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November 12, 2025
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How to create a culture of listening that drives change
How to create a culture of listening that drives change
The expectations of today’s workforce are rapidly evolving, as a focus on employee wellbeing takes center stage. For many workers in the U.S., it's no longer just about compensation or generic perks. It’s about feeling supported, heard, and valued. Organizations that ignore this shift risk losing top talent, weakening morale, and seeing productivity decline across teams.
But how can leaders keep up with the evolving demands of a modern workforce? The simplest and most effective approach to identifying and meeting employee needs is simply to ask them directly. Too often, leaders guess at what matters most or rely on assumptions. Direct input cuts through the noise and surfaces the insights that actually move the needle on engagement, wellbeing, and performance.
In many organizations, feedback is overlooked, inconsistently acted on, or never requested in the first place. But building a culture of listening requires more than open-door policies or annual surveys. It’s about embedding listening into the way an organization operates, communicates, and leads. It’s about creating a workplace where employees know that their voices matter and lead to meaningful action.
Read on to learn why listening isn’t just a courtesy. It’s a competitive edge.
The difference between hearing and listening
In large organizations, it's easy to mistake activity for impact. Feedback channels are open, meetings are held, and surveys go out on schedule. But none of that guarantees employees feel truly heard.
Hearing happens by default, but listening is a deliberate act. It requires time, focus, and a willingness to understand not just what is being said, but why it’s being said. Listening is about drawing out meaning, identifying patterns, and making informed decisions based on what you learn.
This distinction matters because when employees offer feedback, they’re not just sharing opinions. They’re taking a risk. And when that input is met with silence, dismissal, or surface-level responses, it sends a clear message: this isn't a conversation, it's a checkbox.
Building a culture of listening means shifting from reactive hearing to active engagement. It means treating employee voice as a source of insight, not noise. The organizations that get this right are the ones that move faster, adapt smarter, and retain people who feel seen.
Listening is foundational to psychological safety
Trust starts with being heard. When employees feel ignored or dismissed, they disengage. When they see feedback disappear into a black hole, they stop giving it. Over time, this erodes psychological safety, which is essential for innovation, collaboration, and performance. That’s why emotional intelligence is a critical skill for leaders. Training managers to recognize emotion, respond with empathy, and create space for honest dialogue strengthens the foundation of a listening culture.
Studies consistently show that employees who feel listened to are more engaged, more loyal, and more likely to go above and beyond. Listening is one of the most cost-effective ways to build trust and foster wellbeing. A culture of listening creates the conditions for people to speak up, ask for help, offer new ideas, and raise concerns without fear.
Leading by example
Culture starts at the top. If leaders aren't listening, no one else will. Listening at the leadership level can’t be passive. It means actively seeking out employee perspectives, responding with transparency, and being open to changing course.
This can show up at town halls, where leadership addresses employee-submitted questions, or in post-project reviews, where feedback flows both ways. It’s not just about hearing compliments or ideas that reinforce the status quo. It’s about being willing to hear the hard truths.
Executive teams that model curiosity, humility, and responsiveness set the tone for the entire organization. They normalize listening as part of leadership, not a task to delegate.
Building listening into the culture
Listening can’t depend on chance encounters or annual check-ins. It has to be built into the rhythm of work. That means creating consistent, low-friction ways for employees to share feedback and ensuring that input actually drives change.
Pulse surveys
As companies grow, listening at scale can be a challenge. When technology supports rather than replaces human connection, it becomes a powerful ally in building a responsive and resilient culture.
Pulse surveys are quick, ad hoc check-ins designed to capture how employees are feeling in the moment. Unlike annual engagement surveys, they track sentiment in real time, helping organizations spot trends, identify risk areas, and respond before problems escalate.
The key is to keep them short, focused, and consistent. A well-designed pulse survey can measure everything from workload balance to team dynamics to wellbeing drivers. But the value doesn’t come from collecting data. It comes from what happens next. Communicating results and following through on action builds credibility and reinforces that feedback matters.
We ask and survey our employees at JE Dunn constantly. I'd actually say that was a really nice feature that we appreciated with Navigate.
The Navigate platform’s pulse survey feature makes it easy to gather real-time feedback across large, distributed teams without adding complexity. It helps surface actionable insights quickly, so leaders can respond to what employees need now, not months later.
