In too many organisations, HR strategy still starts with a set of sensible-sounding priorities, and a slide deck that says ‘our people are our greatest asset’. What's missing is the evidence that the priorities will make a difference to your people and deliver Return on Investment (ROI).

In 2026, with tighter enforcement, higher employment costs and increased scrutiny on fairness and transparency, building strategy based on assumptions is a risk that businesses can't afford to take. Yet the fix is straightforward: create an effective employee listening programme, then link the key themes that emerge to commercial outcomes.

Moving from leadership opinions to facts in your operations

Leadership intuition matters, but structured listening turns opinion into operating facts. It is important to tap into what managers are doing well, where work design is blocking productivity, how reward and flexibility are landing and whether your inclusion efforts are credible or just noise.

Done well, a listening exercise tells you about retention hotspots, promotion velocity gaps, pay perception issues and why certain outcomes are happening. It can help you find specific interventions that support your business plan.

Design a listening programme that serves the business plan

Start with your business strategy, then ask which people-related data you need to deliver it.

If your plan depends on margin improvement, you need evidence about workload balance, process friction and whether managers have what they need to lead effectively. If growth relies on new products, focus on skills availability, learning pathways and cross-team collaboration.

Build a rhythm that works for your business

• One annual survey – A deep engagement survey covering the core themes: leadership trust, career pathways, role clarity, recognition, wellbeing, inclusion and team enablement at a local level.
• Quarterly pulses – Short, targeted check-ins on a few key metrics to test whether your actions are working.
• Targeted listening activity – Focus groups off the back of survey results to dig into what the numbers are really telling you. Listening sessions for specific cohorts, new starters, returners, leavers and shift workers help surface issues that get lost in aggregated data.

Segment findings by role, function, level, site, shift pattern and contract type to uncover insights that have commercial impact.

By exploring both quantitative and qualitative results, you can use data to understand what is happening and people’s views to learn why.

Link people data to financial outcomes

Evidence-based HR allows you to connect learnings to the outcomes your board cares about most: retention, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, compliance risk and employment cost.

Reconcile survey themes with hard data on turnover, absence, grievance volumes and overtime. With this clear picture, you can identify where people friction is creating cost or risk and quantify the value of fixing it.

Here are some examples of how this looks in action:

• Retention and attraction – If exit data shows high turnover in specific teams and survey results flag workload or role clarity issues, there is a business case to address those resource issues.
• Inclusion and fairness – If employees report unclear pay rationale or weak promotion transparency, combine listening with pay gap analytics and targeted manager training. This approach supports employee engagement and prepares you for future reporting expectations.
• Manager effectiveness – If survey data shows low enablement scores for front-line managers, training alone won’t solve the problem. Use focus groups to discover the hurdles getting in their way, and review job design, span of control and decision rights.

Create accountability across the business

To drive meaningful action, publish a short organisation-wide plan with three to five priorities tied to the business plan and task each division with setting two local actions that reflect their own results.

Keep actions small, specific and observable. So rather than ‘improve communication’, try ‘redesign handovers to cut unpaid pre-shift prep’ or ‘standardise role clarity briefs before new projects start’.

Line managers make or break change. Equip them with simple playbooks and talking points to keep momentum on the plan.

Governance that works:

• Every action has a named owner, an outcome metric (not just activity) and a review date.
• A monthly one-pager to the executive committee tracking three signals: engagement movement, operational metric movement and anecdotal evidence.
• A quarterly pulse on the same few questions to test if actions are working, and pivot early if they're not.

Integrate listening into core cycles, not side projects

To maintain momentum on listening to employees, make the touchpoints part of your business rhythm to align with planning, budgeting, performance reviews and pay cycles. You should also apply the same rigour to people strategy that you apply to payroll controls and financial compliance. Be sure to document the insight, intervention and impact.

With this approach, you can present the evidence and the expected return when the board wants to know the reasoning for the investment.

Safeguards: data quality, confidentiality and change fatigue

A fast way to lose trust is to survey and then do nothing. To get the most out of the surveys and encourage participation, provide feedback on what changed because people spoke up.

You should also set expectations on confidentiality, use of data and cadence to avoid surprising anyone.

Why insight beats assumption

If your 2026 HR strategy isn't demonstrably based on employee experience, it's a hypothesis that can be expensive to put in place and ineffective at driving the results you want to see.

Employee listening through surveys, focus groups and targeted conversations transform strategy from what we think to what we know. In a year defined by higher scrutiny and tighter margins, insight will make your people plan defensible and aligned to the business plan.

How we can help with employee listening, evidence-based HR strategy and 2026 employment regulation:

• Designing and delivering engagement surveys and targeted pulse checks aligned to your business plan and workforce risks.
• Integrating employee listening into core business cycles including workforce planning, performance management, pay and reward reviews.
• Facilitating focus groups and listening sessions to explore survey themes and understand root causes behind retention, productivity and fairness outcomes.
• Advising on how employee insight can evidence compliance with the Employment Rights Act expectations
• Providing manager toolkits, playbooks and talking points to support consistent, defensible people decisions.

For more information, please get in touch with Sharon Broughton or your usual RSM contact.

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