Where Technology Fits in Scaling Voice of Employee
A 2022 survey found that nearly 95% of companies have a formal employee listening program in place. Seven in 10 plan to further accelerate their employee listening over the next year.
In the present environment of hybrid work, ongoing social unrest and economic uncertainty, listening to and learning from the voice of employees (VoE) is more strategic to business success than ever.
But it’s also a time when everyone has to do more with less. For HR leaders, executing VoE programs that impact employee experience is more challenging than ever.
That’s why leveraging tech-powered tools can help stretched HR teams to amplify the impact of their VoE programs and minimize the effort needed to run them at scale.
Not Your Average Survey
Employee listening practices have come a long way from the stiff, generic annual employee surveys that took months to design, administer and tabulate, often using outside agencies to mine insights for action.
Today, voice of the employee (VoE) programs are designed to gather, analyze and act on employee opinions, feedback, ideas, preferences and perceptions.
Smart technology helps make those programs efficient, user-friendly, scalable, intelligent, privacy-compliant, actionable and measurable. Due to these benefits, VoE tools are seeing both growth and innovation, with more than 100 HR tech vendors offering some components of VoE enablement tools, according to Gartner.
Daniela Catalan, CHRO at no-code automation platform provider Pipefy shared that post-pandemic, the company evolved to accommodate new workplace and workforce realities. "We quickly shifted away from inefficient, time-consuming processes towards digital and automated processes, including how we captured and analyzed the voice of our teams."
Adoption of VoE tools is growing because they make it fast and easy to design and execute initiatives, and connect the impact of employee listening to KPIs like employee experience (EX), engagement, performance and retention.
Related Article: Your Employees Won't Feel Heard Until You Act Like You're Listening
Technology for Each Phase of Employee Listening
An ideal VoE tech stack supports HR and business goals at each of the three main stages of their employee listening efforts: gathering, analyzing and acting on the VoE.
Stage 1: Gathering the Voice of Employees
HR often model their VoE initiatives along the lines of the voice of customer (VoC) initiatives run by their marketing counterparts. With the right tech, VoE can leapfrog from a periodic or one-off program to an ongoing flywheel of insights, action and impact.
Make VoE Continuous and Ongoing
One of the big benefits of using smart tools for VOE is they enable "continuous listening" and "ongoing conversations," said Emily Killham, director of research and insights at EX solution provider Perceptyx. “This doesn’t mean companies are asking more questions more often. Rather it’s how they’re doing it."
Technology enables HR to run various surveys at differing cadences, to meet distinct business needs. Automation and artificial intelligence make this possible.
Lifecycle surveys: personalized to each employee’s journey through their lifecycle of onboarding, exit, promotions or manager changes.
Crowdsourcing: uncovering concerns or questions about specific events, or sourcing ideas for innovation directly from employees.
Pulse surveys: on-demand polls, quizzes and surveys for quick, topical feedback, especially at times of internal or external disruption or even crisis.
Bring Together Multi-channel VoE Touchpoints in a Single Panel
With the right tools, HR can seamlessly and non-intrusively collect VoE inputs across a diverse set of touchpoints, in numerous formats.
Employees have the choice to participate on digital or physical channels and platforms: social, email, mobile apps, forums, polls, interactive quizzes, chatbots, closed discussion groups on Slack and Discord, physical or virtual 1:1 or 1:many gatherings, and even gamified interactions.
Tech Helps Make VoE Programs User-Friendly, Quick, Customizable, Agile, Scalable
Tools today are available in multiple languages, are often accessible and have practical features like automated ‘nudging’ to boost participation or upvoting ideas. An array of templates with pre-defined questions can save HR time and effort, while customization features let them gather granular insights based on different roles, levels, functions and geographies. When needed, these tools can be anonymous or personalized, but they are always privacy-compliant, respecting all applicable employee data privacy regulations.
Self-serve tools let HR and functional leaders quickly get feedback and insights in a timely manner, without any help from IT. For example, said Catalan, her team wanted an integrated system that would seamlessly connect all stakeholders and allow them to execute programs. Smart low-code or no-code tools make it easy to govern and manage even complex VoE programs.
