Employee experience | How to achieve complete listening in your organisation

How to achieve complete listening in your organisation

For most employers, the baseline for employee experience (EX) is the annual employee survey. It’s been a HR staple for decades. Today it is just one part of a whole landscape of EX techniques that come together to create a complete listening program. 

So how do businesses reach that ultimate point? Here’s a roadmap for your journey to complete listening, with tips and ideas from the experts. 

1. Understand your goals, and get buy-in for them

What do you want employee listening to do for you? Improve engagement, increase retention, boost productivity, or all these things and more? Setting goals, and then crystallising them with KPIs specific to your organisation, is an essential first step. 

With the benefits identified and your expectations set, you’re in a strong position to  secure buy-in. The initiative needs to be embraced at C-suite level if it’s going to gain traction. Fortunately, the relationship between EX and positive outcomes is very well-documented. There are plenty of stats and success stories available to help you make the business case

2. Set your listening program up for success

If you’re starting with an engagement survey and building on it, you need to set things up in a scalable way. Look for an experience management platform that removes as much administrative work as possible, since you may be working with a small team to start with.

Look for a service that provides analytics, visualisation features and recommendations. Good EX should go beyond just reporting results, and instead present recommended actions and predictions based on your findings in a compelling and accessible way. 

3. Take a regular pulse

With an annual survey up and running, increasing the frequency of your listening is the next stepping stone. A sixth-monthly or quarterly pulse will amplify the benefits by making insights more timely and relevant – an essential step given the speed of change in modern business. 

Surveying more frequently doesn’t have to mean rolling out the entire annual questionnaire every time. You can use short, focused pulse surveys to keep track of some essential measurements like engagement, overall experience and intent to stay, and to gather feedback in context, for example after a recent HR initiative or industry change. 

Survey fatigue is a reality, but regular pulse surveys shouldn’t pose a problem if they are executed well. In fact, data shows that 77% of employees want to give feedback more than once a year. 

4. Measure moments that matter across the employee lifecycle

So far we’ve talked about listening at set points across the year. But what about the high-impact moments in the employee lifecycle? Listening to employee feedback at the onboarding stage, at exit interviews and at the candidate stage can uncover some powerful levers for improving the employee experience.

At this stage, your experience management platform can really come into its own, since this type of contextual listening can be made an automatic part of the employee journey, and added to your wider listening programme to give you a richer and more dimensional understanding of what’s happening. You can also weave in data from your employee development and employee benefits programmes. 

5. Go beyond employee experience

At this point, listening has become second nature, seamlessly integrated across the whole employee journey. But listening is only effective if you take action to address feedback and improve the employee experience. 

The most mature organisations also apply their listening advantage to other areas, such as customer experience and IT, to provide a truly complete listening system that enables both immediate action and long-term growth and development. 

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