Listen Up! Why a Good Company Culture Starts with Making Employees Feel Heard

When you’re pitching a role to a candidate, one of your biggest selling points is your company culture. Based on how you describe it, candidates get a sense of how much flexibility they’ll have and whether your company prioritizes employee well-being. They also see how the company celebrates wins and handles the (inevitable) bumps in the road. 

But to really sell a candidate on your culture, your culture needs to be clearly defined. And to do that, many top HR leaders say, you need to listen to your employees. Listening is the first step toward understanding what your culture is and where it needs to go. It’s also become an increasingly important employer branding tool over the past few years. 

“The mindset has changed,” says Judy Jackson, global head of culture and engagement at WPP. “People weren’t listening [before] the way they are today.” 

Listening also helps you see whether you have the kind of culture that attracts candidates, one that aligns with people’s values. According to a 2019 survey of workers in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, nearly two-thirds of employees listed “corporate culture” as among the most important reasons that they would stay with their current employer or start searching for work elsewhere. “People want to be respected,” Judy says. “They want their voices heard. They don’t want to code-switch. They want to be accepted for who they are.”  

To learn how listening can help you define — or redefine — your company culture, check out the five tips our experts share below. 

1. Start with surveys

One of the best and easiest ways to start listening is through surveys, which is what Digital River did when they revamped their values last summer. The company already had a set of values that were fine but didn’t entirely resonate with how the organization had evolved. The current executive team wanted the values to align more with where they were headed.

So, they sent the Glint culture survey to all their employees worldwide. “This was a quick way to get a lot of insight from a lot of people,” says Becky Garroch, Digital River’s VP of people and places. 

From the results, the company learned that their workers felt valued as human beings and that Digital River prioritized their well-being. But they also learned that the company needed to do better at cross-functional collaboration, especially with employees spread across the globe and working remotely. The executive team set to work delivering a new business strategy to make cross-functional collaboration run more smoothly — which was more in line with their values. 

Here’s the thing: They only learned what they needed to address because they asked — and they listened. 

2. Find a variety of ways to listen

“The biggest thing we’ve learned at Dropbox over the past year,” says Danny Guilllory, VP and chief diversity officer at Dropbox, “is that we have to listen in a variety of ways.” 

To do this, Dropbox sends its engagement survey to its entire workforce twice a year. They run focus groups, conducted by a third party, with different subgroups within the company. They schedule frequent executive coffee chats, where executives typically meet with 10 to 12 people in a facilitated discussion. And they regularly hold listening sessions with employee resources groups. 

“The biggest lesson I’ve taken from the past year,” Danny says, “is that we need to look at things in a variety of different dimensions to get a full picture and to get the texture of that picture.”

3. Listen often and remember that less can be more

After sending out its engagement survey annually for years, Wiley recently switched to conducting the survey quarterly. “We’ve simplified our questions,” says Danielle McMahan, the company’s chief people and business operations officer, “and we are pulsing regularly to make sure we are really understanding the sentiment of our colleagues.”

One of the things that Wiley is actively listening for right now is how much employees feel like they belong, breaking down the responses by where people work — onsite, remote, or a hybrid of both. “We’re looking for those biases in a very proactive way,” Danielle says. 

Wiley is smart to listen closely. And often. According to a Salesforce survey, employees who feel their voices are heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to do their best work. 

And for more tools on how to listen well, be sure to check out the LinkedIn Learning course Survey to Measure Engagement taught by executive coach and emotional intelligence trainer Don Phin. There you’ll find tips that can help you better understand and learn from your employees, including best practices to up your survey game and ways to measure and evaluate your company’s engagement efforts.

4. Act on what you hear

The global software company Sage has relied on listening tools from Glint for years. But when the pandemic hit, Steve Hare, the company’s CEO, wanted to amp up their listening. So the company engaged Glint’s “always-on” platform. “We call it ‘always listening,’” says Jenny Johnstone, Sage’s senior director of culture and colleague experience and engagement. 

As a result of “always listening,” Steve had insights into what employees were saying and what was important to them within a few weeks of the shutdown. He held a global town hall and solicited real-time feedback. Then he and his executive team did the most crucial thing: They took action based on what they had heard.  

They saw that people were struggling working at home, so they gave them the tools they needed to be successful. They saw burnout levels increasing and announced three well-being days off for the entire staff to thank them for their hard work and give them the opportunity to recharge. 

Instacart did the same thing. After surveying their people, they too became concerned about how hard people were working during the pandemic. In response, the company shut down for five days over the U.S. Labor Day, giving employees what the company called “Self-Checkout.” 

5. Up your employer branding game

When you listen to employees, it helps create the kind of company culture you’ll be proud to share in your employer branding. And, likewise, employer branding can help influence the culture you create. 

That’s what Rian Finnegan, senior global manager of employer brand at Peloton, thinks. “Listen to your team members and be in communication with them often,” Rian says. “And make sure that you’re connecting with the other social and branding teams across the company too.” The more you’re connected to your team members, Rian explains, the more likely you are to understand what people are responding to and what they’re not. This gives you a chance to see where there are gaps. 

“Employer brand really has a front seat to a lot of that,” Rian says. “You can help other parts of the company and influence them by sharing what team members care about and how we need to shift.” 

Final thoughts: Listening is a matter of respect

Listening is important for a very simple reason: It shows your employees you respect them, which is vital for creating a positive company culture. 

According to a recent MIT Sloan School of Management study, the single best predictor of whether a company has a highly rated culture is whether employees feel respected at work. In fact, it is almost twice as important as the second most predictive factor, “supportive leaders.” 

This point is echoed in Glint’s most recent Employee Well-Being Report: “It’s crucial for managers to operate with empathy and compassion,” says Gogi Anand, a LinkedIn senior people science consultant. “Regularly listening to employees creates loyalty, commitment, and inclusion and results in people feeling like they belong because they feel heard.”

So, listen up — it can help you create a culture worth celebrating.

*Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels

To receive blog posts like this one straight in your inbox, subscribe to the blog newsletter.