Now, more than ever, the competition for talent is incredible and increasingly visible within and among organizations. The great resignation has been extensively written about and continues to drain internal talent resulting in a loss of knowledge, experience, and employees who embrace the organizational norms that are the foundation of a company’s culture and reputation. This also contributes to fierce competition for talent to replace employees but also support growth strategies as organizations plan for the future.
Last month we discussed the importance of measuring engagement and this month, we will build on that concept and expand the discussion to create an overarching listening strategy. There are many opportunities beyond engagement surveys to listen to employees and learn about their experiences throughout their tenure tied to milestones and changes in their relationship with the organization. This concept is what is often referred to as a listening strategy enabling organizations to measure the employee experience through a planned approach.
It is critical to take a focused and planned approach to continuously listen to employee feedback to improve programs and validate progress in implementing changes. There are methods available to incorporate important data elements (e.g., department, gender, tenure) and employee sentiment data from various surveys at key milestones to help improve programs, processes, and key performance indicators.
In this month’s blog posting, we will discuss the foundational elements of integrating analytics and sentiment data, why it matters, and what your organization needs to consider when building your listening strategy.
Analytics, Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Data Elements, and Sentiment Data
In our blog post on January 31, 2022, we presented a discussion and defined three types of analytics. This is a foundational element important to understanding what is relevant to an organization and where the organization hopes to improve or innovate. Organizations typically have a set of KPIs that they use to monitor the health of the business and progress over time. There are more standards metrics common across companies and measures that are more industry specific. If you are new to KPIs, there are organizations (such as PWC-Saratoga, INFOR, SHRM) that provide not only definitions of metrics but also can provide benchmark data that helps with perspective. Leveraging external resources can help inform your decisions about what to measure as well as giving you that comparison to your industry.
A data element is how you want to organize your results and is often considered to be the demographic profile of a participant. For example, earlier I referenced some typical data elements such as department, tenure, or gender. These are common and will always have some value to the organization. The options within data elements are where you start to see more uniqueness within organizations such as supporting DEIB initiatives and expanding gender beyond male/female to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ identifications.
The challenge for organizations is to go beyond common, traditional data elements and variables to dig deeper into the trends, patterns, and needs of your organization with new perspectives. For example, DEIB provides an opportunity to expand not only on gender identity but also determine if there are diversity or ethnic data elements that can help you support or attract more unique groups of employees or candidates. Over the last decade, organizations have worked to build on tenure and age data elements by using generation as a derived element (by manipulating or combining more standard data).
The main point is to understand what you want to learn, how you want to analyze the data, and what insights you might be missing from past views into employee engagement and beyond.
Sentiment Data is what is gathered from an employee engagement survey, or any other touchpoint, with questions on a Likert-scale or open-ended questions with thematic analysis. Essentially, sentiment data helps you understand how your employees feel about the various experiences of working at your organization. There are some key factors that can influence the types of analysis available and increasingly, different platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, Gallup, Glint) provide sophisticated artificial intelligence engines to generate sentiment data based on open-ended comments that can be presented on a negative-neutral-positive scale. There are some limitations, internal resource capability or volume of response data, but this is an exciting development that will enable organizations to get more value from each touchpoint. This topic will be discussed a bit later in the post when we discuss what it takes to build a strategy your organization can manage.
Why does it matter?
Understanding your turnover rate is important, viewing turnover by various data elements such as gender, tenure, or department helps build the story and identify patterns and trends. This data alone does not tell you the “why” about turnover. Where organizations can gain actionable insights and learn what changes to make and how to improve programs and processes is by incorporating sentiment data from your employees about the reasons they left.
These employees are leaving, why does their experience matter? This might be an obvious question but when you extend this question to scenarios like a survey about a completed high potential program, a recent promotion to a manager, the impact of an acquisition on current employees, or a 30-day onboarding survey, you can see that while these employees have already been through this experience, they can provide immediate insight to help you continuously improve for the next newly promoted manager or the next acquisition.
