How a listening tour can elevate your internal comms

Want to know what your employees really think? In 2025, go beyond annual surveys and take a listening tour to uncover game-changing insights that boost engagement and build trust.

What we'll cover

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Get to know your organization like never before

On a 2023 listening tour, Safeguard Global, an HR consulting company, discovered that employees were worried about their winter heating bills. The organization acted on this feedback by providing a monthly stipend to help cash-strapped workers.

Chief People Officer Katherine Loranger told SHRM, “It wouldn’t have happened without the firsthand information about how inflation was impacting those employees.”

Similarly, after layoffs at Change.org, Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Dulski used a listening tour to understand the impact on remaining employees. She found that trust was at an all-time low.

The company responded by improving transparency and communication about its financial situation. Employees came to understand why difficult decisions had been made — and felt reassured about their job security.

As organizations like these have found, a listening tour can help you find and fix employee problems before they cause undue harm to your organization. They can also surface fresh perspectives on everything from your products to customer service to the employee experience.

In 2025, a listening tour is an essential part of any good internal communication plan. Let’s look at why that’s the case — and how you can put a listening tour into action.

What is a listening tour and why does it matter in 2025?

A listening tour is a series of structured conversations with employees, designed to gather feedback and insights.

It can include:

1-to-1 interviews with employees
Focus groups
Pulse-check polls
Workplace walk-throughs
Town hall meetings

A listening tour goes way beyond the annual employee survey. By actually speaking to employees, asking relevant questions, and encouraging honest and expansive answers, you develop an in-depth understanding of the employee experience.

In the case of an internal comms listening tour, you get to understand the employee experience in relation to your communications. You discover what employees think of your internal communication channels and tools. And whether your internal comms plan is having the desired impact.

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Key benefits of a listening tour

Executing an impactful listening tour takes time and effort. But it’s well worth the investment. Here’s why:

It builds trust. Conduct a listening tour and you show employees that you value their input. When you act upon their feedback, employees feel heard. This strengthens their trust in your organization and its leadership.
It fosters inclusion. On a well-planned listening tour, you gather feedback from hard-to-reach sectors of your workforce — like frontline employees — who may have little chance, day to day, to share their ideas, challenges, and perspectives with company decision-makers.
It surfaces actionable insights. A listening tour provides lots of useful qualitative data. You get to know what employees are struggling with and their preferred solutions. These actionable insights allow you to make changes that make a real difference to your workforce.

Why run a listening tour now?

There’s never been a better time to run a listening tour.

We know that many hybrid and frontline employees feel excluded from the company conversation. Nearly 2 in 3 UK workers are worried about burnout in 2025. And the latest Gallup figures show that just 23% of employees are engaged at work.

In 2025, employees are also holding leaders to a higher standard of accountability and transparency. Deloitte research shows that 84% of workers and 74% of leaders say an increasing focus on trust and transparency between workers and the organization is very or critically important.

According to Deloitte, transparency is the most pressing business trend. It’s predicted to have the greatest impact on an organization’s success, both this year and over the next two years.

A listening tour helps to address all these issues. Employers can uncover what employees want from leadership and better understand employee motivation and wellbeing. They can then develop a plan to improve internal communications, transparency, and employee engagement, benefitting workers and the organization’s bottom line.

Planning your next listening tour

So how do you make a success of a listening tour at your organization? It starts with a clear and comprehensive plan.

Set clear goals

Decide what you want to achieve with your listening tour and how your communication goals align with broader business objectives, such as employee retention.

If you’re running an internal communications listening tour, you may want to find out how employees feel about the company intranet — or the other internal communication tools you use. You may want to know if employees feel part of company culture and how they rate the transparency of your leadership team. You may also want to gauge their feedback on internal communication efforts such as key messages, internal emails, or peer communication.

Whatever your focus, establishing your goals helps to ensure your listening tour has direction and that you can measure outcomes effectively.

Identify your audience

The goals of your listening tour will help to dictate its audience segments. If you’re looking to address challenges within a single team, you only need to target that department. But for business goals that relate to your entire organization, you should look further afield.

