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Ah, the age-old annual performance review. Dreaded by HR, leaders, and employees alike, this was once the sole touchpoint and reference on employees and their attitudes towards their jobs, teams, and managers.
Most organizations today have moved to a slightly higher level of sophistication. Perceptyx’s 2023 State of Employee Listening report found that 95% of surveyed organization have an formal employee listening program. This might range from more frequent performance reviews to relying on ‘scores’ from in-depth surveys.
Unfortunately, many of these processes are still ineffective.
Although company X runs monthly reviews between managers and employees, unconscious bias from the manager may skew their actions from the meeting. Whilst company Y has finally reached an ‘outstanding’ score on their latest employee engagement survey, they’ve neglected all the analyses that could help them inform their approach to HR strategies around ED&I.
Steve Browne, Chief People Officer, La Rosa’s, argues organizations fail when it comes to listening to employees for two primary reasons.
“The first one is that people tend to think of solutions to whatever is being discussed even before a person finishes their conversation. Our approach is to solve and move on. It limits effective listening.
“The second way companies go wrong is that we feel spending time with employees is wasting our time. We miss the golden opportunity to make time for our employees. If we were more intentional in listening to our employees, we’d have stronger cultures and a collaborative workforce.”
Many organizations are trying to improve their approach. Perceptyx’s report also found that 70% of surveyed companies plan to accelerate their listening. HR leaders are beginning to mature their approach to employee listening from an infrequent event (still 20% of organizations surveyed in 2023), to a continuous, strategic exercise that impacts decisions across the business, not just within HR.
“If you do not tie surveys or other routes to information gathering to strategy that not only HR but business leaders recognize, then it’s a big miss for organizations,” says Scott Gebhardt, SVP and Head of Employee Listening, Citi.
For example, Uber’s former Global Head of People Analytics has previously shared that analysis from continuous listening to employee perceptions around hybrid work pushed the tech company to opt for a two-day work-from-home policy.
When employee listening is executed correctly, and insights are circulated into decision-making at every level and in every division of the organization, organizations can reap the rewards of an engaged workforce guided by in-depth data.
How to improve your employee listening strategy
There is a huge crossover between people analytics and employee listening. At its heart, employee listening draws on all forms of employee data. People analytics teams, therefore, have a significant role to play in helping organizations to move to a mature employee listening model.
Insight222’s 2022 People Analytics Trends report found that in organizations where people analytics functions are not responsible for employee listening, only 46% have a clearly defined employee listening strategy. This number jumps to 69% for organizations where people analytics does take charge of employee listening.
Surveys, performance reviews, and other forms of employee listening all have their part to play in this story. But leading with a people analytics approach to employee listening requires companies to explore, and use, all channels of employee data, be it qualitative or quantitative.
Data on everything from meeting times to in-office attendance, and from daily pulse surveys to formal channels for complaints and whistleblowing can all come together. By continually gathering a diverse range of insights, people analytics teams can ensure every HR and business decision, day-to-day rather than on a one-off basis, is informed by employee listening.
"There's a lot of different directions that you could go in terms of gathering information. You could scrape data off the internet. You can run focus groups, whether they are formal or informal, in-person or online, or through different vendors,” says Gebhardt.
At Citi, he has worked to mature employee listening practices, including its annual census, called the Voice of Employee or VOE.
“I took a look at all the questions we asked and areas of importance within previous surveys and considered, how does that tie back to business strategy?” he says. “We came up with a new survey, tying each question to strategy so HR and business leaders can see how each relates to the direction that Citi is going.”
Aside from improving people analytics capabilities and establishing clear links to business strategy, Browne encourages organizations to invest more resources in developing the listening capabilities of people managers. “It’s better to teach people leaders the power of listening to their team,” he says. “It would eliminate problems, friction, and misunderstandings, and people would get more context to perform.”
How to socialize employee listening data & insights
The pace of change organizations now experience means speed is essential. Information from an engagement survey in Q1, in isolation, will be outdated six months later.
"Let's ask the right question at the right time to the right people and deliver those results quickly," says Gebhardt. "And then have a solid communication plan on what each person gets out of this, offering an example of what’s been done.”
A crucial step in creating a mature employee listening strategy is therefore the velocity at which information can be disseminated throughout the organization. The role of people analytics is not to be a one-off resource but to be an input into decision-making across the organization. Periodic data collection and centralized insights no longer cut the mustard.
Browne encourages companies to build “listening to your employees” into the expectations of anyone responsible for others. “You shouldn’t be managing or leading others if you’re not willing to give them your time and attention,” he comments.
However, this task is more strategic than most think and isn’t being done in most companies.
“We should take the approach of performing through our people, not in spite of them,” Browne continues. “People-first cultures and workplaces will drive better results because they are based on relationships and not just task completion.”
To reach true maturity, this will require a shift in HR operating model toward something that is far more data-driven and business-led. It may be pragmatic to start with a single team, division, or group.
How could insights from employees on their team – or from across the organization – improve their work? What decisions are team leaders making day-to-day that could be better informed by real-time feedback from their employees?
Once structural and cultural changes to decision-making have been proven, it becomes easier to scale across the organization, and more realistic to become a company like Citi or La Rosa’s that thrives on insights from employee listening.
