What Is Employee Listening? Benefits, Challenges, and Best Practices

Active listening is easily as one of the most important soft skills people can have. However, listening is not just essential for average employees. Anyone (everyone, really) in management needs to adopt this skill, as well. We are, thankfully, living in an era where employees don’t riot when their needs and concerns aren’t heard and acknowledged, but there are still significant consequences when leaders fail to hear what needs to be heard. This is why employee listening, or gathering feedback from employees, is so important.

Business management consulting firm Zenger Folkman laid this one out plainly after surveying over 4,000 business leaders:

• Poor listeners ranked in the bottom 15th percentile for trust.
• Great listeners reached the 86th percentile in trust.

If you’re here, it likely means you’re hoping to answer a few important questions:

• What is employee listening?
• How does it benefit me (or my company)
• How do I listen effectively as a leader?
• How do I measure the impact of employee listening strategies?

This post will help pull all of this information together for you, including a free, ready-to-import calendar with reminders for entry interviews, post-probation check-ins, project milestones, and exit interviews

What Is Employee Listening?

Employee listening is an employee engagement strategy in which organizations gather employee feedback at regular intervals, such as quarterly. Instead of relying only on a traditional annual engagement survey, they use a variety of methods, from pulse surveys to mentorship programs, to help business leaders connect with and better understand employee experience.

So what does effective employee listening actually look like?

Emily Killham’s 2024 research breaks it down into a four-stage maturity listening model, depending on how effective an organization is at listening to their people.

• Episodic listening: Businesses rely on traditional listening methods, such as HR-initiated annual employee surveys, to gain a broad understanding of how their employees are feeling.
• Topical listening: HR (sometimes requested by individual departments) employs a targeted approach to gather employee opinions on specific topics, although follow-up actions are often limited.
• Strategic listening: A multi-disciplinary listening approach that diverts from traditional surveys and considers business priorities, often with a strategy for implementing actionable insights.
• Continuous listening at scale: Employee listening is integrated into workplace culture, with multiple communication methods used across departments and touchpoints for every stage of the employee journey.

It almost goes without saying that you and your leadership team should strive for strategic listening strategies, at a minimum. If you can create a structured culture around continuous listening at scale, however, you’re far more likely to see the type of results that get the C-suite to start handing out holiday bonuses.

Employee Listening Calender: Recommended Structure

Getting employee listening off the ground isn’t easy, but creating a structured calendar schedule will help make sure you stay on task. Here are the calendar events or we recommend you create:

1. Quarterly pulse survey launch: Use automated reminders to make continuous listening “just happen” without too much of your direct input once the ball is rolling.

2. Monthly “You Said → We Did”: Give yourself a reminder to send these out on a regularly scheduled basiss to help close the feedback loop and maintain trust and momentum.

3. Monthly ERG listening focus group: Depending on the number of ERGs you have, make sure this calendar events are also shared with your ERG leads who can help you capture inclusive, topic-specific insights without over-relying on surveys.

Weekly manager 1:1 listening nudge: This event can be shared with managers and is designed to help build everyday listening habits, not just episodic check-ins.

Monthly skip-level sessions: Skip-levels create safe escalations and richer content beyond the direct manager, so adding them in at a monthly cadence will help tremendously.

Biweekly mentoring program check-ins: These channel real, human feedback from mentoring relationships.

Quarterly retention & engagement review: Make time to regularly measure business impacts and ROI.

New-hire lifecycle templates (Days 7/30/60/90) : Duplicate and drag this event to actual hire dates to ensure you never miss early signals.

Monthly data hygiene reminder: Waiting too long to clean up data makes it more diffivult. Regularly anonymize, tag by theme, and store data appropriately so insights remain actionable.

4 Strategic Benefits of Employee Listening

We use “strategic” here because, at the end of the day, everything we do in HR is strategic. That’s not really a pessimistic approach, just practice. After all, incorporating employee listening into your business objectives isn’t sentimental mush. It’s a strategy that will give you targeted insights into what’s happening under the skin of your organization. This then allows you to make meaningful changes that will bring zest to the employee experience and, by extension, rejuvenate business health.

1. Enhanced employee engagement

I’m aging myself a bit here, but no one wants to feel like George Jetson: A cog in the machine. Or a sprocket. Whichever you prefer. Either way, no one wants to feel like they don’t matter or that their concerns aren’t being heard.

It’s dehumanizing. Yet many businesses still operate with that dynamic.

A perfect example of this is return-to-office (RTO) policies. Workers have been loud and clear about this. A FlexJobs survey found that 81% stated that remote work was the most important factor for them to enjoy their work. Even more troubling on the RTO front (for poor listeners, anyway) is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that remote work increases productivity 61 industries and decreases a company’s nonlabor overhead costs.

So to get this straight:

• People who work remotely are more productive
• Companies that allow remote work save money on overhead costs
• Most employees want to work remotely

And yet, many companies are slowly clawing back remote work and even phasing out hybrid work. The consequences to employee engagement are fairly obvious here. It also highlights why listening to employees and paying attention to the data results in better outcomes for employees.

