How Delta’s employee-listening revamp led its HR to rethink two major benefits offerings

HR leaders with frontline employees know just how difficult it can be to take them away from their jobs to participate in activities like trainings, surveys, or ERGs.

That was the case at Delta. The airline has more than 100,000 employees worldwide, over 90,000 of whom are frontline workers.

“Think about an airline employee at Delta,” Harsh Mathur, Delta’s director of employee listening and HR innovation, said during a panel at Qualtrics’ X4 conference in March. These employees, he said, often work early or odd hours, and have critical responsibilities, including supporting and ensuring the safety of Delta customers. At the end of the day, the last thing they want to do is fill out an employee engagement survey, Mathur said. “It’s just unrealistic. It’s not pragmatic.”

The airline wanted to improve participation in its listening efforts, to help ensure decisions regarding new programs or policy changes were made in the best interest of workers. So, Delta began tinkering with retooling its approach in 2023, in a way that has already led to success, including changes to some of the company’s benefits, according to Mathur.

Are you listening? Mathur’s team wanted to take a more holistic approach to employee listening. It started by moving beyond employee surveys and tracking sentiment to incorporating feedback from focus groups, town halls, meetings with executives, and VELVET events: a monthly in-person conference of around 1,000 employees, during which they can share what is and isn’t working at the company.

They also worked with Qualtrics to incorporate pop-up prompts on its internal website nudging employees to participate in employee surveys. He said employees already log into the website at the end of their workdays to check company news and updates ahead of their next shift, or their benefits, making it a natural place for a call to action.

“It’s finding the right moment, the right channel, and getting an easy response,” Mathur said. “Ultimately, what we’re allowing our employees to do is: You don’t have to go into your email, we’re going to come to you.”

Mathur’s team first began testing website intercepts in 2023, and after introducing intercepts and making improvements on other employee experience strategies saw a marked improvement: Delta’s most recent annual engagement survey netted a 53% response rate, its highest yet, Anthony Black, spokesman for Delta, said via email. By comparison, the 2024 annual engagement response rate averaged in the low-40 percentages.

That said, the key to effective employee listening isn’t just listening, but the actions taken after. “Now the fundamental goal is, what do we do with that information?” Mathur said.

Plus-one. One change that came from Delta’s new listening strategy was to an existing travel perk wherein employees and their families were entitled to unlimited standby travel to any of its destinations, at either no cost or a discounted rate. Mathur said employees listed the travel perk second only to pay.

But, in using “integrated employee listening,” Mathur’s team realized that employees felt restricted by the program, which only extended to immediate family.)

Mathurs team used surveys, focus groups, and business resource group meetings to understand employees’ pain points.

“It really took some time to actually figure out what could be a good solution,” Mathur said, adding, “but that is a gift of travel that made a meaningful difference for our people.”

Delta extended eligibility for the perk to employees’ secondary companions in February 2025. As of March 2026, around 80,000 employees had done so.

Money problems. One other benefit born from Delta’s new listening approach was focused on financial well-being.

Engagement surveys following the Covid-19 pandemic revealed that employees were experiencing financial stress, but Mathur’s team “couldn’t really figure out why,” he said. Through focus groups and employee conversations, they found employees wanted better financial literacy.

“Because they’re working so hard, they have so many responsibilities, they did not have the time to figure out, how can I get my credit score up? How can I get my debt down?” he said.

Employees also expressed concern about not having a rainy day fund. In response, the company partnered with Operation HOPE, a financial literacy non-profit, to create a program, through which employees—after learning more about financial literacy and seeking guidance from a financial coach—receive $1,000 in an emergency sickness account for use “at any points in their lives at Delta,” according to Mathur.

“It was probably one of the fastest things that we did at Delta, once we got everything figured out,” Mathur said. Since introducing the program in January 2023, he added, Delta hasn’t received “many more financial comments in our service.”

Putting listening to action. Action is “the highest form of currency to increase trust,” Mathur said, and “if that was the formula, retention would be the dividend.”

Retention at Delta is currently quite strong: the average employee tenure is around 20 years, Mathur told HR Brew. However, there’s still room for improvement, he said, including when it comes to better distilling global employee feedback—Delta received 145,000 comments on its February engagement survey—and reducing the time between receiving feedback and introducing changes.

“If we can make our people know and feel they are heard, that their voice is valued, we know that that’s going to have a really good retention,” he told HR Brew.