Employee 1-on-1 meetings
While pulse surveys provide scale, 1-on-1s offer depth. These conversations are a powerful space for employees to be candid, ask questions, and feel truly heard. But not all 1-on-1s are created equal.
Managers need to go beyond status updates and create space for open-ended, reflective questions: What’s been energizing or draining lately? What’s getting in your way? What would make your experience here better? These kinds of questions shift the conversation from performance tracking to relationship building.
For 1-on-1s to become true listening tools, they need to be intentional, regular, and psychologically safe. When done right, they reveal insights that no dashboard ever could, and they build trust where it matters most. For inspiration, explore 30 employee one-on-one questions that help managers open the door to more meaningful conversations.
Team retrospectives and post-mortems
Retrospectives are a built-in opportunity to listen. Whether after a major campaign, product launch, or quarterly close, these structured sessions invite teams to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what should change moving forward. When they’re candid, inclusive, and non-punitive, retros build psychological safety and help teams continuously improve.
To be effective, retrospectives need more than a checklist. They require facilitation that encourages open feedback, time to dig into root causes, and follow-up that turns insights into real adjustments.
Employee resource groups (ERGs)
ERGs offer more than community. They provide critical feedback loops. These groups often surface the concerns, ideas, and lived experiences that traditional feedback channels miss. When organizations listen to ERGs and act on their input, they gain a clearer view of how culture is landing across different parts of the workforce.
For ERGs to be effective listening tools, they need structure, visibility, and a direct line to decision-makers. That includes regular check-ins with leadership, support for gathering feedback within their communities, and a role in shaping policy or programs. When employees see their voices amplified through ERGs, trust in the culture grows stronger.
Open forum town halls with real-time Q&A
Town halls are often treated as broadcast moments, but they’re a missed opportunity if they don’t invite conversation. Adding real-time Q&A, anonymous question submission, and upvoting gives employees a direct voice in the room. It also signals that leadership is not only willing to talk, but ready to listen.
The most effective town halls do more than answer questions. They follow up afterward, share what was heard, and clarify what actions will be taken. This public loop-closing builds credibility and shows that transparency isn’t just a talking point. It’s a practice.
Bring in a trusted outside perspective
Sometimes, the most honest feedback comes from a neutral party. Third-party audits can offer a structured, credible way to evaluate employee satisfaction and benchmark culture across industries. These tools often uncover insights that internal efforts might miss, especially in areas where trust or transparency may be lacking.
An external audit adds objectivity and depth to your listening strategy. It helps validate what employees are experiencing and gives leadership a clear view of where the organization stands. It also sends a message to employees that leadership is serious about listening and willing to be held accountable. When paired with internal feedback mechanisms, third-party audits strengthen both the credibility and the impact of your culture-building efforts.
Great Place To Work Certification is one of the most trusted benchmarks of employee experience, based entirely on anonymous feedback collected through the Trust Index Survey. The certification recognizes organizations where trust, respect, and engagement are deeply embedded in the culture.
Navigate is proud to have earned the Great Place to Work Certification for four consecutive years, demonstrating our commitment to listening, continuous improvement, and creating a culture where people can thrive.
Turning insights into action
Listening without action breeds cynicism. The fastest way to lose trust is to ask for input and then do nothing with it. That doesn’t mean every suggestion can or should be implemented. But it does mean being transparent about what was heard, what decisions were made, and why. This level of transparency builds credibility, even when the answer isn’t yes. Employees don’t expect everything to change, but they do expect to be taken seriously.
If feedback drives change, make that change visible. Employees need to see a clear connection between what they shared and the organization's response. Otherwise, even well-intentioned listening efforts lose credibility.
Highlight progress and success stories in internal channels, whether it’s a new policy, a revised process, or a team initiative shaped by employee input. Use newsletters, all-hands meetings, and manager talking points to close the loop and give credit where it's due. Visible follow-through builds trust and reinforces that listening is part of how the organization operates, not just something it says it values.
Final thoughts
A culture of listening is not built overnight. It’s the product of consistent actions, intentional design, and leadership that treats employee voice as a business-critical input.
Organizations that listen well don’t just react better, they anticipate more effectively. They uncover hidden challenges, harness untapped ideas, and build the kind of trust that keeps teams aligned through uncertainty.
In a time when employee expectations are shifting faster than ever, listening isn’t a one-off initiative. It’s a leadership discipline, a cultural foundation, and a strategic advantage.
