Abstract
Organizations increasingly route employee feedback to leaders through large language model (LLM) summaries, an unaudited layer that silences already-spoken voice. We introduce a Voice Retention / Representation Ratio metric for representational bias in summarization and apply it to a bilingual (English/German) corpus of 2,586 free-text responses from a global professional service company. First, employees supply criticism more reliably than praise (withholding praise is 82 times more common). Second, across 45 leader-summaries the pipeline filters by popularity, not sentiment: criticism survives, yet a concern voiced once is dropped 86% of the time, with short and German-only content lost on the same axis (theme retention 0.14 vs 0.74; German directional). Controlling for frequency, sentiment has no independent effect; the harm is prevalence-driven, which sentiment-only audits miss. A targeted prompt recovers only named themes. We contribute the metric, field evidence, and a disaggregated voice-retention card.
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- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Tamme, T., Hantel, A., & Khosrawi-Rad, B. (2026). Whose Voice Survives the Summary? A Voice-Retention Audit of LLM Employee Listening. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/whose-voice-survives-the-summary-a-voice-retention-audit-of-llm-employee-listening
MLA 9
Tamme, Thilo, et al. "Whose Voice Survives the Summary? A Voice-Retention Audit of LLM Employee Listening." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/whose-voice-survives-the-summary-a-voice-retention-audit-of-llm-employee-listening.
Chicago (author–date)
Tamme, Thilo, Anton Hantel, and Bijan Khosrawi-Rad. 2026. "Whose Voice Survives the Summary? A Voice-Retention Audit of LLM Employee Listening." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/whose-voice-survives-the-summary-a-voice-retention-audit-of-llm-employee-listening.
Harvard
Tamme, T., Hantel, A. and Khosrawi-Rad, B. (2026) 'Whose Voice Survives the Summary? A Voice-Retention Audit of LLM Employee Listening', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/whose-voice-survives-the-summary-a-voice-retention-audit-of-llm-employee-listening.
Vancouver
Tamme T, Hantel A, Khosrawi-Rad B. Whose Voice Survives the Summary? A Voice-Retention Audit of LLM Employee Listening. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/whose-voice-survives-the-summary-a-voice-retention-audit-of-llm-employee-listening
IEEE
T. Tamme, A. Hantel, and B. Khosrawi-Rad, "Whose Voice Survives the Summary? A Voice-Retention Audit of LLM Employee Listening," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/whose-voice-survives-the-summary-a-voice-retention-audit-of-llm-employee-listening.