We’re in an era of employee discontent and “disengagement” is just a symptom on the surface. When we treat disengagement as the problem, we default to measuring it instead of understanding it. When treated as a signal, employee listening becomes a pathway to change—if we’re willing to ask better questions, do something with what we hear and simply change how we value the exchange of receiving feedback.
Has Your Employee Listening Become Performative?
Most organizations are still doing what I call performative listening. Feedback rituals happen infrequently (think bi‑annual surveys) and in ways that isolate people’s input from any real sense of agency. Leadership typically pre‑selects which business issues get airtime, and for the sake of benchmarking, the questions often don’t change year after year. No surprise that the experience on the receiving end feels static, even as the world inside and outside the company is anything but.
What’s missing are two long‑neglected leadership practices: curiosity and deep listening. Many of us can feel how workplaces have become devoid of empathy and compassion, but we struggle to name exactly what’s gone missing. In some organizations, those qualities have never really been part of the experience, but they’ve gone un-attended because productivity and profitability are still good. So hey, what’s the problem, right? All this raises an uncomfortable but important idea: are we capable of inviting employees into shaping not only what we ask, but also how we turn results into action?
Organizations that want to orient to the future will be able to easily embrace this paradigm shift. This form of collaboration is precisely what most organizations can’t yet imagine—and exactly what they need next.
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