Editorial
Employee productivity and retention are perennial challenges for organizations. To address these, organizations often measure employees’ attitudes: Are they engaged? Do they plan to stay and for how long? How do they feel about specific aspects of the workplace? These conversations also help uncover new ideas for innovation, identify current and future customer frustrations, and solve innumerable problems.
While workforce surveys have been around for decades, technology has dramatically expanded the tools for collecting employee feedback, which is essential as organizations swell to hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people. But the biggest benefits come when surveys foster honest conversations between leaders and employees.
Honest conversations happen when employees feel safe to be candid, trust their feedback will be used productively and are not afraid of retaliation for pointing out problems. Mature employee listening programs give both leaders and employees opportunities to drive the conversations. In traditional surveys, leaders determine the timing and topics of conversation, while always-on and passive listening approaches put employees in the driver seat, determining when and what to discuss.
Transform Employee Attitudes and Intentions Into Meaningful Insights
The metrics generated by employee listening activities are different than the operational metrics leaders are accustomed to. Technology helps leaders transform something incorporeal — employee feelings, attitudes and intentions — into data that can help leaders understand employee sentiment and make better talent decisions and predictions. But the metrics generated by employee listening are only useful when they are an accurate reflection of what employees feel, and depend on leaders and employees having a shared understanding of their meaning. Unfortunately I find that the more confident senior leaders are in the meaning of the metrics, the less they understand them.
When organizational leaders focus their attention on metrics instead of the conversations themselves, they unknowingly tamper with the data, losing utility and eroding trust.
Related Article: How to Build a Modern, Holistic Employee Listening Strategy
Score Chasing and Honest Conversations Don’t Mix
Goodhart’s Law states “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” This important principle underpins the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the metrics generated by employee listening.
It is a great paradox — the more emphasis leaders place on scores, the less meaningful the scores become.
While the vast majority of organizations engage in employee listening with good intentions, many leaders employ tactics that incentivize artificially high scores, such as tying leader bonuses to employee experience metrics or punishing leaders who achieve low scores. These pressures trickle down, creating environments where employees feel pressured to tell leaders what (they think) they want to hear, disrupting honest dialogue.
Organizations that use such tactics often do achieve higher scores, but don’t see them reflected in greater performance or retention. At the end of the day, the data just doesn’t jive with reality.
Related Article: 11 Ways to Doom Your Voice of the Employee Program Before It Even Starts
How to Know if Employee Feedback Is Honest
Variability Across Dimensions
There is no such thing as a perfect workplace for everyone. Even the highest performing organizations don’t get everything right. Honest conversations generate scores that are high, low and “meh” across the different aspects of work employees evaluate. Uniformly high scores deserve a suspicious eye.
Metrics Pass the ‘Eye Test’
A former fast food chain CEO recently spoke to me about the importance of senior leaders visiting work locations to directly observe the day-to-day working experiences of the front-line. Do those in-person visits tell the same story as the data? When employees feel safe providing candid feedback, the stories generally align.
Alignment Between Experience and Operational Data
Employee sentiment and relevant operational data such as performance and turnover should be aligned. In a few extreme cases that I’ve observed, leaders boasted of astronomically high employee survey scores and yet, later admitted that performance was down and employees were leaving in droves. Unsurprisingly, metric targets and leader incentives were lurking behind the curtain.
Related Article: Employee Feedback Apps Aren't Immune to Bias. Here's Why
Honest Conversations Uncover Revenue-Driving Insights and Innovation
The high quality experience data that comes from honest conversations is great fodder for the predictive models that improve the speed, quality and scale of decision making. For instance, a global restaurant chain recently overhauled its employee and customer listening programs and we identified particularly good practices and data quality within its U.K. business unit. With that data, we built a powerful model which demonstrated that restaurants in which employees felt well-trained, respected and recognized generated superior customer feedback and significantly more revenue. This illuminated productive managerial practices that were then shared across other business units and are now being implemented across the globe.
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As with any good conversation, employee listening does not stop once information is shared. Leaders must respond, expressing their appreciation for employees’ honesty, sharing the next steps for prioritizing results and the actions they take in response. These final steps create work environments where employees feel safe to share candid feedback that ultimately can lead to a more productive, engaged workforce.
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