When you actually listen to your employees, you can forge a reconnection to increase employee engagement.

A More Inclusive Workplace Culture

Fostering an inclusive culture is about creating a welcoming work environment for everyone, regardless of their background. There are three little letters associateD with this that havE executIve leaders turning tail. Yet engaging with and listening to employees at a regular cadence helps to create the kind of inclusive culture companies want, even if they’re scared to talk about it.

But how can you ensure that your employees feel included if you don’t listen to what they need?

One option is to create Employee resource groups (ERGs), which are designed to help employees feel heard. When done right, they are very effective. In fact, McKinsey reports that 83% of ERG participants felt included in the workplace.

Here’s the thing with ERGs: You can have as many as you want, covering as many domains and employee interests as you want. At MentorcliQ, some customers are using our CommunityCliQ platform to host hundreds of ERGs. That’s because the software is scalable and integrates with HRIS systems for visible business impacts.

As diverse and inclusive workplaces are not only happier but also more profitable than non-diverse workplaces, it’s a no-brainer.

Higher Employee Retention

Engagement and productivity may be top-of-mind, but retention is always important, particularly in hard-to-replace roles.

It makes sense. When your employees feel not only listened to but heard (i.e., you actually do something with the employee feedback you receive), they are less likely to want to leave. This isn’t only about being listened to by managers, but also being heard amongst themselves.

SHRM found that 76% of employees with close friends at work are much more likely to stay on board the ship. Many companies push RTO because they believe it hurts company culture, but remote work can be navigated through strategies other than forcing people into an office.

In case you’re in any doubt of the value of retaining your current crew, here’s another stat for you: between time spent on the hiring process and training investment, it costs around 6-9 months’ worth of an employee’s salary to replace them. And, as invigorating as a fresh face in the office can be, too many all at once or too often can do more harm than good.

Greater Profitability

Yep, we are getting into the money side of things. Yes, the human element is the most pressing concern. But at the end of the day, business is business. You gotta make a profit! Thankfully, employee listening intersects beautifully with business financial health.

Increased employee engagement = greater productivity gains and payroll better spent. Multiply by a diverse talent pool, brimming with creativity. Minus the expenditure of an overinflated hiring budget. What are you left with? Profit.

All the other benefits we mentioned (engagement, retention, and inclusion) influence profitability. Positive gains on those factors result in positive gains in profitability.

How to Conduct an Employee Listening

To ensure that your employee listening is successful, you need a game plan. Use this strategy as a guide to conducting a successful employee listening program that makes a difference, both to your employees and to your business.

Action	Purpose	Additional Resources
Set goals and objectives	Create proper, measurable structure to your listening strategy	Setting and measuring mentoring program objectives
Gain internal buy-in/support	Ensure feedback strategies are acceptable to leaders and employees	Essential DEI strategies
Leverage different channels	Provide employees with multiple avenues for measurable feedback	Feedback vs. feedforward
Listen continuously	Prevent informational gaps and ensure active attention to potential issues	MIT Human Resources guide to active listening
Take action	Make organizational changes where possible based on feedback	How to Turn Employee Feedback into Action (Harvard Business REview

1. Establish Goals and Objectives

Employee feedback is a strategy in itself. As with any strategy, it’s best to begin by setting goals. Ask yourself a few important questions to lay the groundwork:

• Why do I want employee feedback?
• What do I hope to achieve by getting feedback?
• How often do I want to collect feedback?
• When do I want or need to start collecting feedback?
• What method will I use to get feedback?
• How will I process feedback when I get it?
• What actions will I take after I get employee feedback?
• In what ways do I want feedback to impact our company?

Setting goals is about more than just aligning with key business objectives. Although that’s important, each step in the process should also be a well-defined goal. You may even want to make yourself a goal sheet that tracks your movement through each one of the above questions.

For example, is there a high turnover rate of junior employees? If so, one of your goals might be to increase the retention of new talent. You may find that you lack the structure to scale feedback collection, which means you’ll have to start investigating different strategies for that.

Understanding what you need to do to get the desired result is just as important as understanding what you want to get out of it.

2. Get Company-Wide Support

An employee feedback program is not something you step into lightly. There are numerous concerned parties involved, all of whom may be skeptical of your approach.

• Employees may believe you are trying to find reasons to fire people who complain.
• Executive leaders may believe that gathering creates the assumption among employees that they’ll do whatever employees ask (which is not always feasible).

You, dear HR leader, walk a very fine line where you could easily upset everyone if you take the wrong approach. So what is the right approach here?

Gathering support first from both executive leaders and employees.

3. Leverage Different Channels

Let’s say you’re successful and you’ve gained buy-in from both executive leaders and company employees. Great! The next step is to launch your feedback strategy. A multi-channel approach will help you get the most feedback possible.

