Employee listening: what your change plan cannot tell you

Employee listening proves its worth in organisational change when it does more than measure reaction. Used well, it brings practical knowledge into the change that the programme cannot hold centrally, exposes constraints earlier and gives employees a meaningful role in making the new way of working viable.

One pattern I see repeatedly in change programmes is that the closer teams get to delivery, the narrower their field of vision can become. The pressure is to deliver what has been scoped as efficiently as possible, so listening can start to look like an additional activity that introduces more questions, complexity and delay.

I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.

Employee listening is pivotal during organisational change because it gives the change team access to knowledge it does not otherwise possess: how work actually happens, what has been tried before, where dependencies sit and what is being assumed. So, more than just surveying employees to measure sentiment, listening is a way of improving the quality of the change itself – especially in AI-enabled change.

The challenge, of course, is whether leaders are genuinely listening with enough openness to discover that part of the approach may need to change.

One risk in a large change programme is that everybody can be doing exactly what they have been asked to do and still miss something important. Knowledge about what has been tried before, the informal practices that keep work moving or previous failures can fall between accountabilities. In the rail environment, I’ve worked with experienced people who were wary of change precisely because they had seen similar ideas arrive and fail before. That history should not automatically be dismissed as resistance; sometimes it contains a failure pattern the central team cannot see.

Employee involvement also affects the provenance of a decision. I’ve seen scepticism shift when leaders can show that people doing the work were involved in developing the response, rather than the decision appearing to have been designed entirely at a distance.

Who asks matters: people may say something to a trusted manager or colleague that they would never put in a corporate survey. But people don’t withhold their views just because hierarchy makes them nervous. A common reason is that they’ve raised the same issue before, received no acknowledgement and stopped bothering. The result is often not open opposition, but compliance: people do the minimum required and leave improvement to somebody else.

There is also a less obvious representation problem. Over many years of change work, I’ve often seen senior leaders speak clearly and frontline colleagues speak clearly, while the middle-management layer says much less. They sit between competing pressures, accountable both upwards and downwards. A comms cascade may look complete on an organisation chart while the real flow of information is much weaker.

A high survey response rate cannot tell you whether the right people felt able to say the difficult thing. In Network Rail’s 21st Century Maintenance work, for which we were named Class Winner at the IoIC Awards for Best Listening Programme, executive leaders were deliberately asked to leave part of a knowledge-sharing event so colleagues could speak more freely. The point was to change the conditions under which the information was produced, thereby improving its quality.

The most useful listening often begins when the organisation stops asking people simply to highlight the problem and starts involving them in working out the response.

I have found this especially important with people labelled “resistant”. Bringing a sceptical influencer closer can feel uncomfortable, but if they are given a genuine role as a critical adviser, they may surface the issue that needs solving. And if not, it’s still more useful than leaving the argument outside the room.

Listening can also be lateral, not just vertical; the knowledge one team needs may sit elsewhere in the business rather than at the top. Network Rail’s experience, for example, exposed how different Routes could encounter the same problems without necessarily learning from one another. Its in-person sessions drove open discussion of what was and wasn’t working, and afterwards, leaders formed cross-Route visits and working groups around issues discussed. Importantly, employee involvement was given somewhere to go.

One of the most important things leaders can do is be honest about where influence starts and stops.

Some decisions are fixed by law, safety, strategy, technology retirement or economics. Pretending they are open for debate creates false participation and can be less honest than not asking at all. In those cases, the useful question is not, “Should we do this?” but, “What do we need to understand to make this workable?”

I have worked on technology changes where the decision to migrate was already made because, for example, the old environment was being switched off. There was no value in asking people whether the change should happen. There was considerable value in asking what would make it workable. In one case, that meant giving employees a wider choice of devices and the opportunity to try them before choosing. The outcome was fixed, aspects of the implementation were not.

The listening approach also has to fit the tempo and stage of the change. In a fast-growth business, that may mean asking fewer, better questions in minutes rather than taking people into lengthy sessions. Early on, listening can shape design; during implementation, it can expose where the plan is colliding with reality; later, it can show whether the change has become workable practice. The method and aim can change, but the response cannot disappear: what did we hear, and what are we doing differently because of it?

And if the listening mechanism itself is no longer producing useful insight, keeping it unchanged simply because it was part of the original plan rather misses the point.

We saw this in the Network Rail work. The initial approach generated enthusiasm, but some parts were not being used as much as expected. Rather than keep pushing the same model, the team asked people what was getting in the way. That feedback led to a practical change: instead of mainly asking employees to submit ideas, the programme began putting shared problems out to colleagues and bringing interested people together to help solve them.

The weakest evidence of employee listening is that people were asked. A stronger signal is that a decision, design or sequence changed in response to what was heard.

So, when I review listening with leadership teams, I would rather ask three questions than count channels:

If those questions are difficult to answer, the programme may be collecting employee feedback, but it is not yet using employee listening to improve the change.

Jen Lowther is an experienced managing consultant and change leader with more than 20 years’ delivery experience across complex transformation programmes. She works with organisations to turn strategic change into practical, sustainable outcomes.