During the Covid-19 pandemic, the dialogue between employee and organisation is easily a one way ticket, with organisations sending a lot of information and guidelines to its remotely working employees. Listening to what your employees think of the current decisions and what they actually need, will help organisations tremendously in continuing their business. A sound understanding of employee needs improves wellbeing and employee experience.

This situation is new and challenging for all. In the last weeks, we have gained several insights how to create a healthy balance between sending information, listening to employees and making fast improvements based on employee feedback. We share 7 insights because more organisations and their employees may benefit from this.

Insight 1: Set up interventions based on employee feedback

In week one of the Covid-19 lockdown, we quickly set up a formal communication loop between the organisation and employees to gather employee feedback. We realised that the way we live, interact and work would change significantly for the foreseeable future. In the first week of lockdown, we decided to gather feedback around how employees valued the response of the organisation on the crisis and on how the organisation could support employees even better. Within 24 hours, the gathered feedback was converted into insights and advice for crisis teams to design new interventions. We still gather feedback on a weekly base to understand employees needs and improve interventions.

Insight 2: Show that you act on feedback via the Covid-19 communication loop

By analysing the data and converting it into needs and actions, we quickly distribute the actions among the different crisis teams. Central to our employee listening efforts is to always give the results and corresponding actions back to the employees. We communicate the insights from our analysis weekly within the organisation using the formal Covid-19 communication. In this way, employees see that the leaders within the organisation are listening to them and the utmost is done to help the workforce.

Insight 3: Think from an employee perspective, not from departmental silos

Although we, as a People Analytics department, collect and analyse the feedback, we do realise that employee experience is beyond merely HR topics. The overall employee wellbeing and experienced support is what is important. Areas delivering support range from HR to Office Facilities to IT.  Therefore, the information we gather is distributed to and used by a broad range of teams, varying from crisis teams to IT and Facilities to wellbeing teams. By being in contact with these departments, we work towards a common purpose in a holistic, employee centred way. This also prevents that every department conducts their own research and employees are bombarded with survey requests.

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Insight 4: Hypothesise about actions before asking feedback

Sending out surveys periodically will sometimes evoke the fear of survey fatigue. Applying a sampling strategy and be strict in the amount of questions are strategies that help in minimising the chance employees experience survey fatigue. At least as important, we hypothesise for each topic we gather feedback on what the action will be the organisation can take, and who will take it. In this way, we make sure we only gather feedback on topics the organisation is willing to act upon. Lack of follow up is a common cause for survey fatigue.

Insight 5: Be aware of emerging trends

Working remotely in week 1 is different than working remotely in week 7. Our survey results initially indicated that employees needed support with topics like home office set-up and finding a new balance between private and work life. Interventions were rapidly set up and we checked if the actions worked by monitoring which topics arose or disappeared. External circumstances, for instance schools closing, national policies that affects your company’s clients or other changing lock-down measures, will influence employee needs as well. By tracking topics and monitoring if topics change, we obtain an understanding if our interventions have an effect on the needs of our employees. It also gives you the opportunity to respond to concerns or questions and reduce anxiety among employees. By identifying upcoming topics, we create a vivid understanding of new, emerging needs. In this way, we constantly listen, create insights and act upon those to attend to the needs of employees that are important in that specific moment in time.

Insight 6: Don’t be shy to inquire about corporate values

Our questions are clearly linked to our HR and company strategy and values. Especially now, strategy and corporate values are not a luxury but part of the identity and purpose that employees can connect with. For instance, for us as a cooperative, it is important that employees feel enabled to make a contribution to society. One of our questions specifically asks employees if they still see opportunities to do so during these times. It helps the organization to know whether these expected behaviours are disrupted or not and if support is needed.

Insight 7: Use the opportunity to look ahead

Open text analysis reveals a lot about what employees appreciate in this situation and gives glimpses of what we should keep in the future. In our case, many employees see opportunities in remote working when this situation is over. This is not exclusively about working from home, but also about having virtual meetings. Although the current situation is not over yet, it is never too early to learn and gather insights about what we should change and keep once we are all back to normal, as long as you manage expectations in the way you ask it.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alexandra Keunen, Tertia Wiedenhof and Martijn Wiertz work at the Global People Analytics Department of Rabobank in the Netherlands. The goal of their team is to use the insights of People Analytics research firstly and fore mostly to help employees and teams to thrive and grow.