What is a listening tour?
(and how communications can affect its success)

What is a listening tour? It’s an organized effort by a leader or a leadership team to… well, listen to people in their organization! Done correctly, a listening tour can provide deep insight into employee engagement, operational gaps and opportunities, and the health of communication across the org. Internal communicators and HR folks play a BIG role in making sure a listening tour is successful from start to finish. 

Listening tours usually mean surveys (of all different types), interviews with employees, focus groups, Gemba walks, and more. It’s important to consider all feedback-gathering techniques and execute the ones that feel right for your team. 

A listening tour is essentially market research at your own company. To create and communicate a successful listening tour, there are a few things to do: 

• Create a communications plan for your listening tour. In order for your team members to participate honestly and give you what you’re looking for, they’ll need to be well-informed and ready to help. That’s where comms can thrive!
• Choose your audiences and build your listening format. Go too wide and you won’t get any focused answers… to narrow and you won’t learn enough. Choose your audiences based on the specific goal of the listening tour, and tailor the format to how those people work.
• Listen! Be ready to actually and empathetically listen when sharing surveys and conducting interviews. Check your plan for bias and prepare to hear constructive feedback.
• Create an action and communication plan based on what you hear. After the actual information-gathering phase, there is so more internal communications to be done! Dive into the data and make actionable decisions with concrete timelines. 
• Follow up and share the results. Clearly explain the specific outcomes that your listening efforts will achieve and how those results will be delivered. If you’re in internal communications, make sure that all your channels are accessible and all of your audiences are informed. This transparency will position you for future success with listening sessions and other ways to measure employee engagement!

In the end, a listening tour can help lead to a more engaged and aligned workforce ready to help reach your goals and succeed together. An organization is so much more successful when its people know their workplace values their opinions and is actively listening to them.

Let’s walk through these 5 steps!

1. Create a communications plan for your listening tour

Set objectives and key outcomes

All functioning communications plans start with clear objectives. Definitely don’t let anyone rope you into planning a listening tour if they don’t know what they’re trying to learn. Their heart is probably in the right place, but all you’ll get are muddy results and employees that are more likely to feel survey fatigue. Some examples of purposes for a listening tour might be:

• Gathering input for a strategic decision a leader might make
• Assessing the impacts of a recent benefits or HR decision
• Understanding employee concerns about a certain issue or area
• Determining why a particular process isn’t working 

With the purpose set, you also should identify key outcomes you’re looking for. This will help guide and focus your question-writing. For instance, for those four purposes, target outcomes might be:

• Gather input for a strategic decision a leader might make: Add the team’s feedback into the decision-making framework.
• Assess the impacts of a recent benefits or HR decision: Make decisions about next year’s program.
• Understand employee concerns about a certain issue or area: Weigh whether or not to continue the current strategy.
• Determine why a particular process isn’t working: Make the right changes to the process.

Develop a timeline

Develop a straightforward timeline outlining all the key steps of your listening tour. This will help you stay on track and easily demonstrate progress and status. Make sure to include milestones like the initial team announcement, a communication schedule for surveys, the actual implementation of those surveys and interviews, and the deadline for sharing results and the action plan. Make sure to share the timeline with both leadership and participants.

Make sure you allow for EXTRA time! The work of actually coordinating and completing interviews (and the back-and-forth with employees) takes longer than you think.  

Create the messaging for your listening tour

It might (probably won’t) be called “The Listening Tour.” Along with how you’re going to phrase what you’re doing, make sure to develop clear, consistent messaging about the purpose and goals of what you’re doing. Remember – you’re asking your employees for time and vulnerability, so make them feel valued and safe. Also, make sure that you’re being transparent about how their input will be used. 

Here’s one example of a listening tour announcement:

2. Choose your audiences and build your listening format

Identify your audience segments

First, decide broadly who you want to listen to (for this initiative). Then divide that group into a variety of segments, and consider the best group or groups to talk to based on your goal. These might be departments, types of roles, locations, different tenures with the company, specific teams, or more. Be sure to also consider demographics like experience level, age, and leadership vs. non-leadership positions. 

Write the right questions for each group

The questions you ask, both in a survey and in person, need to align with the experiences, challenges, and perspectives of each group. You probably won’t ask each group the same thing, or at least not in the same way. In a listening tour set-up, the questions should be open-ended. Whether they’re writing or talking, you want to encourage detailed, full responses without a right or wrong answer.

Here are a few example questions:
Sales team: “What could the company do to better support you as you’re closing a deal?”
Leadership: “What are the biggest challenges you have in keeping your team motivated?”
Remote: “How could internal communications be better for our remote teams?”
Frontline: “How does your relationship with team leaders help you day-to-day?”

Also, make sure to mix up the formats. Different people respond better to different things, and you want to make sure that you have enough of a mix in your plan that everyone has an opportunity to provide a clear, helpful voice. 

