Can you remember learning how to listen to the radio? Probably not. Today it feels completely natural to have the radio on while we make a cup of tea, shower or commute. But as Ed Cook and Molly McMunn from the BBC’s People Experience team explained at the Engage Employee Summit, that relaxed relationship with listening had to be learned. The same is true of listening at work.
Ed and Molly’s session was inspired by Learning to Listen, a BBC Radio 4 documentary in which historian Dominic Sandbrook explores how the first radio audiences learned to listen.
At its centre is Heinrich Schenker, an Austrian music theorist whose diaries from the 1920s and 1930s record how he got used to this new technology. In Schenker’s world, hearing a piece of music could be a once-in-a-lifetime event. So when he first tuned in, he listened as if he were in a concert hall. He and his wife sat silently in their headsets, listening critically for tone, tempo and technique. When dinner was ready, the radio went off.
Then, in 1926, the loudspeaker arrived and radio began to fill the room. Families gathered around it and friends came over for special broadcasts. Gradually, Schenker’s habits changed too. By the late 1920s he was listening over dinner. By the 1930s he was playing cards with a Beethoven sonata in the background, and his wife was dancing around the room to a waltz. In one of his last diary entries, he sits with his wife, drinking champagne and welcoming in the new year with music playing.
In barely a decade, radio went from centre stage to part of the furniture. As Ed put it, listening “can be focused and intentional... but it can also be social, relaxed and deeply human”.
Molly asked the audience how many work in organisations that say they listen to their people. Most hands went up. Far fewer stayed up when she asked whether that listening happens regularly. Plenty of people admitted they’d taken part in a listening exercise and quietly wondered what happened next.
The BBC realised that much of its own listening was still in “headset mode”: intense, occasional and centralised. A staff survey is a snapshot. A listening event is a single moment that can stir up strong emotions, and then the organisation disappears until the next one. “It’s a bit like asking people to listen to the radio once a year, but still somehow magically expecting culture to shift as a result,” said Molly.
Asking questions isn’t the same as listening, either. “Listening isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a human experience.” Its quality depends on the space you create, the level of trust and the skill of the people facilitating.
To make listening part of everyday life, the BBC uses a simple model:
Without outputs, even well-intentioned listening can start to feel performative.
Rather than keeping listening within one central team, the BBC is building a network of trained facilitators across the organisation. These are people who can hold space, listen without jumping in to fix things, and capture insight responsibly. That way, the listening doesn’t stop when the People Experience team leaves the room.
The sessions themselves are small and designed to feel safe. They run virtually on Microsoft Teams, with no more than 10 people, a facilitator, a co-facilitator and neutral observers. The team uses Teams’ transcript function so facilitators can focus on listening rather than note-taking, and Copilot then helps pull the insight together. Behind the scenes, a lot of planning goes into a discussion guide built around open-ended questions.
Ed describes the approach as rolling “a conversational hand grenade” into the room and letting the conversation happen. Colleagues who’ve never met start sharing their experiences, building connection and community along the way.
Career development regularly comes up as a hotspot in BBC staff surveys. When the team brought colleagues together to explore it, they found people weren’t only asking about their next job or promotion. They wanted to understand the skills they have today and how to build skills for the roles they might want in future.
Instead of responding with a comms message or a policy update, the BBC turned its Careers Week into Skills Fest, a practical event where people can explore opportunities, discover where their skills could take them and start building new ones. “We listened, we understood the need underneath the questions and we changed the experience for our colleagues,” said Ed.
For Molly, one of the most powerful outcomes is when people realise they’re not alone. Listening sessions don’t just produce insight for decision-makers. They create connection between colleagues, and that moment of recognition can change how someone feels about their job and the organisation.
She also warns against rushing into solution mode. Listening is a discovery tool that helps you uncover the real problem, not the one you assumed was there. Often, the act of being properly listened to does more than any quick fix.
When listening becomes continuous, patterns start to emerge. Organisations can stop reacting to the loudest voice in the room and respond to what consistently shows up. The BBC now treats listening as a people experience product in its own right, with users, moments that matter, quality standards and outcomes.
After each round of sessions, the team writes a report and shares it first with the participants, so they see exactly what will be passed on. The report is used to check whether past interventions have made a difference and, more excitingly, to influence strategy. For example, mental health has come up repeatedly in sessions, and that insight is now feeding directly into the BBC’s wellbeing strategy.
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