Case study
Building a continuous
listening strategy
from scratch.
How I helped WP Engine move from a once-a-year survey to a continuous feedback ecosystem — and what I learned along the way.
The problem
WP Engine's annual Great Place to Work survey was working. Participation was strong, leadership took the results seriously, and it drove real company-level action planning. But it was a snapshot — one moment in time across a workforce that moved fast and changed constantly.
The gaps showed up in the data. Managers wanted more than annual scores to support their teams. Employees told us in GPTW comments and listening sessions that they wanted more touchpoints throughout the year — more opportunities to share how things were actually going, not just how they felt twelve months ago. At the functional and team level, the annual cadence was too slow. By the time results surfaced, the context had already shifted.
The question wasn't whether we needed something more continuous. It was how to build it in a way that people would actually trust.
The approach
I owned the vision, narrative, and case for change — building the story that would earn executive buy-in and manager adoption. The strategic plan paired our annual GPTW survey with Workday Peakon as a monthly pulse tool and structured listening sessions to create qualitative depth. Together, these three layers gave us a genuinely continuous picture of employee experience.
We started with a Peakon pilot before committing to a company-wide rollout. The pilot gave us something more valuable than clean data — it gave us honest feedback. Survey frequency needed adjustment. Questions needed refinement. Survey length was too long. And perhaps most importantly, managers needed a fundamentally different frame for how to use the tool. Peakon wasn't a reporting mechanism. It was a coaching tool. That reframe had to happen before we could scale.
I took those learnings into a revised rollout plan and presented the full strategy directly to the CEO for approval. The pitch was grounded in three things: what employees told us they needed, what the pilot taught us, and how we'd support HR Business Partners and managers in turning data into visible team-level action.
The data is only as useful as what leaders do next. A continuous listening strategy isn't infrastructure for measurement — it's infrastructure for trust.
Outcomes
Peakon engagement rates landed consistently at the high end of Workday's typical benchmark range — a meaningful signal that the tool had earned employee trust, not just adoption.
Managers were able to take team-level insights directly to their teams, socialize themes, and act on them in ways the annual survey never made possible. The feedback loop became something teams actually used, rather than something that happened to them once a year.
Hot spots and emerging themes surfaced and got addressed significantly faster than the once-a-year cadence allowed. Issues that might have festered for months became visible — and actionable — within a single pulse cycle.
What worked
Starting with a pilot before scaling was the single best decision. The feedback we received on frequency, question design, length, and manager framing would have been difficult to course-correct at company-wide scale. The pilot absorbed the learning so the launch could absorb the growth.
Splitting the strategy presentation into a narrative case for change followed by a concrete operational plan also worked well. Leadership needed to feel the "why" before they could commit to the "how."
What I'd do differently
More time. Specifically, a longer pilot and more deliberate enablement for both managers and individual contributors before, during, and after launch.
Adoption is the hardest part of any listening strategy — not the platform, not the questions, not the cadence. It's whether people believe the tool is worth their honesty. That belief is built through education, repetition, and visible proof that what they share leads somewhere. If I were doing it again, I'd run focus groups with ICs and managers before the company-wide launch — not to refine the questions, but to understand how they actually thought about the tool. That socialization work is easy to deprioritize because it doesn't have a deliverable. It also makes everything else work better.
The throughline
When employees see that their voice led somewhere, they share more honestly next time. Participation compounds. Candor compounds. The loop closes and opens again. That's what we were building — not a survey tool, but a culture where people believe asking is worth answering.
Trust built through listening. Change built through action.