Your Employees Are Talking—Are You Really Listening?

Organizations are made up of relationships. Relationships between vendors and customers, peer to peer, managers to employees, and employees with their organizations. In any relationship, how do we show people we care? Given our human nature, it often translates to giving time, paying attention to one another’s needs through active listening. It’s often said that active listening is one of the key ingredients to building trust, yet it’s also one of the hardest skills to truly master. It involves tuning in in a way that makes people feel seen, heard, and valued. This is something that leadership programs preach, but when it comes to real-world application, the challenges are undeniable.

In today’s workplace, that sense of genuine care often seems missing. Employees don’t just want to be listened to, they want to be heard—they want to know their thoughts, ideas, and concerns will spark real action. After all, if speaking up doesn’t lead to change, what’s the point of having a conversation?

The actions that demonstrate active listening—focused attention, thoughtful responses, and follow-through—sound simple in theory. But in practice, they’re much more challenging. In a world constantly pulling us in different directions, from smartphones buzzing with notifications to the pressure of tight deadlines, being fully present can feel nearly impossible.

Now, think about scaling active listening. How do you ensure that a small team of 10 feels heard? Or that an entire company of 300 or 10,000 employees feels valued and understood? When it’s not feasible to personally engage with every single voice, how do you build a culture that assures people their input matters, and that it leads to real, tangible change?

Consider this, the cost of disengagement is high especially in this economic context where morale remains low and productivity is constantly challenged. It goes beyond turnover increases, and consequent operational disruptions. It creates a transactional relationship with employees, which won’t stop at ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘bare minimum mondays’. In fact, employee engagement in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in a decade in 2024, with only 31% of employees engaged, underscoring the urgency for organizations to rethink their approach to listening.

We don’t have a listening problem, we have an action problem

For many organizations the struggle is to turn their employee feedback into real action. This can be due to their inability to read the volume of feedback, overreliance on stringent systems and traditional tools that can cause oversight on small but brewing points of discomfort or simply the bandwidth listening to employee feedback actively demands. All to say, the disconnect between

collecting feedback, listening and taking action is more widespread than we’d like to admit, and the lack of action and visible change continues to negatively impact the already worsening employee engagement and overall satisfaction.

While it’s easy to qualify this as a leadership issue, the reality is that the responsibility for this disconnect extends to every managerial level of the organization. Interestingly, Gallup’s 2024 report on U.S. employee engagement also revealed that even managers, who are often expected to cultivate healthy workplace culture, are struggling with only 31% feeling engaged themselves.

Executives may carry more weight in key decisions, but frontline employees are the driving force behind operations, playing a crucial role in shaping company culture. Without their insights, organizations risk becoming out of touch with employees. Every perspective is essential to driving smarter conversations and creating a stronger, more engaged workplace.

While organizations can’t fix the disconnect overnight, there are some measures that can help narrow this gap more rapidly and eventually reinforce a strong company culture with a shared purpose. But this warrants them to encourage deeper, more reflective feedback and have the

right tools that enable them to analyze and action it. This involves moving beyond annual surveys and their results that come with a shelf-life.

To foster an inclusive culture, organizations need to recognize and address biases in feedback systems, empower teams with tools that facilitate active listening and support managerial insights and actions, helping leaders guide employees more effectively. Good news is this doesn’t require yet another survey – leading to survey fatigue, it doesn’t require adding headcount for dedicated data analysts to read and analyze the results, nor an overhaul of your HR department and systems to achieve it.

Unlocking the power of feedback with AI

So, how do you make sure every voice is heard when traditional feedback methods just don’t cut it anymore? The truth is, employees are sharing their thoughts in places we may not always think to look—casual conversations, social media, online forums. These spaces are where the real, unfiltered insights live. To keep up, companies need to turn to AI-powered tools that can capture and make sense of all this feedback in real time, in an ethical and efficient way.

These tools can not only capture that informal feedback but also analyze it in real-time, giving you actionable insights almost immediately. These platforms don’t just give you data; they help you understand it—pointing out topic areas that need attention based on positive or negative sentiment and offering concrete suggestions for improvement, recommendations that come from employees themselves. AI can raise alerts for concerning feedback, instantly, reducing the time to address critical concerns or issues of quality, safety, or security. These platforms help create transparency, build a stronger feedback loop, and ultimately, foster a culture of psychological safety and continuous growth. By adopting these tools, you’re not just gathering feedback—you’re actively listening, responding, and driving meaningful change across the

organization. And this is what employees expect when they care enough to share their voice. Employees want their voices to matter. They want to influence transformation.