Editorial
Organization-wide surveys have been around for decades. And today, many more organizations conduct them than don’t. But leading companies do much more than just "survey" employees. Armed with new technologies, their activities are better categorized as employee listening.
Throughout my research and consulting, I’ve found that employee listening activities are best framed as scalable conversations. When framed as such, listening has a positive but largely indirect effect on employees and organizations. Through these tools, employee attitudes and beliefs are captured and transformed into metrics that drive leadership action. In turn, leadership actions aim to shape future employee attitudes and behaviors. These technology-mediated conversations cover a wide range of topics from satisfaction with pay and benefits, to trust in leadership, to cross-functional collaboration.
When organizations improve the experiences they deliver, productive employee attitudes and behaviors tend to follow. This indirect relationship is well understood and is the primary reason organizations invest in employee listening. But as it turns out, employee listening activities — those honest conversations — appear to also have a direct and powerful effect on these universally-valued outcomes.
The Direct Value of Employee Listening
During the heart of the pandemic, I interviewed several employee listening experts on whether and how organizations should listen to employees during that time of crisis. All of the experts agreed that times of disruption are precisely when organizations should facilitate honest conversations. They didn’t, however, believe that organizations should simply field the “same old surveys” they normally do. Although these points now seem obvious, during the peak of COVID, many companies paused their listening programs.
Around that same time, we studied over 17,000 employees across dozens of countries and all major industries (excluding healthcare). We found that employees whose companies engaged in formal listening reported substantially higher engagement, well-being and resilience than those whose companies either never listened or paused their programs during COVID. Among the dozens of organizational factors we studied, being listened to by one’s employer was by far the most important driver of these top-line attitudes.
These findings lead to an important hypothesis: that honest conversations, operationalized as employee listening, have both direct and indirect effects on employees. Our most recent global study of the workforce bore this out. For the employees who said their company “Never” asks them for feedback (roughly 11% of the sample), employee attitudes were dismal. This neglected cohort reported a remarkably low level of engagement (only 49% favorable). In contrast, employees asked for feedback annually, reported decent engagement of 68% favorable. And for those asked more frequently (e.g., quarterly) engagement soared to a range of 78% to 81%.
Advances in Employee Listening
Employee listening technologies have greatly enhanced organizations' abilities to facilitate honest conversations at different moments. In other words, technology provides different tools, fit for purpose. Traditional employee engagement surveys, for instance, capture overall attitudes about the workplace. But a growing number of organizations are also measuring top-line attitudes like inclusion and well-being, and complementing them with more tactical check-ins following activities such as onboarding, benefits enrollment and exiting the company.
One of the latest tools in the bunch is unstructured listening, which is already being adopted by forward-thinking organizations to capture more detailed employee feedback, as well as their emotions and intentions. Unlike traditional surveys, in which organizations solicit feedback about pre-determined topics, unstructured listening is far more employee-driven and raw. Passive listening takes the next step by tapping into employee insights without specifically asking for feedback. The use of large language models in unstructured and passive listening shows promise in helping organizations capture, understand and act on ever-more nuanced employee feedback.
Feeling Heard Matters
Importantly, employee listening doesn’t stop once feedback is shared. Action is an integral part of the listening process. Good conversations, after all, aren’t simply an exchange of words. The emotions, intentions and meaning shared elicit responses. And it’s essential that employees perceive that leaders are responding to their feedback.
Like listening activities themselves, perceptions of leadership action are strongly correlated with other top-line employee attitudes like engagement and well-being. In fact, in our global database of over 27 million employee survey responses, the item “I believe that positive change will happen as a result of this survey” is one of the biggest differentiators between financially high-performing organizations and the middling majority.
Why might employee listening affect employee attitudes? Technically, there are many reasons. But perhaps the simplest is that when organizations listen to their people, it implies they matter. And "mattering" matters to people.
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