The different feedback channels you may consider include:

• 1:1 meetings: Regular manager-employee check-ins that can build trust and alignment and surface concerns early.
• Skip-level meetings: Think of it like going to the principal instead of just your teacher. Skip-level meetings provide employees opportunities to ask questions and share ideas directly with senior leadership, without, but not necessarily, their immediate manager present.
• Pulse surveys: Short, regular surveys that capture real-time insights into the “pulse” of the organization. To avoid survey fatigue, keep pulse surveys short, sweet, and clear why they matter.
• Focus groups: Small groups of people brought together to discuss specific topics, ideas, or issues for in-depth feedback that often goes beyond survey results. For example, a Women’s ERG might participate in a focus group to share perspectives on inclusive and bias-free benefits that the company is currently offering, which align with legally protected rights, such as healthcare coverage for pregnant mothers.
• Mentoring programs: As helpful as surveys can be, people feel most heard when they are listened to by real people. Specifically, when they feel like they have a voice and are met with attention, respect, and empathy*, which is what mentoring is all about.

Again, choose your feedback channels carefully. Trust is the most important factor in employee listening. If employees don’t trust the feedback channel, they won’t participate.

4. Listen Continuously

One survey is all it takes, right?

Yeah, no.

You should plan to gather feedback continuously, at a regular cadence. An effective employee listening strategy largely hinges on continuous conversations and active listening. This means training your managers to mentor less experienced employees and incorporating employee listening into professional development plans.

Pay attention to key moments of the employee lifecycle. Entry interviews, post-probation check-ins, project progress queries, and even exit interviews will give you a deeper understanding of how to create a positive employee experience.

5. Take Action

Don’t be the boss who asks for constructive feedback, then gets annoyed when they receive it. You may not be able to respond to every piece of feedback you receive, but be sure to take meaningful action on the items that come up repeatedly.

Your employees might share some helpful information that you can turn into actionable insights to make your business healthier, happier, and more profitable. If you’re not listening, you might miss out on something game-changing.

Common Challenges with Employee Listening and How to Solve Them

We see you, skeptics at the back, arms crossed, and brows furrowed! You are probably thinking that, even if employee listening is proven to be of benefit, there is no place for it in your business. After all, how can you spare the time? And what if your employees share something that you don’t want to hear? Let’s iron these out.

HR burnout

This is, more often than not, the first hurdle to overcome. A 2024 Sage report found that 81% of HR professionals are burned out. Statistically speaking, that likely includes you. And it’s understandable if you don’t appreciate being asked to jump on board with yet another initiative.

Any attempt to support your employees with the broken backs of resentful HR staff, well, just won’t hold up. After all, HR teams are also employees. They’re just the employees who don’t have anyone to advocate or their own care, concerns, and needs. You, too, deserve to be listened to, my friend.

Move away from only episodic or topical listening, in favor of a more integrated approach, which doesn’t rely solely on your HR department. Sure, you might be responsible for helping to set up your listening strategy, but in the long run, employee listening should be based on an interdependent approach. And, as much as possible, an automated approach (which MentorcliQ offers!).

Unactionable insights

Unactionable insights are those that we warned you about earlier, e.g., the feedback that your leaders can’t take action on. This is the type of feedback that keeps makes executive leaders wary about fielding employee wants and needs in the first place.

What happens if you receive key insights that you are unable to action? Perhaps your employee feedback indicates people are unhappy with the amount of parental leave you offer. Or that they want you to offer a more robust package of health insurance. Or that you start putting name brand snacks in the break room.

If you can’t afford to make those types of changes, you’re potentially in a bind. If you don’t do something, you risk losing team morale and some of your highest performers. All your listening efforts will be in vain, possibly even eroding employees’ trust in leadership.

Adopt a “You said → We did” feedback loop after every listening cycle. For items you are yet to be able to act on, explain why and what you will try instead. Employee listening shouldn’t turn into a complaint center. If it does, it’s time to regroup and cange your approach.

Confidentiality

Some employees, while desiring to be heard, may feel cautious about sharing their views on platforms that are not confidential. Companies place themselves in legal peril every year due to retaliation. In fact, EEOC data shows that retaliation is the most common complaint filed, by a very, very large margin.

Or, if your workplace isn’t psychologically safe, it’s only natural that employees might be afraid of airing their opinions for fear of receiving a reprimand.

Anonymised surveys, confidential ERGs, and carefully selected mentoring relationships are all stellar solutions to confidentiality and confidence restraints.

MentorcliQ Supports Multiple Employee Listening Channels

81% of C-suite executives acknowledge that they are making greater demands of employees than before. With employee listening, however, you can increase productivity and engagement (and, by extension, profitability) without burning out your staff.

MentorcliQ’s mentoring software helps you launch and scale mentoring programs and ERGs. By supporting engagement and development, you already solve one of the most common problems employees ask you to solve. MentorcliQ also automates employee feedback and allows for feedback, making it easy for you to establish a feedback schedule (and stick to it).

Whether you’re starting small or launching big, check out what MentorcliQ has to offer.