More locations, more teams, more decision-making levels – and suddenly fewer real conversations. How do companies manage to stay close to their employees even as they grow? Kristina Gerwert, Human Resources Director at adesso SE, explains which dialogue and listening formats have proven themselves and what is really important when implementing them.
Executive Summary
Employee dialogue in growing companies
- The challenge: With every new location, team and hierarchy level, the risk of losing direct contact with employees increases. Information leaks out, moods are recognized later and the exchange between the workforce and management becomes more difficult.
- The solution: Companies need different dialogue and listening formats at team, management and company levels. Team checks, personal discussions, management dialogues and direct exchange formats with the board help to systematically record feedback and identify changes at an early stage.
- Your benefit: Managers receive a more realistic picture of the organization, challenges become visible earlier and employees experience that their perspectives are heard. This strengthens trust, participation and loyalty to the company.
- Focus: Employee dialogue in growing companies, employee listening, corporate culture, organizational development, leadership, growth.
Rapid growth is considered a success story – until the point where the corporate culture can no longer keep up. What still works through personal relationships with 1,000 employees needs a new structure, formats and, above all, an honest willingness to listen with 10,000.
This is exactly the challenge that the IT service provider adesso has faced in recent years. The internationally oriented company with its headquarters in Dortmund grew rapidly, new locations were added, and teams became larger and more decentralized. The crucial question was how contact with employees should be maintained under these new circumstances. Because closeness is created through formats that enable encounters and through an attitude that sees feedback as an opportunity.
Employee listening requires different altitudes
The solution is employee listening. This is about an organization’s ability to listen systematically – across different channels, at different levels, continuously rather than selectively. In many companies this is limited to an annual survey, the results of which disappear in an evaluation. But employees quickly notice whether their feedback actually changes anything. Especially in growth phases, this ability determines whether people feel like they are part of the company.
Real listening only works on several levels at the same time:
- Team level: How is the individual team doing? What’s going well, what’s wrong? What can be improved?
- Managementebene: What signals do managers pick up from the organization? How do they deal with it?
- Company level: Are there real spaces for dialogue between the workforce and the board – or just one-way streets?
It is advisable to set up separate formats for each level. Five of them have proven themselves in practice at adesso.
Team checks as an early warning system
A digital pulse check tool enables teams to reflect on their collaboration in short cycles – with compact queries about role clarity, workload or psychological safety. The results stay with the team, not with HR. Managers moderate the evaluation together with their team and derive concrete measures.
In addition, employees can seek a personal conversation with their manager at any time. For example, in a 1:1 to clarify individual concerns that go beyond the team check. The decisive success factor: The responsibility for team health lies where it belongs: in the team itself. HR provides the framework and tools, not just the diagnosis.
Managers as seismographs
Employee listening also shows its strengths above the team level. Project employees who work on site at the customer’s site are at risk of quickly flying under the radar in large organizations. That’s why every project team at adesso has a permanent contact person from management.
Regular jour fixes not only focus on the project situation, but also on workload, travel and the general working environment. In this way, signals from everyday project life flow back into the organization before they become challenges. This model can be transferred to any company in which employees work decentrally – whether in consulting, sales or field service.
Board of Directors and staff: reduce distance, establish dialogue
At the company level, employee listening requires formats that reduce the distance between the board and the workforce – both physically and hierarchically. A format that has particularly proven itself at adesso: the summer tour.
Last year, Chairman of the Supervisory Board and company founder Professor Volker Gruhn and I visited our locations across the country – for a keynote speech on a specialist topic and a subsequent open question and answer session. No agenda, no filter. Afterwards, we deliberately stayed on site so that the employees could address topics in personal conversation that had no place in the larger group.
The format was created as a direct response to employee feedback that the exchange with management was lacking. The effect is not created by the format itself, but by the consistency with which it is carried out – and by the willingness to face uncomfortable questions.
Clear questions, clear answers
Not all topics can be addressed in a personal conversation. A digital live format as a classic question and answer session allows our employees to submit questions to the board. The answers are given live and are then published on the intranet, as are the questions that could not be answered live due to time constraints.
In our last round alone, 62 questions were received – from workload and project situation to salary and economic situation to culture, leadership and the use of AI at adesso. Employees experience: Critical questions are not ironed out.
Employee representation as a listening channel
An often underestimated instrument: employee representation as an independent listening channel. adesso’s international employee representation regularly carries out anonymous surveys on changing topics and brings the results into a structured dialogue with management.
There, specific questions – including those asked anonymously – are openly discussed: How do growth and profitability fit together? How do values and culture carry themselves through the internationalization process? There is a real conflict going on here.
Listening is an attitude, not a project
All formats described can be copied for everyday business use. What cannot be copied, however, is the inner attitude behind it. Employee listening only works if managers are willing to give up control. Anyone who seeks feedback but only wants to hear what fits their own image will not initiate positive development. Real listening sometimes means hearing things that hurt: that employees don’t support a decision, that a strategy is out of step with everyday life, that managers are overwhelmed.
The crucial skill in such moments is not to reflexively justify things, but rather to endure the tension. To stay curious and open instead of becoming defensive. And then act visibly. Because nothing destroys a listening culture faster than feedback that has no consequences.
Five principles for effective employee listening
- Serve multiple flight altitudes: A single format is not enough. Team, management and company levels each need their own formats.
- Distribute ownership: Employee listening is a management task. HR creates frameworks and formats – the responsibility for the dialogue lies with teams and their managers.
- Prioritize encounter: Different communication channels lower the threshold for critical feedback. The strongest changes still occur in personal dialogue.
- Consistency shows respect: Every question deserves an answer. Every feedback deserves a visible reaction – even if it says: We don’t want to change that at the moment, and here’s why.
- Persistence beats perfection: The best listening format is the one that still takes place in the third year.
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