Employee Listening: Turn Feedback Into Action | Achieve

Employee Listening Isn't the Survey. It's What Happens Next.

Engagement survey season is here, and the timing for a hard look at employee listening could hardly be sharper. In September, Gallup reported that just one in five U.S. employees who work on a computer or digital device have a great deal of trust in their organization's leaders to use employee data responsibly. That's the same share of the global workforce that's engaged at work: according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 report, global engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020.

So here's the tension. Organizations are asking their people more questions than ever. Employees are less sure than ever that their answers are safe, or that anyone will act on them. Too often, listening has become a calendar event when it should be a capability.

That was the starting point for a recent Achieve webcast with Jody Ordioni, Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix and author of The Talent Brand. Her argument was simple and a little uncomfortable: the answers are already inside your organization. The real question is whether your research is designed to hear them, and whether you do anything with what you learn.

The Employee Listening Gap Is a Trust Problem and an Action Problem

Ordioni opened with a finding that still stings. A 2021 Gartner survey, reported by SHRM, found only 29% of employees trusted their organizations with data collected through common feedback processes. Gallup's new numbers suggest that trust gap hasn't closed, and that it tracks closely with engagement: 40% of engaged employees have a great deal of trust in how leaders use their data, compared with just 4% of actively disengaged employees.

Trust is only half of it. In a 2025 Perceptyx survey of 750 HR leaders, 95% said they had maintained or increased their listening efforts over the past year, yet only 27% felt confident their feedback programs would lead to the business outcomes they wanted, down from 43% a year earlier. Perceptyx also reports that organizations that act on employee feedback are six times more likely to exceed financial targets.

The webcast audience saw the same gap. In a live poll, 31% of attendees described the insights from their research as actionable, and one participant summed up the frustration in the chat: the findings can be actionable and still go nowhere. Ordioni's framing was useful here. Whether you call it a research problem, a trust problem, or an action problem, the gap itself is the opportunity. Gartner's research points to one way across it: when organizations communicate effectively at each phase of the feedback process, 86% of employees report a high level of trust in how their data is used, according to the same SHRM report.

Ask the Questions You Don't Already Know the Answers To

Ordioni borrowed a rule from the courtroom: an attorney cross-examining a witness never asks a question they don't already know the answer to. Good employee research does the opposite. If every survey item is built to confirm what leadership already believes, it will never surprise you, and surprise is where the insight lives.

Her approach at Brandemix is what she calls a qualitative and quantitative cocktail. It starts broad, with focus groups, leader interviews, and one-on-ones, and then uses surveys to measure how widely those themes hold across roles, tenure, and locations. Projective questions do a lot of the heavy lifting. Ask employees, "If our culture were a car, what kind of car would it be?" In one engagement, a chief marketing officer hoped for a red Porsche convertible. Her employees described a used flatbed pickup. The answer mattered less than the reasons behind it, and the work became closing the distance between the brand leaders wanted and the culture employees actually experienced.

She also shared practical prompts that surface the real employee experience:

• What almost stopped you from accepting the offer?
• What surprised you most after you started?
• What information is hardest to find, and who do you ask?
• What gets in the way of doing your best work?

One of her favorites is the happiness factor: how happy were you when you started, and has that increased, decreased, or stayed the same? Mapped against tenure, it tells you where the experience starts to bend.

There Is No Average Employee: Segmentation and Personas in Your Employee Experience Strategy

"The answer alone is not necessarily the insight," Ordioni told attendees. It's the answer broken down by who said it. People join, stay, and leave for different reasons, and they want information in different ways depending on their role, career stage, and generation. Some want a conversation with their manager. Others want a text, or a short video.

Segmentation matters most where the averages hide the story. Gallup's 2026 report found that falling manager engagement accounts for most of the recent global decline, with manager engagement dropping from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025. An organization-wide score can look steady while one critical group quietly slides.

Personas turn those segments into people. Ordioni walked through an example persona for Danielle, a night-shift nurse eight years into her career: what matters to her, what might break her trust, and how she engages when she finds the time. Someone like Danielle probably doesn't care that Friday is karaoke night. Research often shows employees would rather spend that time growing and learning. A persona keeps an employee experience strategy honest about who it's actually for.

This is also where peer perspective helps. Inside the Achieve Leadership Network, people leaders regularly compare how they segment feedback, build personas, and turn findings into action, which is often the fastest way to see your own blind spots.

AI in HR Makes Analysis Faster and Authenticity Harder

Ordioni called AI the elephant in the room, and as a researcher, she welcomes it. Analyzing thousands of open-ended comments once required a statistician and weeks of work. Now teams can find themes, compare segments, and spot patterns in a fraction of the time. Adoption is still uneven, though. SHRM's State of AI in HR 2026 found that less than half of organizations (46%) expect to use AI in HR this year, and its use is concentrated in a few practice areas, recruiting chief among them.

The bigger risk is on the output side. When everyone can produce polished, on-brand messaging, employees get very good at spotting copy that's been over-architected. Ordioni framed it as the promise versus the experience. If the story you tell doesn't match what people live, they'll say so, at the barbecue, in the group chat, or on Reddit. Her fix is a messaging word bank built from employee verbatims rather than marketing language, so the words people actually use about their work shape how the organization talks back to them.

Close the Loop: Employee Listening as a Retention Strategy

The cost of listening without acting shows up in turnover. Gallup research found that 42% of employees who voluntarily left their organization said their manager or organization could have done something to prevent it, and 45% said no manager or leader proactively discussed their satisfaction, performance, or future in the three months before they left. That's the case for stay interviews, which Ordioni counts among her favorite tools, and for treating listening as an ongoing employee retention strategy rather than an annual event.

Her most practical advice: the biggest mistake is stopping at step two. Asking and listening aren't enough. Come back to people, thank them, and remind them what they told you. When something tangible comes out of the work, bring the contributors in for a sneak peek so they know they shaped it. Not every answer carries equal weight, so prioritize, act, and measure whether you're making a difference. Done this way, listening strengthens all three pillars of the achieveCPR framework: Culture, Performance, and Retention.

And the payoff can be immediate. Ordioni described walking onto a freezing third-shift manufacturing floor, where people worked in their coats, and hearing employees say at the end how wonderful it was simply to be asked.

What This Looked Like in the Room

The session, hosted by Zech Dahms, President of Achieve, brought together HR, talent, and people leaders from across the U.S. and as far as London. Ordioni, who founded Achieve and has been part of the community since the beginning, drew on 20 years of research for employer branding, change management, and communications projects. Live polls let attendees benchmark their own listening programs in real time, and the chat filled with sharp questions, including whether purpose still differentiates an employer in the nonprofit world and how to energize a focus group when the room goes quiet. Ordioni's answer to that last one is worth hearing in full, along with her complete question bank and persona examples. Members can find the full recording and recap in the Achieve Leadership Network resource library.

Build a Better Listening Practice With Peers

Employee listening works best when it's treated as a discipline, not a deadline. That's easier with people who are solving the same problems. The Achieve Leadership Network is a membership community for HR and people leaders, offering masterclasses, masterminds, member-only events, tools and assessments, and research built for the realities of leading people today. It's a place to test ideas, borrow what works, and build a better world of work alongside your peers.

If you're planning your 2027 listening strategy, start there. Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network and join us.