Listening Strategies

A listening strategy defines how and when you gather employee feedback across the cycle. It is the strategic plan that sits above individual surveys, mapping out the full listening calendar for the organisation.

What Goes Into a Listening Strategy?

A listening strategy typically includes:

• Cadence — How often surveys are run (annual, quarterly, pulse)
• Topics — Which dimensions of employee experience each survey covers
• Channels — How invitations are distributed (email, QR code, kiosk)
• Populations — Which employee groups are included in each survey
• Goals — What the organisation is trying to learn or improve

Creating a Strategy

1. Open a client record and navigate to the Listening Strategies tab
2. Click New Strategy
3. Start with the essentials, or choose a deeper level of detail
4. Develop the channels, measures and governance, then review and export the strategy

Strategy vs. Survey

You can have multiple surveys running under a single strategy. For example, a yearly engagement strategy might have four quarterly pulse surveys and one annual deep-dive survey.

The download is the board pack. Practitioner notes (hosting, vendor-in-the-room) stay on Review in the product.

Accessing the Global View

The Listening strategies tab under Plan shows the chosen client's strategies. For a consultancy, a line under the heading reads "Showing [client] only"; choose Show all clients beside it to see every client's strategies in one view. Click any strategy to open it within its client context.

Start simple

Use Simple to capture the decision, people and first next step. Choose Standard when you are ready to develop channels and measures, or Detailed for the full strategy. These are different levels of detail within the same strategy.

Develop the Working Plan

In Standard, choose Channels and ownership or Measures and success. Use Governance and review to open Detailed mode when you are ready to develop those sections. Unknowns can stay open while the strategy is a draft.

Discover

Confirm the strategy parameters, organisation profile, strategic priorities and workforce composition. Review current listening tools and describe the current state and desired outcomes before designing the plan.

Design

Choose the listening channels and their frequency. Set the audience, fieldwork duration, who runs each channel and its owner. Check the calendar against workforce access and the organisation's capacity to follow up.

Measure

Select listening themes and map them to channels. Choose key performance indicators and targets, then review data segmentation and the benchmarking approach. Measures should connect to the decisions this strategy supports.

Govern

Review guiding principles, governance roles and privacy and confidentiality settings. Set the action planning approach, communication plan and reporting plan. Confirm who will act on findings and how people will hear what happened.

Assemble

Review the assembled strategy sections and edit the wording where needed. Refresh from the strategy data when the underlying plan has changed, then check the resulting document before moving to Review.

Review

Check the strategy and its readiness for approval. Use the review or approval action available for its current status. Keep practitioner notes here; the exported board pack is the document for the audience.

Set Review this strategy by here. It starts a year after approval, and Pindrop adds a prompt to the organisation's Overview as the date nears.

Export

Check branding and the prepared-for and prepared-by details before downloading the board pack. Choose the available document format. If an export is blocked, address the readiness issues shown on the page, then try again. Save branding changes with Save branding.