What happens when a People team moves beyond engagement surveys and gives employees space to explain what work actually feels like?
That was the focus of “Beyond Engagement Surveys: How Athena Is Using 1:1 Conversations at Scale”, the session featuring Liana Mawston, Chief of People, Marketing and Corporate Affairs at Athena Home Loans, and Mohit Midha, CEO and Founder of Hoogly, at the virtual Startup People Summit on 3 September 2026.
The session put Athena’s experience with Hoogly at the centre of the conversation: using personalised, confidential one-to-one conversations to listen to employees and turn what they share into meaningful action.
Understanding the experience behind the score
An engagement score is a starting point. Understanding why someone feels that way, what is getting in their way and what would help them gives leaders something they can respond to.
The Athena case study explored the gap between what leadership believes about culture and what employees experience day to day. Moving beyond surveys creates room for people to describe that experience in their own words.
For People teams, the practical question is how to make that kind of listening possible across a growing organisation, while keeping the feedback useful enough to act on.
A real implementation, with a People leader’s perspective
Ahead of the Summit, Mohit described the session as an opportunity to put a People leader and a real implementation in the spotlight. Liana’s experience at Athena gave the discussion a concrete focus: how the organisation used Hoogly to listen through confidential conversations, strengthen engagement and build trust through action.
The session was framed around what worked, what the team learned and how People teams can begin using AI without needing to become prompt engineers or build their own software.
That connection between listening and action matters. Asking employees to share their experience is only the beginning. What leaders do with that feedback determines whether people see value in speaking up again.
Taking the next step
For teams considering a different approach to engagement, Athena’s story offers a useful starting question: are we giving people enough space to tell us what is really happening, and are we equipped to respond?
View the session breakdown for more about Liana and Mohit’s conversation, or book a conversation with Hoogly to explore what this could look like for your team.