3. Listen! Listen on your listening tour!

It might seem obvious, but remember to actually listen. You’re asking your employees to open up, and you’re asking them to potentially talk about the things that aren’t going so great work. 

That means that building trust is extremely important on a listening tour.

Some tips:

• Coach anyone leading the interviews on active listening, empathy, and asking meaningful follow-up questions.  
• When you’re talking in person, make sure to leave space! The best information tends to come at the end of open-ended responses.
• Even for surveys with quantitative data questions, leave room for open feedback, too. 
• Allow participants to ask questions, as well. Even if you (or whoever is conducting the interview) don’t have the answer, you can take it in and follow up. 

4. Create an action and communication plan based on what you hear

Analyze

First, you have to actually do an analysis of your survey data. There are lots of scholarly schools of thought out there about survey data analysis, but the simple fact is this: you really just need to be able to pull out themes, concerns, and areas for improvement. The best results will also be if you can segment those by the audience groups you decided on before. So….

Enter ChatGPT!

ChatGPT (or your preferred AI chatbot) is especially good at taking lots of data or text and summarizing it with exactly these types of themes. Instead of sweating super-scientific rundowns, try some AI prompts like this:

• Analyze these employee survey answers and summarize the common themes.
• Identify the main concerns in these employee survey results.
• Create a word cloud of these survey results and show the sentiments that stand out the most.

If you’re not 100% sure about using AI at your company (or you don’t have a policy for it yet), we’ve got a free AI Policy Template that can help you get it officially adopted!

Prioritize

With sentiment analysis in hand, work with your team (and be sure to include the relevant leadership) to rank the issues uncovered based on their impacts to the business, employee engagement, productivity, and alignment with the company’s goals. There will be things you see that you can’t do anything about right now. That’s OK! Focus on the original goal and on what’s actionable. Keep the longer-term or thornier issues in a “parking lot” for strategic planning. 

Take action

Create specific, achievable actions based on those top priorities. Each should come with an action plan with details and a timeline. It won’t be enough to say to your teams “We hear this isn’t working… we’re working on it.” They need to hear a plan with (1) assigned responsibility for the change, (2) measurable goals and timelines. Consider change management best practices as you choose what to do.

Remember, these don’t have to all be huge things! Don’t try to “boil the ocean!” But directly and promptly addressing something discovered in your listening tour will have a BIG impact. 

Communicate

This is a big one, and one where internal communicators can shine! Very little of what you’ve done matters if employees can’t SEE it. Share the action plan with the entire company, and give recognition to your participants for the help they’ve provided. Your communications plan should: 

1. Explain the purpose behind the listening tour you’ve completed
2. Thank and recognize the employees who contributed their time and energy
3. Share a summary of the results with as much transparency as you can
4. Show the action plan(s) in place, and really drive home how the feedback is being used to make things better
5. Explain why the issues you’re addressing were chosen
6. Make it all feel really good, and keep excitement high for next time!

Grab a super-helpful internal communications plan from our resource center to work on this!

5. Follow up and share the results

Make sure what’s happening is visible

While the action plan changes are ongoing, keep talking about them! As with all internal comms, team members need visibility and repetition to really take in what’s going on. Some ideas:

• Include updates on progress in your all-company newsletters
• Post about the project (and about future listening tours) on the intranet
• Share updates and specific pieces of feedback that helped in your all-hands meeting
• Have your leadership talk about the results in their leadership updates
• Make sure managers follow up (especially with participants) in 1-on-1s 

Build in feedback loops

It’s important to make sure that your listening tour doesn’t feel like the ONE time you listen, either. Use your internal comms channels to create opportunities for feedback all the time. We love in-email pulse surveys (super-simple in Workshop) for quick pieces of input, or a digital suggestion box on your intranet. 

Celebrate when it’s complete 

Publicly recognize the successful completion of anything related to the feedback you’ve received! It’s so important for employees to see how they contribute to success… you might even get other employees asking to be part of the next survey. If you can, create internal (or even external) case studies for what you’ve done that highlight the positive results and show the value of listening and feedback.

Listening tours are a lot! But they are so worth it. 

A listening tour is a structured opportunity for leadership (or anyone, really) to actively listen to what their teams have to say about their experience in the company. It goes beyond a typical engagement survey or annual report—it’s about fostering real conversations with employees. Effective communication is crucial for making a listening tour successful, and strong internal communication strategies are the key to turning employee feedback into company-wide improvements.

Ready to elevate your internal communication efforts? Whether through listening tours, pulse surveys, or strategic messaging, Workshop’s email and SMS platform can power your strategy and help you create meaningful engagement. See how Workshop can transform the way you connect with your team (this 2-minute video is a great place to start)!