Design Your Listening Event | Overview

Once you’ve defined your overall Employe Experience and Transformation Strategy, you’re ready to design the listening events that will inform and drive your desired outcomes and impact. Whether you’re working with our team of experts to design your program or designing on your own, this article walks through the basics to get you started.

This article walks through how to:

• Start With the End in Mind
• Select Your Listening Event Type
• Design Your Listening Event Content (Item/Question Design)

Start With the End in Mind

Before building your listening event, step back and ask, “Why are we listening?” Identify the business problems or opportunities you are trying to address: retention, leadership development, employee well-being, etc. Once you’ve established the company priorities and outcomes you want to address, you can define your goals.

1. Identify 1-3 priority outcomes aligned with your organization’s key talent or business priorities.

Note: For more information about defining your business priorities and KPIs, refer to the Define Your Business Priorities & KPIs article.

2. Define success and related KPIs. How will you measure success? 

For example, if employee retention is a top priority, your listening event should help uncover what’s driving turnover and where the greatest risks are. If retention improves over time, your listening feedback, and resulting action from that feedback, are working.

3. Conduct stakeholder interviews.

Have 3–5 brief conversations with key leaders to align on priorities and build buy-in.

Bring a point of view and ask:

• What are your top priorities?

• What metrics will define success?

• What are the biggest challenges you are currently facing?

• What insights do you need from employees to address these challenges?

• What key initiatives or changes will have the biggest impact on employees this year?

• Which groups need special focus?

Note: If you aren’t sure who your stakeholders are, see the Identify & Align Your Stakeholders article for guidance about stakeholder roles.

4. Document goals, outcomes, and use cases in your Insights and Actions Blueprint.

This approach helps tailor content, demographic options, and reporting strategy to leaders’ needs, provides context for meaningful insights, and builds early buy-in for action and success.

Select Your Listening Event Type

Once you’ve defined your goals, you’re ready to select the type of listening event channel you want to use. Different event types serve different purposes. For example:

• Point-In-Time
  Collect targeted feedback at a specific point in time (e.g., annual or bi-annual census event or quarterly pulses). These events enable quick insights into specific topics or experiences.
  
  

• Lifecycle
  Capture feedback at key milestones in the employee journey, from onboarding to exit.
  
  

• 360 Feedback
  Gather feedback to foster individual growth and development.
  
  

• Crowdsource
  Collect diverse employee insights and enable voting to engage employees in co-creating solutions to improve decision-making and workplace culture.

Design Your Listening Event Content (Item/Question Design)

Once you’ve selected your listening event type, the next step is to design event content that aligns with your goals and ensures the right people receive the right questions.

Use the Perceptyx People Insights Model as your guide. This research-backed framework covers 10 key factors of the employee experience, from future vision to growth to enablement, and supports both broad and targeted events. The Perceptyx platform also offers more than 60 event templates based on this model, aligned to key business priorities, to help you measure the right topics, with the right people, to drive meaningful, aligned action. You can also use (or begin with) our Best Practice Template. Use the template items as a starting point and tailor them as needed based on needs and challenges your company is facing.

Select the Right Items for Actionable Insights

Whether you’re starting from a best-practice template, a previous listening event, or building from scratch, selecting the right items is essential. There are three critical factors to consider when selecting content for your listening event:

1. Internal Historical Comparisons

If you’ve asked about certain topics in the past, including those items again (if they are still relevant) allows you to track trends over time and evaluate progress. For lifecycle events (e.g., onboarding or exit), repeating select items can help measure how employee perceptions shift across the lifecycle.

2. External Benchmark Comparisons

To understand how your results compare externally, select items from the Perceptyx Benchmark Library. Benchmarks provide context to help leaders interpret their scores with a point of comparison for what’s normal on any of the items - globally, by region, industry, role, or more. These validated questions use consistent scales (e.g., 5-point agreement, 11-point eNPS) to ensure consistency and accuracy.

Note: Click here for more information about benchmarks.

3. Emerging Needs and New Topics

You can also include new questions that address evolving priorities, organizational changes, or leadership information needs. Use flexible scale formats, such as multiple choice, single select, or tile & drill, to provide additional context and rich insights for taking action.

