EasyJet Case Study: Building Trust With Frontline Through Better Listening

Insights From Kate Marks, Head of People Analytics and Employee Listening at EasyJet

When the traditional survey isn't enough

EasyJet's previous employee survey, Your Voice Matters, had been introduced during the pandemic and covered many of the standard questions found in an employee engagement survey.

But when the results reached the executive board, a bigger question emerged.

The survey worked reasonably well for the organisation's office-based population, but around 80% of EasyJet's workforce doesn't work in an office.

For crew and pilots, the workplace is the aircraft. Their day-to-day team can be the captain, co-pilot and other crew members they are working alongside on that particular flight.

That creates a very different employee experience — and a very different challenge for employee listening.

As Kate explained, the organisation needed to understand how to listen in a way that reflected the reality of its frontline workforce, rather than expecting the frontline to adapt to an office-based model.

Listening is a business imperative

The starting point was a deceptively simple question: why do we listen to our people?

For Kate, the answer goes far beyond employee engagement scores.

The people working on EasyJet's aircraft are also the people interacting directly with customers every day. That means their experiences, observations and feedback can provide valuable insight into both employee and customer experience.

EasyJet found a particularly strong connection between employee and customer satisfaction during disruptive flights. When things go wrong, discretionary effort becomes even more important — and higher engagement can have a significant impact on how employees respond.

That creates a powerful business case for listening.

The people closest to customers often have some of the clearest insight into what is working, what isn't and where improvements could make a difference.

The challenge is ensuring that insight reaches the people making decisions.

Four lessons from the frontline

When EasyJet spoke directly with crew and pilots about what was working and what wasn't, four key themes emerged.

1. Connect listening to business performance

Employees wanted to understand what happened with their feedback and how it connected to the wider organisation.

Simply reporting an engagement score wasn't enough.

People wanted to see the relationship between what they were telling EasyJet and the outcomes the organisation was trying to achieve.

That meant moving the conversation away from response rates and towards meaningful insight and business impact.

2. Stop reducing people to numbers

One of the clearest messages from the frontline was that employees didn't want to be defined by a percentage or response rate.

They wanted leaders to look at the comments behind the numbers.

This distinction is important. Quantitative data can tell an organisation what is happening, but qualitative feedback can often reveal why.

For EasyJet, rebuilding trust meant demonstrating that employee voices were being read, understood and acted upon — rather than simply counted.

3. Get insight to the people who can use it

Another challenge was ensuring that the right insight reached the right teams.

For example, crew feedback could contain valuable information for the team responsible for in-flight retail. Yet there wasn't necessarily a formal mechanism for getting that frontline intelligence to the people responsible for making decisions.

Listening therefore isn't simply an HR responsibility.

Insight needs to travel across the organisation.

The value comes when the people closest to customers can influence the teams responsible for products, processes and experiences.

4. Trust can make or break listening

Perhaps the biggest challenge was the reputation of the survey itself.

The problem wasn't necessarily the survey. EasyJet had simply lost trust in the process.

That meant introducing a new platform became part of a wider reset — a visible signal that the organisation was prepared to approach listening differently.

Because employees are unlikely to invest their time in providing honest feedback if they don't believe anything will happen as a result.

The connection between listening and trust

EasyJet's work highlighted a deeper relationship between employee listening and organisational trust.

When trust is strong, coordination becomes easier, decisions can move faster and people are more likely to work together effectively.

When trust is weak, the opposite can happen. Work slows down, problems escalate and teams can become less willing to accept decisions they don't fully agree with.

For a frontline workforce, this can be particularly important.

Imagine a crew member encountering a problem with in-flight retail. If they believe their previous feedback has been taken seriously, they are more likely to trust that decisions have been made for good reasons — even when the outcome isn't exactly what they wanted.

Trust doesn't mean everyone gets their preferred outcome.

It means people believe they have been heard, respected and treated fairly.

Trust has to work in both directions

EasyJet also considered trust from three different perspectives.

The first is trust from employees to the organisation: do people feel supported, respected and confident in their leaders?

The second is trust from the organisation to its people: does the business genuinely value the expertise and insight of its frontline workforce?

And the third is shared reality: do people across the organisation have a common understanding of why they are there and what they are trying to achieve?

That second element is particularly important for organisations with large frontline populations.

It is easy for head-office teams to make decisions based on data and assumptions without fully understanding the reality of the people delivering the customer experience.

Employee listening can help close that gap.

