The question nobody asked

Why noticing what's missing matters as much as analysing what's there.

We've never had more information about what's happening inside our organisations.

Engagement surveys, pulse surveys, dashboards, channel analytics, employee listening platforms, sentiment analysis. And now AI can sift through thousands of employee comments and identify patterns in roughly the time it takes the rest of us to make a cup of tea.

Much of this is genuinely exciting. Used well, data and AI can help us understand our organisations in ways we simply couldn't before. And yet, the cleverer our tools become, the more I find myself thinking about something decidedly less sophisticated.

The ability to notice. Really notice.

I mean noticing when something doesn't quite add up. When the language leaders are using doesn't match what people are experiencing. When the same question keeps cropping up in slightly different forms. Or when the mood in the room tells you something very different from the dashboard.

I've lost count of the number of times someone has said something to me while we're packing up after a workshop that tells me more than anything they said during it.

Or when the questions at a town hall suddenly become very polite and you wonder whether that's actually a good thing. (Read: definitely not.)

Or when a change is repeatedly described as 'exciting', while the people affected by it are wondering whether they'll be able to pay their mortgage in six months' time.

Those things don't necessarily fit neatly into a dataset. But they can tell us an enormous amount about what's really happening.

I felt this recently in a first meeting with a new client. Nothing in the brief mentioned pressure, and nobody said they were struggling. But you could feel the tension in the room from the Comms and HR teams, the looks across the room and the relief when they had shared their challenges. It was clear how much they were carrying, and how little space they had to say so. That told me more about what they actually needed from us than the brief did, and it wasn't something any survey would have picked up. 

Data can tell us what. Humans are rather good at wondering why.

A dashboard can tell us that engagement with leadership communication has fallen. But are people bored? Overwhelmed? Unconvinced? Or simply too busy to read it?

A survey can tell us people don't feel well informed about a change. But perhaps more information isn't actually what they need.

Perhaps instead they need a decision. Or they need their manager to have an honest conversation with them. Or they just need a leader to acknowledge the thing everybody knows but nobody is saying.

Or perhaps they simply need somebody to listen.

This is why I worry slightly when we talk about employee listening as though listening were mainly an exercise in collecting information. We can survey people endlessly without ever really listening to them. Real listening means being curious about what's underneath the responses. It also means noticing absence.

If people used to challenge something and suddenly stop, has the problem gone away or have they given up raising it? If nobody asks a question after a major announcement, was the communication brilliantly clear or don't people feel comfortable asking?

We shouldn't invent meaning where there isn't any. But "Why aren't we hearing anything here?" can be every bit as useful a question as analysing the things we can see.

Get out from behind the screen

There's another risk that comes with all these clever tools: we can start to feel extremely well informed about an organisation without spending very much time in it.

Some of the best insight I've ever had hasn't come from something labelled 'employee listening'. It comes from talking to someone after a meeting, spending time with frontline teams, joining a manager call or simply listening to the words people naturally use when nobody is asking them an official question.

I think this matters particularly as internal comms become more strategic. The more time we spend advising senior leaders, the easier it is to spend less time with the people those leaders are trying to reach. And there's a strange irony in becoming an expert adviser on an employee experience we no longer experience ourselves.

A few months ago I was in the final deliverables meeting at the end of a big change project we'd been involved in. One of the team, someone who has seen more change programmes than most and isn't easily moved, started talking about the comms work and the difference it had made to people, and her eyes filled with tears. The energy in the room changed. Nobody had asked her how the communications had landed, and no engagement score could have told us what that moment did. It reminded me that behind every metric are people who care a great deal about how this feels. 

So to help you a little, here are five ways to get better at noticing:

Noticing sounds like a personality trait, but it's also a habit. Here are five ways to practise it.

1. Stay for the packing-up.
The most honest comments often come after the official bit has finished. Stay five minutes longer after a workshop, town hall or manager call, and make a note of what people say when nobody's asking.

2. Keep a list of the questions that keep coming back.
If the same worry appears in three different forms, it isn't three questions. It's one question nobody has properly answered. Log them somewhere and look for the pattern.

3. Look for the quiet.
After a big announcement, ask who isn't asking questions, and whether that's normal for them. Compare it with the last time something similar happened. Silence isn't always agreement.

4. Put the two vocabularies side by side.
Take the words leaders are using ("exciting", "opportunity", "journey") and put them next to the words employees are using in comments, chats and corridors. The gap between the two is usually where the real story is.

5. Ask ‘What aren't we hearing?’ before you open the dashboard.
Before you look at any data, spend two minutes thinking about what's missing: which teams, which questions, which voices. Then look at the numbers. It stops the data from doing your thinking for you.

AI should give us more time to be human

For me, this is one of the most exciting opportunities AI gives us.

AI will get better and better at drafting, editing, summarising and analysing. It can find patterns in employee data faster than we can and take away some of the production work that has traditionally kept internal comms teams incredibly busy.

Great.

But I'd love us to use some of the space that creates to do more of the things humans are rather good at. Being curious. Understanding context. Exercising judgement. Challenging assumptions. Having conversations. And noticing when something just doesn't feel quite right.

AI can help us see patterns. We can explore what those patterns mean in this organisation, at this moment, for these people. It can summarise what employees have said. We can notice what they haven't said. It can help us produce the message. We can ask whether another message is actually what people need.

None of this is an argument for instinct over evidence or humans over technology. We need both.

But organisations are still collections of human beings trying to get things done together. They're full of relationships, histories, loyalties, frustrations, emotions and contradictions that don't always fit neatly into a dashboard.

Our tools will get enormously clever, and that's exciting. But perhaps one of the most valuable things we can bring to our organisations will remain remarkably simple:

Pay attention. Stay curious. Get out from behind the screen occasionally.

And notice the things that don't quite add up.