Still running one engagement survey a year?
Hate to break it to you, but that’s not going to cut it in today’s work environment.
AI adoption, restructuring, in-office policies, leadership changes, and shifting employee expectations can change how people feel about work in a matter of weeks. If you're only listening once a year, you may not see the signals until months after they first appear.
By the time that data lands on your leadership team's desk, the employee who was quietly disengaged three months ago has already left. Or worse. Has dragged the entire team down with them.
So the question isn't how to improve your annual survey. It's how to build an employee engagement listening strategy that creates the conditions where your people can share their feedback, do their best work, and want to stay.
The goal isn't a better score. It's a better workplace.
It's easy for employee engagement programs to become overly focused on measurement.
What's our engagement score? How does it compare with last year? Which teams are above or below the benchmark?
The real goal of a CPO is to understand what's helping people do their best work, what's getting in their way, and where problems are emerging before they turn into regrettable attrition.
That requires moving from periodic measurement to continuous listening.
And continuous listening doesn't mean surveying employees every week. It means creating the right opportunities to listen at the moments that matter, and having a plan for what happens next.
Here are three places I'd start.
3 ways to rebuild your engagement listening strategy in 2026
1. Add lightweight pulse checks around moments that matter
Your annual engagement survey gives you the big picture. Pulse surveys help you understand what's changing between those larger check-ins.
Tie it to something employees are actually experiencing: a reorganization, a leadership change, a new policy, or the rollout of a new AI workflows.
The key is context. A pulse check that's just a vague temperature reading won't get you useful signals.
And keep it short. Five thoughtful questions can often tell you more than another 50-question survey.
And because you're asking closer to the moment itself, you have a much better chance of acting while the feedback still matters.
2. Make managers your first line of listening
HR should not be the last to know about an engagement problem. But right now, often it is.
Train your managers to run 1:1s that ask about experience, not just deliverables. Give them a simple, clear way to flag concerns upward. The intelligence is already in your organization, you just need a faster path for it to travel.
3. Run stay interviews before you need exit interviews
You already know why people leave. You find out in the exit interview, after they've decided to go.
Stay interviews flip that entirely. You're talking to your best people about why they're still here, before you ever need the harder conversation.
Aim to integrate them regularly in 1:1’s. And be honest with yourself: if you've never asked your top performers what would make them leave, you don't actually know the answer.
The part most employee listening strategies miss
The key is staying proactive, and following through.
Employees stop believing their input matters when nothing changes because of it. Response rates drop. The survey becomes a ritual nobody trusts. Continuous listening only works when people believe something will actually change because of what they shared. That trust is built one response, one conversation, and one action at a time.
Ready to build a listening system?
For most People teams, the challenge isn't knowing that they should listen more often. It's operationalizing it.
That's why we've built the SurveyMonkey Employee Engagement Programs.
Based on insights from tens of thousands of HR professionals, our programs bring the pieces of an ongoing employee listening strategy together from annual engagement surveys and lightweight pulse checks to stay interviews.
You'll get ready-to-use surveys and templates, along with recommendations for when to use them, so your team doesn't have to build an employee listening strategy from scratch. Plus, easily share the results with leadership or people managers.
Rebecca Cantieri is the Chief People Officer at SurveyMonkey, where she has spent the last 15 years building the people strategies behind one of the world's most recognized feedback platform. Before SurveyMonkey, Rebecca spent nearly 12 years at Yahoo, leading HR across product, engineering, sales, and mergers and acquisitions, giving her a front-row seat to how people strategy either scales with a company or gets left behind.
She's seen every version of the engagement survey cycle. She knows what the heatmap looks like when nobody acts on it. And she built SurveyMonkey's employee engagement program because she believed HR deserved something better.
