Do you ever wish for a solution that would allow you to understand what your employees are thinking so that you can adjust your initiatives accordingly? Welcome to the realm of employee listening.
Employee listening is an organizational framework that is focused on gathering relevant employee feedback and turning it into actionable insights. In this blog, we will cover the benefits of and employee listening strategy and how to implement it correctly, starting with…
What is Employee Listening?
In essence, Employee Listening means active listening (you didn’t see that coming, did you). However, it’s more than just a fancy term for listening. Employee listening involves gaining insight into employees’ daily experiences, concerns, and motivations. The traditional method for it is conducting employee surveys, but as more and more solutions appear on the market, some give an opportunity to run a listening campaign alongside any company update. On top of that, bottom-up feedback should be an integral part of the strategy.
When employees feel heard, engagement levels soar. Research by the Workforce Institute at UKG showed that 74% of employees feel more effective and engaged when they believe their voices are heard at work. This intrinsic value of feeling heard extends beyond employee engagement alone, as organizations with short feedback cycles can also make quicker changes and innovations, leading to increased profitability.
The goal is to use the insights from the feedback loop to make better decisions for your company, and specifically at an executive level. Quite simply, continuous employee listening offers ongoing learning potential for the business, and valuable actionable insights.
Benefits of an Employee Listening Strategy
Employee listening can provide valuable insights into employee experience and satisfaction. However, hybrid and remote work make active listening to your employees much more challenging. Organizations need to find ways to listen to their employees despite time or location restrictions.
There are several reasons why you should listen to your employees:
- it encourages you to build and maintain strong relationships with your employees, which strengthens employee loyalty and a sense of belonging
- it increases trust in the leadership team
- it gives you insight into ongoing developments, topics, or issues that are currently occupying your employees
- it serves as a basis for your company’s decision-making as the data helps you uncover improvement potentials and can derive well-founded strategies and actions to pursue your company’s goals
- it demonstrates appreciation to your employees, which positively affects their satisfaction
- it allows to improve processes and provide a more productive working environment
- it makes the company more agile
According to research, 86% of employees report not feeling heard in the workplace.
Essentials of a Good Employee Listening Strategy
The most well-known method for employee listening is conducting employee surveys. However, this doesn’t mean sending out the traditional bi-annual questionnaires that are common in many companies.
Instead, you should offer feedback opportunities at each significant touchpoint of the employee journey. For example, seek feedback on the onboarding process, collaboration tools used, employee benefits, training sessions, or regularly check the overall sentiment and mood.
In addition to traditional questionnaires, other methods are available. For instance, you can create a listening campaign for each of your intranet posts and analyze both how well employees receive updates and if the format or the messaging delivers the idea well. By including an open comments section for anonymous feedback, you can respond to your employees’ concerns promptly while simultaneously protecting their privacy. For comprehensive insights, rely on the tried and tested method of personal conversations.
Continuous listening means being constantly prepared to receive feedback and providing your employees with the necessary tools, channels, and conditions to provide feedback easily and quickly.
To enable continuous listening and maximize your employees’ feedback, you need a well-thought-out employee listening strategy. Simply listening to feedback from all directions without control is not effective. Instead, consider how you can gain the best insight into the employee experience and act on the findings.
Here are nine key points to consider in your strategy:
1. Set Clear Objectives
When developing your employee listening strategy, always consider your overall company strategy. Ask yourself how you want your company to evolve and what insights you want to gain.
Based on this, set clear objectives in the first step. For example, your goal might be to increase employee motivation, provide more efficient training for your employees, evaluate current change processes, or improve overall internal communication.
Only with clear objectives can you listen in the right places and ask the right questions to the right people. We’ll explore this point in more detail later.
2. Involve Everyone
Employee listening has a significant impact on the overall company culture. Therefore, it is crucial to involve everyone – not just stakeholders but all employees for effective buy-in of any insights.
Communicate your strategy’s goals, what you expect from your managers and employees, and the benefits of employee listening for everyone. Consider offering appropriate training, for example, to provide tips for active listening to supervisors or to familiarize employees with the chosen methods and tools.
3. Capture the Entire Employee Experience
Some employees may feel less heard than others. According to a study by The Workforce Institute conducted, employees in essential jobs, for example, feel that they have less influence on company decisions. New employees may also feel less heard compared to managers.
When we say involve everyone, we mean exactly that. Include remote employees, freelancers, and part-time workers, as they are all important members of your workforce and can provide valuable insights.
Let everyone have their say. Get a holistic overview of the entire employee experience, including the experiences of applicants and former employees.
