You ask employees for their input — but are you really listening to what they have to say?
Inviting employee input is essential in an organization seeking to ensure team members feel invested in its future — but sending out the random questionnaire is not nearly enough. Employers must listen carefully to what employees have to say, incorporate their feedback thoughtfully and measure the outcomes precisely, according to the latest research.
A report from the employee experience (EX) company Perceptyx reveals promising developments and yet lingering challenges in how companies are engaging with the workforce. The study was based on interviews with more than 750 HR decision makers at companies in the U.S. and Europe having more than 1,000 employees. This is the fourth year Perceptyx has published the survey.
“Too many companies confuse collecting feedback with actually listening,” said Patrice Williams-Lindo, a career strategist and CEO of Career Nomad. “True listening happens after the survey — when organizations take real action. If there’s no follow-up, no transparency and no accountability, employees feel like their voices were just background noise.”
Indeed, the research suggests that the days of annual employee surveys collecting dust are over.
According to the Perceptyx report — authored by Emily Killham, a senior director at Perceptyx who heads its Center for Workforce Transformation — organizations have dramatically accelerated their listening practices. Whereas most used to do so on an annual basis, about 75% of employers now collect feedback every quarter, while 7 in 10 develop action plans within four weeks — a crucial timeframe for maintaining workforce trust and engagement, the researchers suggest.
“The most mature organizations have a robust and flexible listening program, integrated deeply into their overall business strategy, enabling workforce transformation at speed and at scale,” as Killham explained.
That integration is paying dividends for companies at the highest level of what researchers dub “listening maturity.” Such organizations are six times more likely to exceed their financial targets, eight times more likely to achieve high customer satisfaction, and significantly better at retaining talent and fostering innovation.
Yet despite those advantages, just 15% of organizations have reached a stage of “continuous listening and action,” a decline from 23% last year.
Meanwhile, organizations are expanding beyond workaday surveys, with 7 in 10 conducting “lifecycle surveys” at key employee milestones, 3 in 5 employing crowdsourcing methods to gather ideas, and about one-third utilizing behavioral listening techniques like 360-degree feedback — a method that entails gathering feedback from multiple sources, including managers, peers, direct reports and customers, to provide a comprehensive view of someone’s performance. The report stresses that a more diversified approach to surveys enables employers to capture a more nuanced picture of EX across different touchpoints.
Challenges continue to pile up, meanwhile. For one, HR teams are stretched thin, with 30% citing workload as a primary barrier to success in fielding employee feedback. Limited analytics capabilities (27%), manager skill gaps (24%), and poor alignment with business outcomes (24%) further complicate effective implementation. As a result, just one-quarter of organizations feel confident their current listening programs will help achieve business outcomes—a significant drop from 43% a year earlier.
Another transparent issue is that most employee surveys are anonymous, to encourage honesty while guarding privacy. So, while management can take actions taken based on anonymous feedback from surveys, the anonymous format places an obvious constraint on working directly, one-on-one with employees, as their identity is unknown.
The report also examines how organizations are connecting employee listening with learning and development, with those successfully integrating those functions nearly twice as likely to have effective coaching programs.
Among mature listening organizations, 77% excel at development, compared with 40% among less mature firms. That integration enables personalized learning experiences informed by real employee feedback, the report suggests, adding that employers would do well to ensure that their coaching and development activities and employee listening activities work in tandem versus in silos.
But the most persistent challenge remains the action gap. While 7 in 10 employees report that survey results were shared with them and 6 in 10 say action plans were created, only half saw actual improvements resulting from their feedback. That disconnect threatens to undermine employee trust in the entire listening process, the report emphasizes.
When it comes to building a culture with listening at its core, Williams-Lindo advises employers to:
Ask less, show more. Build in micro-moments of listening — Slack polls, real-time feedback in meetings, live Q&As — not just big, impersonal surveys.
Translate insights into strategy. Assign leaders to own feedback themes and tie them to KPIs. Don’t just collect data — move with it.
Close the loop publicly. Tell team members what was heard, what’s happening and what’s next. Even just saying “We’re working on it” builds more trust than silence.
Reward the voices. Employees remain and contribute when they feel recognized.
As she puts it, “Listening without action is just noise. But when you treat that feedback like a growth asset, that’s when culture transformation begins.”