Capturing employees’ needs and sentiment amid rapidly changing workplace realities has become more important than ever. Many organizations have well-worn tools, such as annual surveys, but are looking for ways to get more frequent, ongoing insights.
For more than three years, our People Analytics & Measurement team has cultivated a continuous-listening capability, an online survey that we call “Pulse”. We have used the insights it generates to shape more than 300 different initiatives—everything from parental leave to team health to new joiners’ onboarding experience to our feedback tools. It has evolved into a central pillar of our firm’s overall employee engagement strategy.
Of course, the most significant challenge for any employee listening program is sustaining high engagement. If we are listening and no colleagues are talking, how valuable could the insights be? For our program, we have managed to achieve ongoing participation levels that have far surpassed our expectations. Pulse has become an established internal brand, with a majority of colleagues regularly providing input. And more than 500 leaders regularly utilize our self-serve tools and leverage our data-driven insights to support localized strategic decisions. From global leaders to local offices, most teams integrate colleagues’ input in their core decision-making processes.
To keep a listening channel sufficiently well stocked with timely insights, we need colleagues who are willing to share their candid input over time. To ensure that they share (and continue sharing), they need to see that leaders are paying attention to what they are saying—and taking action. This challenge is made harder by the often well-founded concern of some employees that their feedback will end up in a “black hole.” And from a leader’s perspective, too much data can be overwhelming—inviting so much slicing and parsing that there is no time to act before a new wave of information comes crashing down.
So the work behind keeping engagement high involves making it easy and meaningful for employees to participate, and straightforward for leaders to listen and act. Here are some of the ways we do this.
Build a ‘habit of transparency’ in the way we share results with colleagues
In our effort to establish a partnership with all colleagues, we’ve adopted a “habit of transparency” and continuously look for innovative ways to share results while protecting colleagues’ anonymity (to ensure anonymity, results are reported only in the aggregate, and only for groups or teams with at least ten responses). The following are a few of the ways we do this.
Firm-wide readouts: Each time we ask employees for further input through Pulse, we share the prior week’s results for all colleagues to access and see that we are neither hiding nor shying away from their answers—even when they are less than rosy. We also regularly publish articles in our firmwide news blog highlighting patterns in recent results and examples of how different leaders have used those insights to shape initiatives and make changes in their organizations, including new support for inclusive teams, on-the-job apprenticeship, and mental health and wellness.
Community dialogues: Leaders across our organization have different forums and formats they use to engage their team members on a range of topics. We are making it easier for them to incorporate discussions about their Pulse results by bringing them together on an internal discussion board to exchange ideas and examples of how they are shaping constructive discussions about Pulse findings as well as best practices for addressing some of the most common issues that arise.
Individualized insights and support: We recently launched a “colleague experience portal” where individuals can access their responses over time and monitor important metrics for their peer groups. Early user feedback has been positive, with colleagues telling us they get a lot of value out of being able to examine their own experience over time relative to their and other cohorts.
Provide ‘care packages’ to help leaders focus their attention on what matters most
While we routinely share firmwide trends, leaders need to get local and group insights in a timely manner without getting overwhelmed. When we see material changes or patterns in a population, our team develops custom reports that highlight specific areas of concern or achievements to celebrate. These targeted “care packages” help leaders know where to focus and take action in real time.
We also use advanced analytics techniques to surface hard-to-spot trends. For example, we use natural language processing to quantify the depth of interest in different topics, based on colleagues’ free-text responses, as well as to understand which populations are engaging in those topics most. Being able to get a data-driven understanding of the weight of different themes on colleagues’ minds (including changes over time) often yields unexpected and more actionable insights for leaders.
Finally, we’ve surfaced a “help button” for every colleague who is feeling “bad” or “terrible” in a given survey, offering to share their name with a trained firm professional who will reach out to help support the individual in a variety of ways. Since its inception, our HR leaders and ombuds have contacted more than 3,100 colleagues who have pushed the button, enabling extremely personalized and caring support in the moments when colleagues have needed it most.
As organizations build and mature their employee listening strategies, keeping engagement high will be an increasingly essential (and difficult) piece of the puzzle. But we have found that it is well worth the investment. By focusing on transparency, action, and individualized support where needed, we have gathered more than three years (and counting) of longitudinal sentiment data that informs all of our critical talent decisions. We hope these insights from our own experience have been helpful and look forward to connecting with others who are exploring new ways to make employee listening a source of insight and continuous improvement.