Crina Pupaza, Chief People Officer at Nymbus, has built a reputation for scaling people functions in fintech and finance, including stops at OppenheimerFunds and Insider Intelligence. Her perspective on decision-making is shaped by a graduate degree in organizational psychology and the realities of doubling a company's headcount in a single year. People-related decisions made without listening produce predictable failures.
The wider issue is that many HR decisions still get made on intuition. Compensation philosophy, manager promotions, return-to-office policy, benefits design, and even values work often run on what leaders assume employees want, rather than on what employees actually say they need. The cost shows up in disengagement, attrition, and ER cases that could have been avoided.
HR leaders who want to make better decisions have to build listening into the decision process itself, not as a separate validation step at the end.
Why employee-informed decisions outperform top-down ones
Listening produces better decisions because it surfaces information leaders cannot get any other way. McKinsey's research on continuous employee listening makes the case directly; McKinsey's research on continuous employee listening shows that companies with mature listening practices outperform their peers on retention, engagement, and adaptability.
For HR leaders, the practical move is to design listening into the rhythm of major decisions. AllVoices' employee survey tool and pulse surveys give people leaders a steady read on how employees experience the decisions already made.
Listening also depends on trust. Employee feedback programs that ask for input and produce no visible action teach employees to stop offering it. Decision quality declines as a result.
Building employee voice into the decision process
Which decisions benefit most from employee listening?
Compensation philosophy, hybrid and remote policy, benefits design, manager development, values work, and DEI investments all run better when grounded in real employee input. The pattern: any decision that depends on lived experience benefits from listening before, during, and after.
Gallup's research on employee voice walks through the practices; Gallup's research on five ways to make the most of employee voice shows the design choices that move listening from theater to insight.
How do you avoid listening fatigue?
Be selective about what you ask. Focus surveys and pulse questions on decisions you actually plan to make, and close the loop visibly when the decision is final. Asking for input that never affects anything destroys trust faster than not asking at all.
Pair surveys with anonymous channels for the concerns that surveys cannot easily capture. AllVoices' anonymous reporting tool gives employees a parallel path that surfaces signals direct conversation cannot.
What actually works
Build listening into the decision rhythm
Identify the major people decisions for the year and build listening into each one. Pre-decision input from employees, during-decision pulse checks, and post-decision follow-up create a loop that improves decision quality over time.
Use people analytics to surface patterns across listening data, ER cases, and engagement scores. The combination produces insight no single source provides.
Close the loop visibly
Employees notice whether their input affected the outcome. After every major decision, share what was heard, what changed, and what did not change and why. The transparency itself builds the trust that makes future listening more useful.
HBR's research walks through the patterns; HBR's research on turning feedback into action covers the practices that move listening from data to outcome.
Treat ER data as decision input
ER cases hold information that surveys often miss. Patterns in case volume, themes, and resolution outcomes tell HR leaders where decisions are not yet working. Bring that data into compensation, manager promotion, and policy decisions.
Ignoring ER data is one of the most common ways HR teams produce decisions that do not match operating reality.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Listening cultures still need formal channels for the moments when something goes wrong. AllVoices' employee relations function support gives HR teams a structured way to handle those moments. Our HR case management system keeps documentation consistent, which is what makes pattern detection possible at scale.
How does ER reinforce employee-informed decisions?
ER teams catch patterns that surveys cannot. A spike in cases tied to a single manager, a quiet trend around remote and in-office disparities, or an emerging issue with how recognition is distributed all carry information that engagement scores alone will miss. Acting on those patterns produces better decisions next quarter.
That feedback loop is what makes listening durable. Decisions get better over time because each one feeds the next.
Frequently Asked Questions About Employee-Informed Decisions
What is the difference between listening and surveying?
Surveys are one channel within a larger listening practice. Listening also includes one-on-ones, focus groups, anonymous channels, exit interviews, and ER data. Each channel surfaces different signals.
How often should HR run pulse surveys?
Quarterly works for most organizations, with shorter pulses tied to specific decisions when needed. Survey fatigue sets in when frequency outpaces the company's capacity to act on results.
How do you keep listening from becoming theater?
Close the loop visibly after every survey. Share what was heard, what changed, and what did not. The transparency itself produces more honest input next time.
How do anonymous channels improve decisions?
They surface concerns that named channels cannot easily capture, especially around fairness, manager behavior, and inclusion. The signals from those channels often carry the most decision-relevant information.
How do you handle a decision where listening data conflicts with leadership preference?
Be transparent about the trade-off. If leadership chooses to go a different direction, explain why. Employees can accept decisions they disagree with as long as the reasoning is honest.
What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?
Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.
Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.
Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Crina Pupaza's work scaling people functions in finance and fintech makes a clear point. Decisions that affect employees should be informed by employees, and the listening that makes that possible has to be designed into the decision rhythm. Tools alone do not produce listening cultures; deliberate design does.
HR leaders who do this work consistently produce companies where decisions feel earned rather than imposed. Skip the work, and even good decisions land badly because the people they affect feel unheard.
See how AllVoices brings listening, ER, and decision data into one system for HR teams.
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)