How Does Employee Listening Drive Innovation?
Companies that are innovation leaders are changing the world. They are developing new ways to perform business while beating their competitors during looming talks of recession and business shrinkage. Leading Companies are doing this by turning to their most significant asset, their people, and implementing a more effective and welcoming employee experience through employee listening. What’s more people analytics teams in Leading Companies are responsible for/drive employee listening more than non-Leading Companies.
Why Does Employee Listening Drive Innovation
You may have experienced an organisation leader at some point in your career who claimed to know everything. They required that you do as you were told and didn’t offer up any opinion or provide much feedback. Likely you didn’t see many changes or improvements under that mindset, let alone any form of an engagement survey or listening strategy.
Then some leaders did not just listen when their employees spoke up but who also encouraged the practice. These same individuals saw an improvement in the employee lifecycle and their bottom line. Leaders and businesses who drive an employee listening program within their organisation see more significant innovation. This is because, with employee listening, you harness three important benefits.
Improved Diversity and Inclusion Efforts
Asking and listening to all your employees improves diversity and inclusion efforts and shows the business is genuine in its desire to listen. A more extensive range of people with different perspectives feel included and can offer innovative insights. This also implements a more thorough analysis of the employee lifecycle and adds to a more data-driven HR approach allowing for more actionable hypothesis and conclusions.
Developed a Culture of Innovation
By asking for employee insight, a culture of innovation is developed in the organisation that makes employees excited and engaged with having a hand in creating and seeing new things come from the company. This not only increases morale but creates lifetime team members and it is something that Leading Companies continue to take advantage of. It’s no surprise then that Employee Listening is one of the top five areas where people analytics delivers business value.
Real-Time Insight
By employees talking about what is on their minds, insights can be drawn from the current conditions and issues within the workplace, and change can be set in motion. This is key as real action initiated by management and driven by employee feedback is how the business will see tangible results.
But there is work to be done. From research conducted by Ethan Burris and his team, only 13.6% of employees surveyed spoke up on 10 of the 15 topics they asked about. Additionally, 47.1% spoke up about only 5 of the 15 topics. That left a surprising 17.5% that didn’t speak up at all.
What Does Effective Employee Listening Look Like?
Effective employee listening is a company culture that creates a safe environment and encourages employees to speak up. There is psychological safety in the organisation where employees do not fear any repercussions or shaming from pointing out errors the company may be making or steps the business could take to serve the customers better.
Effective employee listening is also backed by a strategy developed by HR leaders and people analytic teams. HR practitioners understand the importance of employee listening and implement the fundamentals when creating their strategy.
Six Steps to Building an Employee Listening Strategy to Drive Innovation
Identify the Problem
Have a clear idea of where innovation needs to be applied, be it a process that needs improvement or a product that could use advancement. Clear insight into the issue will prevent asking the wrong questions.
Communicate with Transparency
By bringing everyone together with the problem and why you are enlisting their help, you communicate with transparency. This gives your employees a reason to contribute while building trust.
Distribute Surveys and Focus Groups Effectively
Ensure the group you reach out to is diverse. Respect their time and utilise technology which can create easy processes for answering questions and providing feedback. This increases the chances of receiving viable solutions.
Collect and Analyse Data
Avoid making first-hand assumptions with the information collected. Be sure you and your team have the skills to evaluate the statistics and insight with a data-driven approach. Real solutions are discovered this way.
Act On the Results
So employees see results from input and are more enticed to provide more ideas and insights and act on the results. As a caution, if you can not act right away, communicate this clearly and wait until you can because if employees see no improvements from their input, they will be less likely to offer insights.
Continue to Measure Results
As with any process, you must measure results and adjust continuously. There will always be room and opportunities for tweaking and making it better.
How Leading Companies are Amplifying Employee Listening
Leading Companies are often the best place to start when considering how innovation is advancing. As we describe in our Insight222 2022 People Analytics Trends report, Leading Companies are those companies or organisations that deliver, measure and communicate value from, have seven key characteristics, and publicly share their experiences of people analytics. For leading companies, it is vital to explore their processes with their employee listening and create a genuinely human interaction through their employee listening strategies.
Microsoft
Microsoft wanted to dive deeper into what their employees needed to be engaged with the company and thrive. They found that more than just yearly surveys and surface analytics of responses were needed. They utilised a platform to reach employees every six months with a more in-depth survey to stay closer to their employees and have actionable insight.
They also raised the bar with their definition of employee engagement, looking at pay, people, perks, pride, and purpose. By doing this, they uncovered what was essential to their employees and created their own definition of what it means to have a thriving workforce.
Uber
Faced with the challenge of creating a “return to office” policy when it was unpopular, Uber turned to employee listening to make the shift smoother.
Before the pandemic, Uber had semi-annual surveys, but they realised that a lot could happen in six months. That was when they decided to begin a continuous employee listening program. From the continuous listening, they learned where caregiver employees were struggling and how more flexibility could assist them.
As RJ Milnor of Uber stated:
“When we think about continuous listening, what I really think about is continuous response. So, it is not just hearing; it is responding.”
They initially learned that employees wanted a hybrid work schedule where they could work from home on scheduled days and work at the office on others. This helped them to keep their connection to their teams strong while still having the freedom to attend to affairs at home. So, from this experience, they continued to listen to employees when the subject of returning to the office came up. From the continued listening, they also kept a focus on when employee perception shifted in what they wanted, and Uber was able to respond to that shift.
Microsoft even applied to improve the results from their employee listening by shortening the length of the survey to eliminate survey fatigue. Additionally, they created an Employee Dashboard where the workforce could see the survey results and communicate with other employees. Plus, the team put together a Global All-Hands where they discuss the results, insights, and what it all means in the meeting.
Employee Listening Determines the Employee Experience
While an effective employee listening strategy takes time and effective communication within HR, it can greatly benefit the business as a whole. For many companies, this is still something of a new endeavour, and it may be a bit daunting to know where to start. If you are curious to discover more about employee listening, we welcome you to sign up for the myHRfuture Academy and enrol in the Introduction to Employee Listening course. The course will enable you to listen to the heartbeat of your business through feedback and how it can create unique business and workplace opportunities that show tangible results. Implementing employee listening will tap into your best resource and build business value as many Leading Companies do. You can build on your innovation by soliciting help from those serving the customer, working with the technology, and handling your multiple accounts that all grow your business.
The myHRfuture Academy hosts an array of data-driven HR, and People Analytics speciality courses. ‘An Introduction to Employee Listening’ is an intermediate course that will enable you to listen to the heartbeat of your business through feedback and how it can create unique business and workplace opportunities that show tangible results.
Our unique mix of training courses, videos, interviews, podcasts, case studies and articles help you build hands-on skills while providing real-life context to what you’ve learnt.
By completing this course, you’ll gain a foundational understanding of Employee Listening and the business impact it can drive for your business.