What employee listening gets wrong, and what the frontline can teach you
I'm usually the one asking the questions. Kaz Hassan from Unily's The EX Conversation flipped that on me, and the conversation covered more ground than I expected.
Employee listening, frontline experience, middle managers, AI guilt in internal communications, and whether "a seat at the table" is a debate worth having anymore. If any of those are on your mind, the episode is worth 30 minutes.
Employee listening is bigger than your survey
We talked a lot about what employee listening actually means, and my take hasn't changed: organizations have confused "we run a survey" with "we listen." Surveys are one data point. Behavioral signals are another form of listening that most EX and internal communications leaders ignore entirely.
If employees aren't reading your newsletter, that's data. If they're asking the same question to five different managers, that's data. If turnover spikes three months after a major announcement, that's data. None of those require a Likert scale.
What the frontline actually teaches you
The moment at General Motors that reshaped how I think about internal communications didn't happen in a conference room. It happened on a plant floor. Physically being with frontline employees changes what you understand about work, culture, and how communication lands or doesn't.
Most employee experience strategies are built from the middle of the org chart outward. The frontline is treated as a downstream recipient of decisions rather than a source of insight. That's a problem, and it shows up in the work.
Middle managers are the most under-listened-to group in most organizations
They're the translation layer between leadership intent and employee reality. They absorb the confusion from above and absorb the frustration from below, and they rarely get asked what they're experiencing.
If your listening strategy doesn't specifically include middle managers, you're getting a partial picture. Full stop.
AI and the communicator's guilt problem
There's a real tension in the internal comms community around AI. Not "should we use it" exactly, but something closer to: does using it make me less of a communicator?
My position hasn't changed. If AI frees you to do more strategic work, that's a good outcome. If you're using it to produce more content at the same low quality, faster, that's not progress. The goal isn't output volume. It's organizational understanding, trust, and behavior change.
Big thanks to Kaz and the Unily team for the invitation. If you work in employee experience, internal communications, or digital workplace, The EX Conversation is a podcast worth following.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
August 27, 2026 · Sioux Falls, SD
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