Are your employee listening results being listened to by the right people?
Over the years, I’ve worked with many organisations who regularly invest significant time and resources into employee listening, but have very little to show for their efforts.
The typical employee listening process goes as follows….
People and Culture teams will launch an engagement survey, results will be shared with leaders, vague commitments will be made by leaders to take action, then leaders will return to BAU and the employee experience will slowly fall down the list of priorities until it's eventually time to survey again.
There are a number of reasons why this can happen, but the critical one is…
Engagement survey results don’t speak to what really keeps leaders up at night
That’s not to say there aren’t critical and valuable insights for leaders within the results of an engagement survey. But often those insights get lost in a sea of seemingly arbitrary scores and superficial anecdotes (e.g “our engagement score is XX which puts us in the XXth percentile”) which fail to link the results to the real world business outcomes that leaders are most interested in.
Additionally, it is common for engagement surveys to predominantly measure the drivers of talent attraction and retention. Leaning on “what’s in it for me?” questions, at the expense of “what’s in it for the organisation?” questions.
While attracting and retaining talent is undoubtedly important, unless you’re in an industry with an extremely competitive labour market, it’s likely that your senior leaders are willing to accept being a “good enough place to work”.
In my experience, senior leaders care foremost about the execution of their business strategy - which is why survey questions that speak to the drivers of strategic execution are going to be far more interesting to them.
The good news is there are some simple changes you can make to your employee listening strategy to unlock the buy-in you need from senior leaders to transform the employee experience. Here are four key changes you can start with right away:
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Redesign your survey questions to make sure you’re also measuring the aspects of your employee experience that are most important for delivering on your organisation's strategy, not just those that are about creating a great place to work.
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Avoid too many questions that capture broad themes that are hard to interpret and directly act on. Specific questions drive accountability by making it clear what action is required and who is responsible for taking action.
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Find out what data sources you have in your organisation that would allow you to better understand the aspects of the employee experience that are most important to leaders (e.g. customer satisfaction scores, productivity metrics, no. of safety incidents, etc).
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Make sure you are presenting employee experience data in a way that is vivid, memorable, and clearly articulates the ‘so what’ for leaders.
Effective employee listening is the crucial first step towards creating meaningful change to the employee experience. It is both an art and a science that requires significant commitment to do effectively - but the organisations who do it well are able to unlock enormous competitive advantage through their people.
If you’d like to hear more about We Are Unity’s approach to employee listening, we’d love to chat. Feel free to reach out to joel@weareunity.com to set up a time.
Dr Joel Davies is an Organisational Psychologist and Culture Lead at We Are Unity – working with leading Australian organisations to level up their employee listening strategy and shape their culture to drive high performance.