10 Ways To Build Employee Listening Into Your Internal Comms Strategy

Good news first. Organizations are increasingly understanding the importance of employee listening in building positive work cultures and delivering their strategic objectives. Not so good news – despite these intentions, many still don’t understand how to effectively listen to their people.

Employee listening isn’t easy to do – it’s part art and part science, and your internal comms strategy needs a blend of both to be successful. 

So, what can you do? Here are 10 useful ways you can bake employee listening into your internal comms strategy. 

1. Employee surveys  

If you’re not doing one already, a traditional annual employee engagement survey is a good place to start. It will give you a baseline on employee sentiment across a range of areas, so you can track how they move over time.

When building your engagement survey, consider:   

• What it is your organization is looking to measure – understanding of strategy and individual role in delivering it, satisfaction with leadership, upholding of values etc? 
• Focus on issues you can commit to address 
• Be clear on how results will be communicated and acted upon

Once this type of listening has become established and matured in your organization, surveying should become more frequent (for example, quarterly), with lighter touch ‘pulse’ checks. These give you real-time feedback, enable you to identify emerging problems, course correct if needed, and review how quickly progress is being made.

2. Focus groups

If you want to be a listening organization, you need to have regular face-to-face conversations with your people. Feedback given in person enables employees to provide critical context and colour, which they often can’t do online. When establishing focus groups, remember:

• They can be broad or topic-specific
• Ideally, they should be regular – so consider your cadence 
• To get a holistic perspective, invite a range of levels, tenures, roles, and generations

Focus groups provide a space for your people to safely open up, share how they’re feeling, and learn from the experiences of others. This can help them co-create solutions, so that ‘fixing’ problems doesn’t always fall back on the business itself.

3. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are collectives of people that come together on an identity or issue-specific basis. Sometimes, these groups feel marginalized or ignored by their organizations. Here, internal comms can help to foster a more inclusive culture by working with ERGs to: 

• Set up specific listening activities with ERGs – meetings, focus groups, etc
• Help to surface ERG sentiment back to management 
• Include ERGs in all communication plans 

Employee listening means understanding the views of everyone, not just the most vocal or regular at airing opinions. By involving ERGs in your internal comms strategy you will improve engagement, talent attraction, and retention.

4. Change champions

For any business transformation or change, no matter how big or small, identifying champions to advocate and role model it is widely acknowledged as critical to the success of the project. Given that all internal comms is change comms to some degree or other, engaging with change champions is another way to build listening into your internal comms strategy. 

With this network, you need to get information on: 

• What are the real impacts and benefits of the change?
• How is the change being received by employees?
• What elements should the change communications dial up or down? 

It’s only by listening to these champions that you’ll get a ground-level view on the reality of the change. This will ensure your communications are clear, credible, and compelling. 

5. Employer brand ambassadors 

Your employer brand helps you attract and retain the right people for your organization’s culture and strategy. Similarly influential as change champions, employer brand ambassadors promote your organization to potential candidates on social media and at events. You can ask this group:   

• How is your organization perceived in the market?
• What do people see as your organization’s cultural differentiator?
• Why do people join, or not, your company?

All of which gives you a more rounded view, so you can use your internal comms strategy as a powerful tool to reflect and reinforce your employer brand. 

6. Event feedback 

Getting feedback on company events – for example, town halls – should be a hygiene factor for your organization. However, to truly be a listening organization you need to be capturing employee’s views before, during, and after events. Here’s how: 

• Before – send out a survey or brief questionnaire, or use one of the listening forums listed elsewhere in this article. 
• During – allow a good amount of time for Q&A, and if you can’t give an answer in the moment, commit to getting back to people within a timeframe. 
• After – follow up with a post-event survey, and specify how feedback will be used to improve future events. 

Events are a regular part of any internal comms drumbeat, but with a bit of effort they can help to bake employee listening into your strategy. 

7. Employee experience platforms (EXPs)

Employee experience platforms (EXPs) are a fantastic addition to the employee listening toolbox. Increasingly, employees are using EXPs (such as Workvivo) as their central portal into their organizations, and through them are:

• Sharing how they’re feeling, whether professional or personal  
• Engaging with (liking, commenting on) official company communications 
• Collaborating and forming connections with individuals outside their teams 

With such a wealth of user-generated content being published on them every day, EXPs are a quick, cost-effective, and up-to-date way to capture feedback. As such, they should be a central channel of employee listening in your internal comms strategy. 

8. Team meetings

Sometimes, the opportunities for employee listening can be right under your nose. Every team has meetings, and, if used correctly, they can be a great source of employee listening. But how? 

• Provide managers with feedback prompts for their team meetings 
• Share case studies of managers who listen to their team, and the impacts it’s had
• Run regular forums with managers to understand what their employees are saying – key topics, trends, etc

Managers are the key conduit to most people in your organization. If you give them the training and materials they need, you will find much of your employee listening can be done for you. 

9. Central forum for feedback 

Occasionally, employees may not feel comfortable sharing their views, whether in-person or online. In these situations, it’s important that your employee listening extends to the provision of a centrally managed forum (for example, a phone line or mailbox) that allows anonymous feedback to be given.

Employee listening of this type is a rich source of information for your internal comms strategy because: 

• It’s more likely to be unfiltered, giving you honest feedback
• While individual in nature, it may expose broader cultural issues that need exploring (for example, inclusivity)
• It gives your internal comms strategy more weight if you’ve reflected all the forums in which feedback can be given  

Employee listening means meeting your people where they are. Sometimes, for valid reasons, they don’t want to be revealed, but their concerns should still form part of your internal comms strategy. 

10. Report back on what you’re doing 

Nothing demotivates employees more than being asked for feedback that goes into a black hole. Your people want to know what you’re going to do in response to the issues they’ve raised, so: 

• Be clear about how and when you will communicate the findings of any listening activity 
• Do not over-promise – manage expectations about priorities and resources 
• Communicate progress in between listening activities – to maintain momentum and credibility