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A retrofit coordinator flags a household as a problem case. The resident has cancelled a survey appointment twice and gone quiet on a third attempt. The file notes "reluctant," maybe "hard to engage." Nobody has asked why.
When someone finally does ask, the answer is rarely about retrofit at all. Our research into communication in domestic retrofit found that a resident who appears reluctant to accept an installation may not be sceptical about the technology, the funding, or the disruption. They may simply be worried about how weeks of building work will affect an elderly relative in the next room, or a child who can't cope with dust and noise. The team assumed resistance. The resident just needed someone to ask the right question.
That gap, between what a team assumes and what a resident is actually worried about, is where empathy and active listening either close the distance or let it widen into a stalled project.
It's tempting to file empathy under "nice to have." The retrofit sector has plenty of harder, more measurable things to worry about: compliance, delivery schedules, PAS 2035 sign-off. But treating empathy as a personality trait, something some people have and others don't, misses what it actually does in a retrofit programme: it's the mechanism that surfaces information a technical process has no other way of collecting.
A retrofit journey asks a lot of a household. Strangers come into the home, sometimes for weeks. Familiar systems get replaced with unfamiliar ones. Routines get disrupted, often at short notice. Much of that isn't something a resident actively chose, in the way they'd choose to redecorate their own kitchen. That's especially true in social housing, where a landlord decides on the programme rather than the resident, but even in the able-to-pay market, once work is under way, a household has little control over the day-to-day reality of living through it. Every one of those disruptions lands differently depending on who lives in the house: whether there's a health condition, a caring responsibility, a bereavement, a fear of change that has nothing to do with retrofit itself.
Active listening is how a team finds out which of those things apply, before it becomes the reason an installation stalls. Get it right, and a coordinator hears the real objection early enough to solve it. Get it wrong, and the same objection surfaces three months later as a complaint, a refusal, or a resident who simply stops answering the phone.
Empathy in a retrofit context is less a tone of voice than a specific sequence: notice, ask, and respond to what's actually said, rather than what was expected to be said.
That sounds obvious. In practice, it's the opposite of how most retrofit conversations are structured. Coordination calls are often built around a script: confirm the appointment, list the measures, close the call. There's rarely a deliberate pause built in for "is there anything about this that worries you?", and even when there is, a resident who senses the caller is working through a checklist won't always volunteer the real concern.
The households where this goes well tend to share a pattern. Someone on the team treats the resident as a person navigating a disruption to their home, not a job to close out, and listens for what's underneath a hesitation before responding to it. That's not the same as being endlessly patient or agreeing to anything a resident asks for; it's closer to diagnostic listening, assuming there's a specific, solvable reason behind the reluctance, and treating the conversation as the way to find it.
Gemma Voaden, Senior Manager Net Zero at Together Housing, sees a related version of this gap play out in how the offer itself gets framed. She's noted that tenant liaison officers can end up feeling they have to sell something a resident should already want, a warmer home, lower bills, because the conversation has been built around persuading rather than listening. Approached that way, the resident becomes someone to convince rather than someone whose specific concerns are worth understanding first.
This is also where empathy connects to trust that outlasts a single conversation. Interviewees in our research consistently described communication as one of the strongest predictors of overall resident experience, regardless of whether the technical installation went smoothly. A resident who feels heard early on gives a team the benefit of the doubt later, when something inevitably goes wrong. A resident who felt processed rather than listened to won't.
If empathy is this valuable, why isn't it standard practice already?
Part of the answer is structural. People working in retrofit are typically hired and assessed for their ability to complete a technical or administrative task: survey a property, coordinate a schedule, install a measure. Olivia Muscat, Customer Experience Manager at CCS, makes the point precisely: customer service is a specific skillset, not something to assume someone has simply because their role puts them in front of residents. People in these roles can spend all day booking and rescheduling appointments without ever having been taught how to let someone down gently. That mismatch tends to go unnoticed until a resident conversation goes off-script, because most of the job can be done perfectly well without it ever being tested. Nobody sets out to hire people who can't listen well; the job description and the KPIs simply aren't built around it.
The other part is confidence. Genuine active listening means being willing to hear an answer you didn't plan for, and then adapting the conversation instead of pushing on to the next line of the script. That's uncomfortable if you've never had to do it under pressure, with a queue of other calls waiting. Without practice, most people default to the script, because the script feels safe even when it isn't working.
There's also a scale problem. A single retrofit journey can involve five to ten different people interacting with the same household: surveyor, designer, coordinator, scheduler, multiple trades. Empathy shown by one of them and forgotten by the next doesn't add up to a good resident experience; it adds up to an inconsistent one. Trust in a programme is never built solely by the person with the resident liaison job title. Every one of those five to ten people shapes whether a resident feels heard, and residents are often quicker to trust someone who isn't visibly reciting a script than a specialist who is.
Three changes are worth making before any of the more ambitious ones.
First, build a genuine pause into early conversations, not a scripted question, but a real one, and train teams to expect an answer that has nothing to do with the technical scope of the works. "Is there anything about the timing or the work itself that would be difficult for your household?" surfaces more than "do you have any questions?" ever will.
Second, make sure what one person hears actually reaches the next person in the chain. A vulnerability or concern raised at survey stage is worthless if it dies in a form nobody reads before the installation team turns up. This is a process fix as much as a communication one, but it's the difference between empathy shown once and empathy sustained across a five-month project.
Third, and hardest to do from a slide deck: give teams the chance to practise hearing an answer they didn't expect, and responding to it well, before they're doing it live with a real resident and a real deadline. Knowing that empathy matters and having the confidence to act on it under pressure are different things, and only one of them can be taught in a classroom.
None of this is about making retrofit delivery softer, rather more accurate. A team that listens well isn't being kind for its own sake. It's collecting information a purely technical process has no other way of gathering, and using it to stop a solvable problem from becoming an unsolvable one.
That's the argument at the centre of our research report, The Retrofit Conversation Gap: communication skills like this one aren't fixed traits some people happen to have. They're specific, observable behaviours that can be built deliberately, in the same way technical competence is built. Download the full report for the complete findings, including where empathy sits alongside the five other communication skills we found mattering most in retrofit delivery.
If you're looking for a practical way to build this capability in your own teams, rather than hoping it develops on the job, we've developed interactive role-play scenarios that let them practise exactly this kind of conversation, including the ones that don't go to plan, and get personalised feedback before they ever have the real version. Get in touch to find out more.