Also, consider the diversity of your target audience. If you want to get a holistic sense of employee sentiment, speak to employees from all corners of your organization. That includes hybrid and frontline workers who experience the workplace differently from desk-based workers.

Choose the right format

The format of your listening tour needs to align with the needs and expectations of your workforce. Be conscious of time zones, shift patterns, access to tech tools, and the resources available to your interviewing team when deciding how to conduct your tour. Options include virtual sessions, in-person conversations, or a mix of the two.

Prepare key questions

You’re more likely to achieve your listening tour goals if you set a couple of key interview questions in stone. Some examples include:

What challenges are you facing in your role?
How can we improve employee communications?
What support would make your work easier?
Which key messages do you care the most about?
What motivates you to stay with the organization?

Pro tip: Conduct an employee survey before running a listening tour. This helps to surface issues you might want to explore in more depth during the tour.

Executing the tour

To get the most from your listening tour:

Be present and authentic. Show genuine interest in employee feedback by demonstrating active listening skills and empathy. Leave space for them to elaborate on their answers.‍
Encourage open dialogue. Use inclusive language and emphasize that all opinions are valued and confidential. Facilitate two-way communication by allowing participants to ask questions, too.‍
Adapt as you go. Be flexible and prepared to pivot if certain topics emerge as priorities. Don’t be afraid to go beyond your key questions to ask meaningful follow-up questions.‍
Document key insights. Designate a note-taker or record sessions (with permission) to ensure no feedback from employees is lost

Analyzing and acting on feedback

If you’ve executed an extensive listening tour, the amount of data you now have at your fingertips can feel overwhelming. Here’s a step-by-step process for analyzing and acting upon it.

Step 1. Organize your findings

Group feedback into themes like communication gaps, technology issues, or recognition needs. You can do this manually, using a spreadsheet or sticky notes. Or you can use tech tools like AI and mind-mapping software. This helps you identify any burning issues and prioritize your action plan.

Step 2. Share what you’ve learned

Transparency builds trust. So share a summary of the feedback with employees, acknowledging recurring themes, significant insights, and any surprising findings. Also, thank workers for their input, emphasizing the crucial role they play in shaping workplace improvements.

Step 3. Take action

The ultimate goal of any listening program is meaningful workplace change. So outline specific steps the company is planning to take, along with timelines. Involve managers to ensure employees see immediate and tangible results.

Most importantly, prioritize transparent and effective communication along the way, keeping employees up to date with progress on your action plan and closing the feedback loop.

Pro tip: Seek ongoing employee feedback to find out if changes have addressed the concerns raised in your listening tour. If not, go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan.

Beyond the tour: Building a listening culture

When you go beyond a one-off listening tour to build a culture of listening at your organization, you embed the benefits.

Employees have faith that their feedback is listened to and acted upon — and they feel comfortable voicing their opinions because there’s a wider culture of psychological safety.

As a result, you receive honest and valuable employee input, which yields more effective workplace improvements. You also get ongoing feedback, which means employee dissatisfaction is much less likely to take you by surprise.

So how do you create a listening culture? Start by putting these key foundations in place:

Ongoing feedback channels. An annual feedback event isn’t enough. Encourage employee feedback all year round with regular pulse surveys and 1-to-1s, ensuring feedback channels are accessible to all workers.
Leadership training. Equip managers with the tools and skills they need to conduct their own mini-listening tours, making open and empathetic communication a priority.
A regular schedule of listening tours. Keep your finger firmly on the pulse by turning listening tours into an annual event. You’ll improve the process — and employee input — with each new cycle.

It’s time to make listening tours a fixture of your internal communication plan

Listening tours are a commitment of time and effort. But — because they provide insights that you simply can’t get from an employee survey — they’re well worth the investment.

By embarking on an annual listening tour, deploying other employee listening tactics in the months between tours, and reliably acting upon feedback you build a culture where employees feel heard and supported.

Find new ways to improve your internal communication strategy, foster employee engagement, and build workplace trust. And make a tangible difference to the work lives of employees in the process.

‍Blink. And start truly listening.