How to Build a Modern, Holistic Employee Listening Strategy
Employee listening is an inseparable component of employee experience management. Unfortunately, research has shown that about two-thirds of global employees say their employer needs to do a better job of listening.
Employee listening isn't new, and many organizations have some mechanisms in place. But given the advances in technology, how can organizations build a modern employee listening strategy?
While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, there are a few principles that any organization can apply to build a holistic employee listening program to keep their teams engaged and productive.
Start With the Basics: Employee Surveys
Employee engagement census surveys have been around for decades. And even with advancements in employee listening technology, these surveys are still an excellent foundation of a holistic listening program.
But why start here? Why not begin with (presumably) more innovative employee listening techniques?
Engagement surveys are designed to measure employees’ general attitudes about their experiences at work, such as their engagement, wellbeing and inclusion. Because they measure somewhat stable attitudes, they are good at predicting future employee behavior like performance and attrition.
Census engagement surveys are a great place to start because they invite every employee in the organization into a dialogue. They also help build muscle among managers, giving them the opportunity to digest and act on feedback.
In turn, this builds trust among employees — trust that their feedback is being heard, being acted upon and won’t be used against them. These surveys teach everyone in the organization how to have honest, actionable dialogue at scale.
Related Article: 5 Tips to Get More From Your Voice of Employee Program
Lower the Bar for Action
Through a number of global studies, we have consistently found that less than one third of global employees believe their employers do a good job of acting on their feedback.
While feeling heard is important to people, the action that results is what ultimately matters. In this way, action is an essential component of listening, not a separate activity.
So, if that’s the case, why ‘lower the bar for action’?
One reason engagement surveys sometimes get a bad rap is that leaders struggle with action planning. In years past and in many organizations still today, action planning is a formal, heavy activity where managers identify broken processes or policies and then execute changes to improve them.
In our work with customers, it’s quite common to get eye rolls and sighs from managers at the mention of action planning. We’ve even seen organizations change the name of the activity because ‘action planning’ has become a dirty phrase. This doesn’t have to be the case.
Some of the most impactful actions happen at the local level among managers and their teams. Not every action needs to involve big process or policy changes. An 'action' can be as simple as managers having better quality 1:1s, communicating with more frequency and being clearer with expectations, for example. This is what is meant by ‘lower the bar.’ Once managers and their teams realize the impact of small behavioral adjustments, it creates organic demand for more feedback.
Related Article: Employee Experience Surveys: Dos and Don’ts
Target Specific Moments
Census engagement surveys are nearly always organizationally driven, meaning leadership determines the timing of the survey(s) and the nature of the survey items. In other words, the organization starts a dialogue on its own terms.
Once this is in place, it’s time to start listening to employees at moments that matter to them. But with so many important moments, how do organizations decide which ones to start with?
First, narrow in on universal moments — those experiences that everyone in the organization goes through.
Learning Opportunities
Next, identify moments that require heavy investments of time, money and resources; in other words, experiences that the organization really needs to get right.
And finally, identify moments that have clear owners — leaders in the organization who are accountable and can take real action to improve those experiences.
More often than not, these converge around two experiences: the candidate and onboarding experiences. These are great places to start and offer the benefit of quickly introducing new joiners to a culture that invites honest dialogue.
Related Article: Want to Improve the Employee Experience? Identify the Moments That Matter
Let Employees Drive the Conversation ... Sometimes
Now that the organization has dipped its toe into employee-driven listening, it’s time to go further.
Consider for a moment a personal relationship between two people. If only one of those people initiates and drives every conversation, it’s unlikely that relationship will last. The same is true for conversations among organizations and employees. Simply put, in any good relationship, both parties need the opportunity to drive the conversation, sometimes.
The most foundational place to begin is leveraging open-ended questions within existing surveys, such as the census survey.
The technology to digest and make sense of open-ended feedback has improved dramatically, which allows these types of questions to be more open-ended and employee-driven. From here, organizations can gradually progress to more advanced forms of unstructured and employee-driven listening such as always-on feedback and social media scraping, keeping in mind data privacy and ethical issues.
The numbers generated from surveys are not just numbers; they represent real peoples’ attitudes and experiences. Unstructured data makes these quantitative results more human.
Among leaders who consume such data, numbers tend to elicit a cognitive response that engages the rational, logical parts of the brain. But unstructured feedback tends to generate more of an emotional response, which can help to spur action. The combination of the two is quite powerful!
Related Article: Working With Emotional Awareness
Ongoing Dialogue at Scale
Every successful organization must create opportunities for dialogue, regardless of their size or industry. And both organizational leaders and employees should be able to start and drive the conversations.
These conversations support employee and organizational resilience as well as drive performance and innovation. As the late Stephen Hawking so eloquently put it, “Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking …. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”
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About the Author
Dr. Benjamin Granger is Chief Workplace Psychologist and Head of Employee Experience (EX) Advisory Services at Qualtrics. He has over a decade of experience building, running and optimizing experience management (XM) programs across the globe.
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