The most valuable insights often come from the conversations you already have with employees — but only if you have a system in place to capture and act on them.
On this episode of People Fundamentals, Ashley Litzenberger is joined by Nick Haap, director of talent management and continuous listening at KeHE Distributors. Nick has helped the company shift from traditional performance management to a model focused on continuous listening, enablement, and structured conversations.
“You're still hearing things as a leader on the floor when you talk to your employees, you have informal conversations,” Nick says. “You want to make sure that you are taking note of that … and what you could potentially impact to make the employees’ overall experience even better.”
In this episode, Nick explains why high-quality conversations unlock performance, retention, and engagement. He shares how KeHE operationalized continuous listening, connected data streams in centralized dashboards, and balanced AI-generated insights with the human judgment leaders need to coach well.
Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Music
Creating more opportunities for development
Nick’s journey began with the realization that traditional performance management wasn’t delivering value. “People didn't look forward to it. They felt like it took up a lot of their time to complete the tasks throughout the year, and then they didn't get a lot out of it,” he says.
After studying different approaches, Nick reframed the process around performance enablement, with a focus on unleashing potential through structured conversations. “You're ultimately in these regular conversations, letting the employee know where they stand, and then getting alignment on what they need to do going forward, and just creating those actions around it.”
Each check-in at KeHE now covers four consistent topics: Results so far, OKRs for the upcoming quarter, development progress, and what support employees need from their manager. As Nick puts it, “We want to become a culture of continuous development.”
Embracing ‘vibe’ check-ins
For Nick, listening isn’t limited to surveys. It’s about creating multiple feedback loops so employees feel heard and leaders take action. During the pandemic, KeHE created “vibe” check-ins, in which team members reflect weekly on their experience.
“The reason that we've titled it ‘continuous listening’ more broadly is because we want to encourage our leadership team to listen to their team members, and the vibe is just a supplemental portion of that,” Nick says.
That practice extends to quarterly check-ins, where KeHE tracks conversation quality, not just whether people participated. “Within our current quarterly vibe, we’ve incorporated a question around, ‘How valuable was that check-in conversation?’” Nick says. “And so far, it’s looking quite positive, with upwards of 90-plus percent of people agreeing with the statement that it was valuable for them.”
Closing the loop is critical. Nick shared one striking finding: Make sure your people see their feedback put into practice. “For those team members who recognized the actions were actually being taken, they had a 36-percentage-point-higher level of favorability than those who didn't recognize any actions being taken,” he says.
Making analytics accessible and actionable
Nick also emphasizes making data accessible to leaders. At KeHe, centralized dashboards pull together data on engagement, performance, turnover, promotions, and new hires. “Our intention was to help streamline this by getting the fanciest tool that we could find,” he says. “And it is actually really fantastic because of how it integrates all of the data sources that we have.”
The goal is to move HR business partners away from administrative tasks and toward strategic support. Leaders can self-serve insights and uncover correlations — for example, between engagement and turnover, or between check-in quality and performance outcomes.
When conversations are structured and supported by data, they can reveal more than a performance rating. They can build trust, create clarity, and give leaders the insights they need to support their people.
As Nick reminds us: “If you think about an individual's perspective, that's how they feel. That's their reality, and so we've got to make sure that we understand how we're feeling instead of just looking at the cold, hard numbers, because they don't tell the full story.”
People in this episode
Nick Haap: LinkedIn