Organizations with a mindset of continuous improvement and a commitment to listening can learn a lot from timely, actionable feedback. Identifying the key performance indicators that help you measure the health of your organization and determining which data elements you need to view broad and deep into your entire employee base can help you identify what works for one group but may not be as effective for another.
For example, if your organization regularly provides a level 1 satisfaction survey for all completed learning events (e.g., training, company meetings) they are often anonymous so the results are viewed in summary and not by some of the various data elements previously discussed. Leveraging a common platform and approach to listening can make it easier to include demographic data that would then allow you to view if your latest, expensive investment in an all-day company event was effective for different groups. This enables you to take a more targeted approach to follow up as well as planning for future events that might be more segmented to be inclusive of the feedback from across the organization.
Another important element of a listening strategy that includes a robust demographic profile (data elements) is that it can help you put the most extreme positive or negative feedback into perspective. It is easy to fall into a pattern of focusing on the negative feedback but when you add in a demographic viewpoint that helps you isolate this feedback to employees from a certain department, generation, or gender then it becomes more viable to look at how smaller changes, such as in messaging, might help improve the perception of the experience. This more focused view of your data will help you focus your efforts on what the organization can change (with reasonable investments and resources) AND what you want to or are willing to change with a bigger effort.
Let’s look at how adding new data elements and sentiment data can matter to how you use different key performance indicators. Sales performance is always highly visible and monitored closely. But how many organizations view sales performance through a window of feedback that includes intent to stay responses across generation, tenure, or gender? What if you also added in viewing engagement scores by sales performance? Would it be interesting to know if your most highly engaged sales team members are your highest performers? If your organization takes a quarterly pulse survey monitoring intent to stay and engagement, compare that to sales performance to view trends. Maybe poor performance over a quarter means so much more than a perceived lack of effort.
Being able to view results through various filters and data elements provides valuable insight for building targeted change actions. It is equally as important to view overall trends and comparisons to leverage the experiences and share key learnings. If the marketing department continuously has high ratings and more positive sentiment responses to DEIB questions (starting with onboarding, through pulse surveys, and a specific DEI survey) then maybe they are doing something non-traditional to boost their results. The actions might be purposeful or less obvious, for example maybe they do something during the recruiting process that is resulting in better results. By providing data with various demographic data views, you can identify highs and lows and incorporate that information into your change planning by involving those groups in the solutions.
Making the Investment
Making a commitment to assessing, measuring, and monitoring your employee experience requires an investment. This investment includes a financial commitment that often takes center stage but more importantly also takes a commitment to listen and act which means investing in the resources and time required to deliver on your commitments.
To get started, we recommend an honest reflection on these six considerations.
- Understand your culture and what the organization is prepared to hear and act on
- Anonymous vs. confidential – gathering input that people trust
- Identify resources
- Outline your cadence for employee feedback (short and long-term)
- Commit to educate leaders to drive data insights
- Determine your communication, sharing, and action planning approach
First, do you have a common understanding of your culture? Are employees open and do they have any opportunities to provide input on the organization? Regardless of the type of opportunity, is there an expectation that leaders want and value input from across the organization? If yes, it is a bit easier to get started and if the answer is no or you simply do not know then it is even more important to think about what it will take to implement a listening strategy that ties how you measure results to how employees experience working for the organization. Part of the commitment is acknowledging where you are today and what you are prepared to hear and the extent to which you are committed to act. Experienced practitioners can help you identify where you are now through a series of interviews, activities, and even short surveys.
A secondary factor tied to your culture is about trust. Surveys can be delivered anonymously where no demographic data is attached to responses at all or positioned as confidential where demographic data is attached to each response however the name of the respondent is not attached to the results with any visibility outside of key administrators of your listening strategy. As already expressed, the value of being able to filter and view results using your desired demographic profile is the goal and with appropriate preparation and communication, this is achievable regardless of your starting point.
Anonymous surveys can be the right method for some listening touchpoints even in a trusting organization and may be necessary to start with more inexperienced organizations or those with known issues around distrust. The downside of completely anonymous surveys is the inability to isolate where there are red flags or successes across the organization. The value is that if you want to get started with high participation and the only option is complete anonymity then this could be considered but we recommend engaging the right resources to support you, including people and systems.
