Imagine your organisation’s employee survey has just opened.
The launch email explains that everyone’s views matter. Senior leaders encourage people to be honest. Managers remind their teams to take part, and the communications promise that feedback will help shape a better place to work.
Now imagine being the employee reading those messages.
Perhaps you remember raising an issue last year and never hearing what happened. Perhaps your team spent more time discussing its response rate than its experiences. Or perhaps a previous conversation led to a useful change, and you’re hopeful that sharing your views will make a difference again.
The survey might be the same for everyone. The experience of being asked to complete it can be very different.
Listening is an experience too
In our recent benchmarking webinar, we explored why understanding employee engagement requires us to look at the experiences behind the scores. That principle also applies to the way we gather feedback.
Being invited to share your views is itself an experience. So is deciding what to say, discussing the findings and finding out what happens afterwards. Each interaction gives employees information about how listening works in their organisation.
Do people want to understand what working here is like? Is there room for a view that challenges the preferred story? Will someone take an interest in what we’ve said?
We can put considerable care into designing survey questions while paying less attention to these moments. Yet they deserve just as much thought.
What are we encouraging people to do?
Consider two ways of introducing a survey.
One team hears that its response rate is behind other departments and everyone needs to complete it by Friday. Another hears why the organisation is asking, what it hopes to understand and how employees will be involved in exploring the findings.
Both messages might encourage participation. But they give people different reasons to take part.
There are practical details to get right too. Can employees complete the survey during working time? Can colleagues without regular computer access participate easily? Is it clear how responses will be used and what confidentiality means in practice?
Before launching another listening exercise, it’s useful to walk through it from an employee’s perspective. What are we asking of people, and have we made it straightforward for them to contribute?
Make room for answers you weren’t expecting
The invitation to be honest needs to carry through into what happens when feedback arrives.
Imagine a team reporting that priorities change too often. The immediate response might be to explain why the organisation needs to remain flexible. That explanation may be reasonable, but it leaves an important question unexplored: what happens to people’s work when those priorities change?
Are existing tasks stopped? Do deadlines move? Are employees left to reconcile competing demands themselves?
Understanding this requires curiosity, including when feedback feels uncomfortable or seems inconsistent with the organisation’s intentions.
Managers often help make these conversations possible. How they introduce a survey, acknowledge a difficult finding or ask a follow-up question can shape the discussion. Emma explores the wider expectations and support surrounding that contribution in her recent blog: The line-manager’s role in employee experience: expectations and reality.
Let people help judge whether things improved
Once an action has been taken, there’s another conversation to have.
Suppose employees say it’s difficult to keep track of changing priorities. The team agrees to try a short weekly discussion about what matters most and what can wait.
After a few weeks, ask whether it has helped. Are competing demands easier to resolve? Is anything still unclear? Has the discussion created extra work without making decisions any easier?
This gives employees a continuing role in improving the experience. It also helps distinguish between completing an action and achieving something useful.
Where a change needs more time or a decision elsewhere, explain what is happening and when people can expect an update. Where something cannot change, give an honest account of why, with an opportunity for questions.
Design the whole listening experience
Our 2026 benchmarking report provides context for understanding employee experience and engagement. A useful next step is to examine the experience of listening within your own organisation.
Choose one recent exercise and trace what happened from the initial invitation through to the latest update. Ask a few employees what they remember. What encouraged them to contribute? What happened after they did? What would make the process more useful next time?
You may discover opportunities to improve well before you need a new question or platform.
For more on the evidence and the practical implications, download our 2026 Benchmarking Employee Experience and Engagement Report or watch our Beyond the score webinar.
At People Lab, we help organisations understand employees’ experiences and involve people in designing improvements. If you’re reviewing how listening works in your organisation, get in touch to explore how we could help.
