pertain to their work and life.

By using a workforce communication platform like Firstup you can send surveys and content to targeted workers when relevant to them, without unnecessarily filling up their inbox, and discover which communications are resonating and optimize what isn’t.

Have some fun once in a while

The last few years have been difficult enough; don’t burden your employees with even more dread. When polling, don’t ask questions only about work, have some fun with some of your surveys! What band from the past would they want to go see today? Who is going to win the Super Bowl? What did you want to be when you grew up? Friendly, team-bonding questions are always a good conversation starter.

Empower those closest to your colleagues

Not every poll or survey needs to come from the top or from Human Resources. Sometimes it’s more important to be a facilitator but not the owner of a conversation. There is often a level of trust between co-workers that leadership struggles to pierce, so finding those connections of established rapport is key to delivering – and generating – the survey responses that are most useful to your organization.

The key is to discover ways to remove the mystique around asking employees for their insights. They need to be comfortable with giving honest responses and assured that their opinions are valuable. Some ways to do that include: 

• Empower managers with toolkits and resources to have deeper, more meaningful conversations.
• Consider ways to tap into safe zones for employees, empowering those closest to their colleagues and building on existing levels of trust.
• Engage with employee resource groups to target tough questions and discussion guides. Often, employees are more willing to be open in these conversations.
• Offer location-specific or role-specific focus groups.

Commit to response and action before even asking

Workforce communication is not only about communication from leadership to staff, but also staff to leadership. Two-way communication is a lifeblood of your organization, and it’s up to you to make sure not only are employees being heard, but what you are hearing is being acknowledged and acted on. So before you ask any questions in your polls and surveys, be ready to respond to what you get back.

• Know and communicate the course of action for your findings before you even ask the first question.
  • Will the info determine the decision or guide decision-making? 
  • How? Who will use it?
  • Will it only form the basis for additional discovery, such as focus groups or employee task forces?
• Know that when decisions are made without input from employees, they tend to start holding back their ideas
• Learn the value of transparency and making a commitment to act quickly, including forming action plan teams before the results
• Communicate if and when specific audiences will learn the results (ideally within 30 days) 

When taking part in workplace surveys, employees are more willing to respond with genuine thoughts and care if they know they will be considered.

Leverage technology for continuous listening

Technology has become the backbone of an effective employee listening program. With platforms like Firstup, you can transform how you gather, analyze, and act on employee feedback. No more waiting for annual surveys—automation ensures you’re collecting insights in real time, empowering you to respond quickly to the needs of your workforce.

These platforms don’t just stop at data collection. By integrating AI, they can even predict when employees might disengage, giving you a heads-up to take action before issues escalate. Whether it’s automating personalized surveys based on an employee’s journey or surfacing key trends in real time, technology allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your organization—ensuring no voice goes unheard.

Embrace technology to unlock deeper insights and take your employee listening strategy from reactive to proactive. When you have the right tools in place, you can meet your team where they are and act with the speed and precision today’s workforce expects.

Conclusion

Because companies with a high level of employee engagement are more profitable by a factor of 23%, it’s vital you listen and act on input from your team.  Building an effective employee listening strategy takes time, effort, and commitment. You can’t expect every employee to respond to every survey, but by opening up more purposefully to what your workforce needs, wants, and expects ensures not only their engagement but also the success of your organization.

For additional information, you can catch the lightning talk we did at Ragan’s Employee Communications & Culture Conference, or check out the Firstup platform. It is a solution and partner that values listening and helps you communicate and connect with your entire workforce.

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