As AI reshapes the workplace and economic uncertainty rattles workers, employee listening has become more critical than ever for leaders to increase productivity, build trust, and stay ahead of disruption.
But there’s a gap between how often many companies ask how employees feel and how often they act on their answers. That disconnect not only undermines employers’ investment in surveys and employee feedback but can erode the trust they’re trying to build.
In a recent Charter webinar, Laura Fuentes, chief human resources officer at Hilton, and Bradley Wilson, global head of insights and innovation at Perceptyx, addressed how to close that gap, discussing what separates companies that truly listen well from those that merely survey their people. Here are five concrete ideas from the conversation leaders can use now:
Use AI to get survey results into leaders’ hands faster—and make them more effective.
AI can help companies act on employee feedback faster. Fuentes described a not-so-distant past when her team at Hilton spent a full month producing PDF reports after each survey closed, and hotel general managers waited another two months to receive them. “You’re putting things ‘in market,’ if you will, six months after the feedback was given,” Fuentes said. Now Hilton’s executive committee receives core reports within 48 hours of a survey’s close: “AI is allowing us to be more precise, more customized, faster.”
Wilson said generative AI has become a powerful prioritization engine. Instead of giving managers a 30- or 40-item to-do list drawn from survey results—a surefire way to trigger disengagement—AI can surface the one or two things most likely to prompt change. That precision matters especially now, when leaders are suffering from change fatigue, buried by information overload, and struggling with competing demands on their time.
At Hilton, Fuentes is also building AI survey-response agents that will draw on a decade of historical listening data to give leaders personalized input—surfacing where they’ve improved, where they’ve regressed, and what actions have worked at comparable organizations. “You can imagine a world where every one of our leaders has a listening coach where you can have all of that information at their fingertips,” she said.
Listen to employees about AI—before, during, and after adoption.
Fuentes described how Hilton has added AI-specific questions to its Great Place to Work surveys—asking whether employees feel equipped with the right tools and have clarity on where the company is headed with AI. “The results were not our highest scoring results by a long shot because frankly, we were still in learning mode,” Fuentes said. “It was good to see what the baseline [is].”
Beyond surveys, Hilton has employee councils weigh in on use cases and pilots, runs listening forums inside individual teams, and convenes innovation summits for its heavy AI users. The goal is feedback at every stage—not just a post-launch retrospective.
Wilson added that Perceptyx’s research found a strong association between companies that are mature at employee listening and those further along with AI. But he also warned that hierarchical cultures are much less likely to have made progress on AI adoption. In those environments, people “may be using technology,” said Wilson, “but they’re not willing to talk about it because then there’s this fear of ‘If I unveil this productivity hack, what is that going to mean for me?’” The fix is the same as the problem: Listen, and make it psychologically safe to tell the truth.
Close the loop visibly, telling people which changes result from feedback.
Perceptyx’s data finds there’s a stubborn “action gap:” 71% of employees say their organization shares survey results, but only 51% say actual improvements took place. Wilson said it can be worse to run a survey and do nothing visible with it than to not ask at all: “We should think of survey data as a conversation starter, not the end.”
Hilton’s solution is simple: a stamp. When it announces a program or update that started from employee input, it adds a label that says “fueled by your feedback,” explicitly connecting the two. Wilson described fast food restaurants that take the same approach, putting stickers on upgrades employees request to remind them the improvement happened because they spoke up.
Ask qualitative questions—then use AI to handle the volume.
For years, many organizations avoided open-ended survey questions because the volume of answers felt unmanageable. With AI, that constraint is now largely gone. “AI is giving us the ability to basically have a conversation one-on-one at scale in any language in real time,” Wilson said.
Fuentes said the most valuable questions in Hilton’s surveys are ones that expose friction (“Tell me the one thing we’re doing that’s making it hard for you to excel”) or open up possibility (“If you had a magic wand, what is the one thing you’d like to do to make our guest experience better?”) Those two types—honest obstacles and aspirational ideas—tend to generate the most actionable input.
Tighten your ‘listen-act ratio’—and tell a story every time you do.
When asked for one piece of advice to jumpstart a stalled listening program, Wilson said leaders need to get clear on what they are trying to accomplish, and adopt what he calls a “small company mindset” that’s not weighed down by current habits or practices. “Then, work backwards to ensure that you’re gathering, analyzing, and reporting the data so it moves the organization forward, even if that means shaking off some of the bureaucracy and history [of] things that have been done,” Wilson said.
Fuentes pointed to follow-through: “Have a tight ‘say-do’ ratio and a tight ‘listen-act’ ratio,” she said. Then, build a storytelling strategy around the actions you take to help spread the word. She said she’s never had to defend the company’s investment in employee listening because it’s more than an HR metric—when employees feel heard, they take better care of Hilton’s guests, which can improve business performance. “If you interpret employee listening as the complaint box alone, you’re thinking about it in the wrong way,” said Fuentes.
What to read:
- Listen to the full conversation with Fuentes, Wilson, and Charter managing editor Jena McGregor here
- How Booz Allen used employee surveys to build out skills-based learning
- The most promising ways to use AI to better hear and analyze worker feedback