Designing listening with employees, not for them

One of the most important changes EasyJet made was involving its crew and pilots directly in designing the new approach.

The message from employees was clear:

Don't just tell us what you've decided. Build it with us.

That principle influenced everything from the survey itself to the way feedback would be gathered.

EasyJet launched a new survey called Airwaves, with the tagline “From bases to beaches, every voice travels.”

The name was deliberately designed to work across the organisation and reinforce the idea that listening should feel like a two-way interaction.

The new approach was built around three principles: listen first, learn fast and move together.

That meant creating space for leaders to genuinely hear feedback, becoming more comfortable with difficult messages and avoiding the temptation to spend months analysing data before taking action.

From six months of analysis to 30 days of action

Perhaps the most striking change was the introduction of a 30-day commitment.

EasyJet committed to ensuring that everyone across the organisation would hear the key outputs from the survey within 30 days.

For crew and pilots, that meant hearing from their base management. For head-office employees, it meant hearing from the relevant executive leader.

This approach was supported by rapid leadership alignment.

The day after the survey closed, EasyJet's airline management board — including the CEO and direct reports — came together to discuss the key themes emerging from the results.

Rather than waiting for a lengthy analysis process, leaders immediately started discussing what they were seeing and which issues needed attention.

The organisation could then take the insight away, explore it in more detail and work out how to communicate and act on it.

The lesson is simple:

Perfect insight delivered too late is often less valuable than useful insight acted on quickly.

Putting frontline leaders at the centre

EasyJet also recognised the importance of the people sitting between head office and the frontline: base managers and base captains.

These leaders became a critical part of the listening process.

Rather than treating employee listening as something owned centrally by HR or People Analytics, EasyJet worked with these frontline leaders to understand what they needed to make listening work within their bases.

This also helped create ownership.

Base managers weren't simply receiving survey results. They were becoming part of the process of understanding, communicating and acting on them.

That matters because trust isn't built through a survey platform.

It's built through conversations.

Listening where employees actually are

For a workforce that spends much of its time away from a traditional office, communication also had to happen in the right places.

EasyJet used events, local leadership and informal employee networks to build awareness.

At one event for high-performing crew, the team delivered a short explanation of the new listening approach repeatedly throughout the day, speaking directly to small groups.

The aim wasn't simply to broadcast information.

It was to create enough understanding and advocacy that employees would talk to one another about it.

That matters because frontline communication is often most powerful when it travels peer to peer.

What happens next?

EasyJet's listening reset is not a one-off project.

The organisation has developed a three-year roadmap.

The first phase focuses on resetting listening and rebuilding trust.

The next phase will look at making data and dashboards more accessible, bringing employee forums together and strengthening the role of captains through training.

The final stage will focus on scaling the approach, connecting employee listening with other data sources and exploring real-time channels for employee feedback.

Technology will play a role in that future.

EasyJet is even exploring how AI could enable crew and pilots to share feedback at the moment when they naturally want to talk — for example, when they leave the aircraft at the end of a shift.

But the technology is not the strategy.

The strategy is making it easier for people to be heard.

The end of the perfect survey

Perhaps the biggest lesson from EasyJet's experience is that employee listening doesn't need to be perfect to be effective.

When the organisation went back to its people, employees still wanted surveys. They valued having a moment to pause, reflect and share their views.

The answer wasn't to abandon the survey.

It was to make it better, connect it to the business and, most importantly, act on what it reveals.

EasyJet also chose to continue surveying every six months, reflecting the seasonal nature of its operations and the needs of its workforce.

The emphasis is now on continuous learning rather than finding a single perfect answer.

From employee voice to business intelligence

EasyJet's experience demonstrates that employee listening can be much more than an annual engagement exercise.

Done well, it can become a source of business intelligence — connecting frontline experience with customer satisfaction, operational performance and organisational decision-making.

But that only happens when employees trust the process.

The real measure of a listening strategy isn't how sophisticated the survey is, how high the response rate is or how impressive the dashboard looks.

It's what happens after people press submit.

Do leaders listen?

Do the right teams receive the insight?

Do employees hear what happened next?

And can people see their feedback influencing decisions?

For EasyJet, the journey is still underway. But by moving from listening to employees towards listening with them, the organisation is taking an important step towards rebuilding trust and making frontline insight part of how the business operates.

Because ultimately, employee listening isn't about collecting more data.

It's about creating an organisation where people believe their voice can make a difference.

To register your interest for the 2027 Engage Employee Summit click here.