Ensure Strong Item Design

If you choose to refine template items or write your own questions, you can help ensure great item design by using our ABC Design model: Actionable, Behaviorally Observable, and Clearly Written.

• Actionable
  Consider whether your organization is willing and able to take action on the item if it emerges as an opportunity. Employees expect action in response to their feedback.
  
  

• Behaviorally Observable

Focus on what employees can see, hear, or experience. Items based on observable behaviors lead to clearer, more actionable insights than those asking about intent or assumptions.

• Clearly Written

  • Keep language simple, direct, and inclusive.

  • Ensure items address only one thing at a time.

  • Avoid jargon or internal lingo.

  • Define key terms when needed.

Capture Insights Through Comments

Open-ended comments add valuable depth to your listening event but should be used with intention. Before including comment questions, make sure you have a clear plan for how responses will be accessed, analyzed, and acted upon.

Align comment prompts with your goals and the insights leaders need. For example, in Point-In-Time or Lifecycle events, a broad question at the end of the survey can uncover what’s top-of-mind for employees - especially when paired with Comment Copilot for unbiased, quick analysis of themes and sentiment. Keep in mind these responses often focus more on areas for improvement, since most employees use this opportunity to share their ideas.

For more information, see the Designing Open-Ended Items for Comment Copilot article.

For more balanced feedback, consider two focused prompts, such as:

• What’s one action that could help us improve most?

• What’s one thing that is working well?

You can also use:

• Targeted prompts for deeper insights. For example, you can ask for input on a key topic or category, or invite employees to share more detail on a scaled response.

• Crowdsourcing questions to collect and vote on peer-submitted ideas, similar to a virtual focus group.

Be mindful of event length and cognitive load. Only include comment questions if your organization is ready to act on qualitative insights.

Add Demographic Questions (if needed)

We recommend preloading demographic data instead of asking demographic questions, when possible. Preloading demographic data helps to keep your content shorter, reduce potential concerns about confidentiality, and get more accurate information.

If you can’t preload demographic data or need a demographic that isn’t in your HRIS data to provide more meaningful reporting insights, we recommend that you:

• Place demographic questions at the end of the listening event.

• Collect only needed information.

• Ensure questions are appropriate across all countries and cultures.

• Ensure all response options are mutually exclusive (i.e., items do not overlap).

• Ensure there is a response option for everyone.

Design With the Employee Experience in Mind

While it’s important to align your listening event with organizational goals, the employee experience should also be a priority. A well-designed event should be easy, relevant, and respectful of employees’ time, leading to higher participation and better quality feedback.

Here are some key design tips to keep in mind:

1. Set Clear Expectations for Event Length

Match the number of questions to your goals and communicate estimated time to participants up front. Full census events typically include around 40 items, while pulse or lifecycle events range from 10-20 items.

2. Keep Items Relevant

Employees should only see items that apply to them. If an item only pertains to certain groups (e.g., physical safety for manufacturing teams), use branching to keep the experience relevant and avoid confusion. For more details about branching, see the Apply Conditional Logic to Event Content | Point-In-Time & Lifecycle article.

3. Group Topics Logically

Organize items by theme or referent (e.g., team, leadership) to make the event easier to navigate. Place high-priority metrics, like engagement, early in the event. This increases the likelihood of capturing responses if employees drop off during the event and helps to prevent those ratings from being influenced by other topics that appear later in the event.

4. Define Key Terms

Clearly define terms that may be interpreted multiple ways (e.g., “total rewards” or “senior leadership”) to ensure consistent understanding.

5. End on a Positive Note

Close with a positively framed, reflective question and a thank you message. This reinforces appreciation, builds trust, and encourages future participation.

Designing with empathy shows employees that their time and input are respected, and reinforces that their voices matter. When the experience feels intentional and thoughtful, people are more likely to engage meaningfully and trust that their feedback will lead to action.

Want to learn more? Permissioned users can log in to the platform and visit Perceptyx Academy to complete the Design Your Listening Event learning path.