Listening Strategies to Better Understand Remote/Hybrid Workers’ Needs

How do your workers feel about their work and workplace? What do they like or dislike about your organization’s remote or hybrid work arrangements? Are those likes or dislikes a driving factor in whether they quit or stick around?

Employee listening may provide some of the answers to those questions.

This article will explore this concept and how it may help your organization diagnose the health of its remote/hybrid workers, teams and setups.

Employee Listening: Definition and Types

Employee listening is a set of practices, techniques, technologies and resources for capturing, analyzing and acting on workers’ voices and feedback.

Employee listening can be:

Episodic. Send surveys occasionally (typically once or twice per year).
Strategic. Cover the employee journey in all its stages, from hiring to promotion to retirement or quitting.
Topical. Focus on subjects relevant to the employee and/or employer.
Conversational. Gather feedback via different communication channels (e.g., emails, meetings).

This listening may involve tools such as:

Pulse surveys. Track changes in employee sentiment over time.
Engagement surveys. Measure employee satisfaction and engagement levels.
Lifecycle surveys. Gather feedback at specific milestones in an employee’s tenure (e.g., onboarding, exit, employment anniversaries).
Sentiment analysis. Automatically collect and analyze employee sentiment data.
Artificial intelligence-driven analytics. Employ AI to analyze previous survey responses to predict areas to focus on next.

Why Employee Listening?

Let’s explore a handful of reasons why an organization would use employee listening in analyzing its remote and hybrid workplaces.

1) Fill communication gaps and notice issues earlier.

When employees work from home or come to the office just a few days per week, some topics can go unvoiced and some feelings can be left unexpressed as the result of zero or minimal face-to-face interaction. Employee listening strategies may mitigate this by bringing to light important subjects deserving of dialogue and action. Moreover, they may allow you to spot and address problems like isolation or burnout at the budding stage and mitigate their growth.

2) Keep track of employees’ well-being.

If you check in with your remote or hybrid workers regularly via an employee listening program, you can monitor important aspects of workplace wellness and see what needs more attention:

Emotional and mental health
Physical health
Social well-being
Financial well-being

Consider that 2023 research by the Integrated Benefits Institute showed hybrid (38%) and fully remote (40%) employees are slightly more vulnerable to stress and depressive symptoms compared to in-office workers (35%).

3) Strengthen trust and connection.

Harvard University research from 2021 found physical distance can be a powerful “deteriorator” of trust-driven corporate relationships in remote or hybrid work environments. Working miles away from coworkers may also cause individuals to feel disconnected, lonely or even abandoned.

When you actively listen and react to your workers, even in a virtual space, you can build a stronger emotional connection, re-engage your workforce, and become someone they can count on and confide in.

4) Make needs-driven corporate decisions.

Decisions are generally better understood and accepted when affected parties feel they had a say (or at least a voice) in the discussion.

Suppose your organization wants to bring some or all of its employees back to the office. Do they actually want that? In this context, topical employee listening could help. You can ask them about a comeback strategy via a short survey:

Would you return to the office completely? Please explain your choice.
If yes, what could help you make it a smoother transition?
If no, what factors may need to be addressed?

5) Retain your top talent.

Deloitte research found as many as 90% of workers are more likely to stay with employers that solicit their opinions and act on their feedback. Employers that don’t practice openness and two-way communication may be pushing workers to explore other options.

Conversely, an end-to-end employee listening strategy — spanning listening, sentiment collection, analysis and action — likely will impact retention and corporate loyalty rates.

Leading Practices for Implementing Employee Listening

Consider the following five pro tips for using employee listening for remote or hybrid teams.

1) Go with multi-method and multi-tool listening.

When organizations use multiple methods and tools, the odds for strategy success generally increase.

Consider ways to best use:

Employee surveys
Online feedback forms
1:1 meetings
Town hall team meetings
Virtual suggestion boxes

Sabas Lin, the chief technology officer at learning tool provider Knowee, recommended artificial intelligence (AI) when preparing an employee listening strategy toolset.

“Whether you want to send regular pulse surveys or grasp your workers’ sentiments episodically, AI can take care of anything and everything, soup to nuts,” he said. “[Many] AI-powered employee listening tools extract employee insights automatically, which can save you countless hours filtering and sorting raw data.”

2) Create a safer setting to speak up freely.

Psychological safety is a critical component of a healthy workplace. In fact, research by survey tool provider DecisionWise found 34% of surveyed employee hesitate to speak up at work due to the fear of retribution. Knowing this, encourage your hybrid or remote team members to safely express their thoughts and assure them you value their honest feedback — positive or negative.

3) Train managers to be active and empathetic listeners.

Are your hybrid/remote leaders and managers good listeners? If not, workers may feel unheard or even dismissed.

While not everyone is naturally gifted at active listening and empathy at work, this skill can be built (and even mastered).

“I believe every manager can and should be trained in active and empathetic listening, which is a foundational element of any employee listening strategy,” said Grant Aldrich, the founder of the web-based education platform Online Degree.

Aldrich added that a plethora of free online resources and courses “has made this training easily accessible for today’s leaders.”

Top skills leaders can focus on include:

Body language. Use eye contact, nodding, etc.
Verbal affirmations. Use phrases such as: “I understand.” “I can see why you’re feeling that way.” “Thank you. It’s very brave of you to share.”
Reflecting listening. Paraphrase and reflect on what has been said.
Open-ended questions. Use questions that entice a detailed response. Examples: “What has been on your mind lately?” “How can I support you right now?”
Control over emotional reactions. Utilize self-regulation techniques to keep calm and listen patiently.

4) Listen more carefully to new hires.

How would new remote/hybrid talent describe their work experience? Send pulse surveys or schedule informal meetings during onboarding to capture and discuss their feelings. Social platforms can be a go-to place to listen to new employees’ takes about their first days or weeks.

In this area, pay particular attention to the youngest workplace entrants (Generation Z) and keep a keener ear out for them. These workers generally require more openness and sensitivity on the part of their employer and often reject the traditional workplace with its “old-fashioned” rules.

5) Avoid toxic positivity and indifference.

Do you pretend everything is normal and simply “bathe” in toxic positivity?

“Toxic positivity, or the ‘I-don’t-want-to-notice-negativity’ attitude, is a silent killer of employee listening strategies,” said Kathryn MacDonell, the CEO at Trilby Misso Lawyers. “When you listen but don’t hear and ignore the issue, it may balloon larger and larger and eventually explode into a more serious problem.”

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Your strategies surrounding employee listening can’t be “set it and forget it.” Continuous improvement is likely the result of continuous iteration.

Team members may be happy today. Tomorrow may bring new professional challenges or personal issues. To address this, consider ways to adjust listening tools, frequencies and more.

Therefore, focus on effective ways to listen to and capture the voice of the workforce. Play with the strategies mentioned in this article and see what works best for you and them. And, act to address the wants and needs that matter most to those workers.

Editor’s Note: Additional Content

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