Tools that enable light and frequent surveys make it possible to have a continuous and ongoing cycle of listening and action, said Jeff Cates, CEO of Achievers, provider of an employee recognition and engagement platform. “If you don’t measure in a frequent but light manner, you are not seeking input to support change. You are just seeking to get a scorecard,” he added.
Related Article: The Trouble With Employee Surveys
Learning Opportunities
Stage 2: Analyzing the Voice of Employees
Just as digital marketers face a deluge of consumer data, more digital listening creates a lot of employee feedback data. And the data can very quickly become unmanageable, outdated and a privacy and security hazard if not managed with the right technology.
VoE tools today are built to gather large and diverse structured and unstructured data sets spread across multiple systems and formats, perform advanced analytics on the data, and deliver intelligent insights from the data to managers.
AI technology plays an essential role in powering advanced analytics, said Killham. They take a ‘big data’ approach to connect the dots between structured employee inputs, sentiments, behavioral signals and unstructured feedback. This uncovers and identifies patterns, correlations, influencers, opportunities and red flags. It can also help isolate trends by role, function, level, geography and demographics. In short, they can create a treasure-trove of unique, contextual insight for business leaders.
Advanced tools also integrate the VoE system with other internal HR systems like performance analytics and L&D, or external systems like CX, to better understand relationships between EX and other business data. These combinations, said Cates, attempt to build an ongoing “sense and respond” capability that goes across traditional application boundaries and creates additional value from the programs.
VoE programs are ultimately about taking action, Killham added, so tools should let HR and management quickly surface insights and act on them. For instance, graphics and data visualizations, heat maps and customized dashboards are easy to understand and share, which prevents ‘analysis paralysis’ from setting in, she said.
Related Article: Communication Breakdown at Work? Here's What to Do
Stage 3: Taking Action
Taking concrete action on program insights is the best way to derive value from VoE programs and keep employees engaged with them, said Killham, adding that when organizations act promptly and consistently, so-called “survey fatigue” disappears almost completely.
Advanced tools layer historical insights with current analytics to better inform decision-making and prioritize action. The best VoE tools empower HR to crunch the time and effort from feedback collection to taking action. Tools that include OKRs to implement action items help managers be accountable post-VoE gathering and analysis, said Cates.
Related Article: How to Build a Modern, Holistic Employee Listening Strategy
VoE Tech Is Powerful, but It’s No Silver Bullet
“One consistent mistake I’ve seen companies make with tech-enabled VoE programs is over-indexing on technology and under-indexing on humans,” cautioned Killham. She stressed that fixating on deploying different technologies while forgetting that action needs to be taken to win human trust hinders the progress organizations can make with valuable employee feedback. In reality, technology should enable the analysis phase to be shorter, not longer, so that the focus is on action and impact.
Another significant challenge with AI-powered VoE tools is ensuring that the data collected is representative of the entire workforce, Cates noted. If the survey questions or focus group facilitation are biased towards a particular group or demographic, the results may not accurately reflect the views of the broader workforce. Similarly, if the survey response rate is low or the participants are self-selected, the results may be representative of only some of the workforce.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to employee listening,” Killham concluded. VoE programs should match listening strategies to organizational goals, and technology should enable action that impacts core business areas at scale.
Overall, gathering and analyzing the voice of employees is critical to the success of any organization. With the right tools in their stack, HR can scale, customize, and optimize VoE programs to help functional leaders take effective action and improve employee engagement, experience, retention and performance.
About the Author
Chitra is a seasoned freelance B2B content writer with over 10 years of enterprise marketing experience. Having spent the first half of her career in senior corporate marketing roles for companies such as Timken Steel, Tata Sky Satellite TV, and Procter & Gamble, Chitra brings that experience to her writing. She has authored over 500 articles, white papers, eBooks, guides, and research reports on customer experience, martech, salestech, adtech, retailtech, and customer data and privacy. She holds a Masters in global media & communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MBA in marketing.
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