What resources are needed to implement a listening strategy that aligns analytics with sentiment data? There is a financial investment for survey administration and licensing that can vary depending on the provider. This is the most obvious expense to consider but not the only investment. Your organization will need to identify whether you have the internal expertise to help you design and develop your listening strategy as well as build and manage the technical elements of the survey and related integrations with your HCM system. Many consulting firms can provide this type of support but you will want to consider whether it makes more sense to bring in or develop employees with this experience and the related skills. A long-term listening strategy takes time and this decision around the right resources is key at the outset of the program design.
Time is an additional investment to consider. An annual engagement survey takes time to build, administer, analyze data, communicate results, develop action plans, and then scope and implement program changes based on the feedback received. Each element takes time and when you add more touchpoints this effort multiplies.
This leads to another point to consider and that is related to the cadence of your listening strategy. Tactically, this means identifying all the potential touchpoints within your employee lifecycle starting from candidate experience to onboarding, various changes in employee status (e.g., promotion, leave of absence), common employee events (such as performance management), and how often you want to measure employee engagement through an annual survey or more frequently as research indicates employees’ desire. This activity is an element of the investment and a phased approach is highly feasible, allowing you to plan for the financial and resource needs.
The ongoing cadence must include continuous monitoring of longer-term impact of changes that are implemented. This becomes evident as you resurvey on the same questions over time to identify if process and program changes are having the desired impact. The value of many of the survey platforms available today is that you can incorporate data from multiple surveys into one dashboard and use filters and other features to model the comparisons and ensure you are realizing the expected improvement from implemented changes.
As referenced in September’s blog post about employee engagement, it is also critical to have leadership support. This effort requires across the board visibility and support and cannot be positioned as just another HR program. While the effort may sit within your Human Resources department, the entire organization has a role.
Gaining leadership buy-in should begin early in the process to ensure you get the support needed for implementing a listening strategy. The support is in the form of participation (completing surveys) and in leading the effort to communicate results. Leaders will need to be visible and knowledgeable and investing in their education about how to use analytics and sentiment data will enhance their comfort level in being advocates for listening. Involve leaders through communication and provide opportunities to learn how each survey is implemented and how to use the related reporting or dashboards provided.
In addition, leaders must see the importance of being a champion of change. This is not only openness to using the results to influence change but driving the identified changes to improve the organization.
Leaders should understand the concepts of engagement and intent to stay, as well as knowing the terminology of the reporting (how the data is presented, how to filter or alter the data, what is the difference between anonymous and confidential). As your leadership team sees listening to employees as part of their role then it becomes part of the norms of the organization and woven into your culture.
Lastly, there is significant value in integrating your analytics and key performance indicators with insights gathered from employee sentiment data. BUT, if you don’t share the results and act on what you learned, you may as well not do anything. Employees will lose trust if you listen and don’t act. It is important to consider this in building your listening strategy and roadmap as it takes commitment, communication, and involvement from the entire organization. You will need to build a communication plan that includes defining the purpose of your listening strategy, how you will use employee feedback and key performance indicators together to help pinpoint where you need to make changes, and outline how you will involve employees in reviewing data and crafting improvement plans.
Measuring your employee experience is an investment that can yield results and work to help you attract new talent, keep your existing knowledge and talent, and shape the future you desire. According to a research study (State of Employee Listening in 2022) conducted by Perceptyx, “Organizations that regularly listen to – and act on – employee feedback are three times as likely to meet or exceed their financial targets as those that don’t. And they are ten times as likely to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction and retention.” It is worth it so be prepared for the investment to ensure you have the greatest likelihood of success.
Perceptyx (April, 2022). Employers That Act on Worker Feedback Are 3x as Likely to Hit Financial Targets. GlobeNewswire. Retrieved from https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/04/26/2429191/0/en/Employers-That-Act-on-Worker-Feedback-Are-3x-as-Likely-to-Hit-Financial-Targets.html