4. Choose Suitable Feedback Methods and Tools
Once you have defined your goals, target groups, and touchpoints, you can choose the appropriate tools to implement your employee listening strategy.
Here are some examples of how to listen with the right tools actively and continuously:
- Use your HR software to conduct regular pulse surveys on employee satisfaction
- During offboarding, conduct comprehensive interviews to gather feedback on the employee’s entire journey with your company
- Encourage regular 1:1 conversations between employees and their supervisors to support individual development and growth
- Use your employee app to send online surveys directly to employees’ smartphones, asking what they need for more productivity while working from home or hybrid
- Consider using an employee listening module from Haiilo to grasp and analyze the sentiment behind every company update.
5. Evaluate Data and Take Action
After collecting data through various methods, it’s time to analyze what you’ve heard. Prepare a short report for each survey to share the results with your employees. But don’t just leave the results without action; derive concrete actions from them. Learn from them and show your employees the impact their feedback has on the company’s development.
For example, if your last survey indicates that your employees are not efficiently using your internal communication tool, perhaps training is needed. Or maybe it’s not the employees’ qualifications but the tool itself. In that case, you should consider introducing new tools for internal communication. Or is it information overload that’s behind the low adoption rates of your internal communication tool? In that case, personalized and audience-specific communication is needed so that your employees receive relevant information at the right time through the right channel.
In summary, active listening also means asking follow-up questions and trying to understand the feedback correctly. Always discuss the results with the wider team and invite further dialogue to improve overall employee experience. This way, you create a continuous listening process.
6. Communicate Transparently
Your employee listening strategy should always be accompanied by a clear communication strategy. Involve your employees at every step and provide transparent information about:
- The purpose of employee listening
- The type, timing, and scope of your surveys and other measures
- How their data will be handled
- The results and what will be done with them
- Your successes
This way, your employees can follow what happens with their feedback and its impact. When 40% of employees get the impression their feedback is not listened to in recent studies, it’s imperative that you show more than lip service in this exercise.
Just as your employees are individual, you should also approach employee listening individually. Carefully consider when to conduct each survey and for what purpose – and who the right contacts are.
Your surveys, for example, could focus on specific events, topics, or teams. Accordingly, you should choose your questions carefully. Always ask only relevant, constructive, and audience-specific questions.
Ideally, your surveys should build on each other, using follow-up surveys to delve deeper into specific aspects or define your target groups more precisely. You might consider involving a focus group – a selected group of employees with whom you conduct in-depth interviews to enrich the quantitative data with qualitative information.
7. Handle Your Employees’ Data Confidentially
An essential prerequisite for the success of employee listening is handling your employees’ confidential data properly. Your employees must be able to trust that their responses to anonymized surveys cannot be traced back to them.
For employees to feel comfortable providing honest feedback and expressing their opinions, they need to feel at ease and have confidence in you.
Furthermore, it is also necessary for data protection reasons to handle your employees’ data with care.
8. Avoid Survey Fatigue
Continuous listening does not mean bombarding your employees with surveys all the time. This is not effective and will ultimately lead to the surveys becoming a nuisance, resulting in a decline in participation rates. Surveys that are too complex or time-consuming can also cause survey fatigue.
Your employees could lose interest if there are no follow-up actions and they don’t know what happens with the results. They might ask themselves, “Why bother at all?”, which could be even more negative.
9. Reach Your Employees Across All Channels
An essential factor for a successful employee listening strategy is not relying on a single channel. Many deskless employees, for example, may not have their own email address – excluding them from email surveys. Consequently, you lose important insights and perspectives.
Implementing a multi-channel approach will help you avoid these risks:
- You can disseminate your content to various target groups and channels
- You have an overview of your most active and strongest channels
- You can address the needs of your employees with personalized content
- You can reach your employees wherever they are at any time
- Your employees can access your content anywhere and at any time through the mobile app – and actively participate
Choosing Employee Listening Software
Let appropriate software support you in employee listening. Digital tools like a social intranet offer numerous advantages:
- They are always available to everyone and everywhere. This ensures that you reach all employees and that nobody is excluded, provided you give them access, for example, through a mobile app.
- Digital feedback is easy to track, and you have a complete overview of the most important topics and trends.
- Integrated analysis capabilities allow you to evaluate your survey results directly in the software and analyze interactions in the intranet. This way, you can always draw the right conclusions from the results.
- You can automate your campaigns for better engagemet.
- Using ready-made templates allows you to create employee listening campaigns more quickly. You can also standardize them for comparison and identification of trends.
