Episode 93: How to Understand the Business Impact of Employee Experience (Interview with Melissa Arronte)
This week’s podcast guest is Melissa Arronte, Employee Experience Practice Lead at Medallia. Melissa started her career in people analytics before the term really even existed and her career has taken her on a fascinating journey where she has become a bonafide expert in employee surveys and continuous listening, two topics that we cover extensively throughout this episode.
Throughout this episode Melissa and I discuss:
The state of employee experience today
How to measure the business impact of employee experience and the future of the field
The technology buying journey for employee experience leaders
Continuous listening in the workplace, the business value, the key challenges and the data sources available beyond employee surveys
Support for this podcast comes from Medallia. You can learn more by visiting https://www.medallia.com/employee-experience/.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Melissa Arronte, Employee Experience Practice Leader at Medallia, to the Digital HR Leaders Podcast. It is great to have you on the show, Melissa. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and work?
Melissa Arronte: Sure, I would be glad to thank you, David. I am so excited to be here, as I am a fan of yours. I read your monthly newsletter with great interest. So thank you for having me. As we mentioned, I am from Medallia. I have been with Medallia a little over two years now and prior to joining, I had been a customer of Medallia.
I have been in people analytics for about 15 years. I was head of people analytics at Liberty Mutual Insurance and then Citizens Bank. And while at the bank, I moved into customer experience so I could bring employee and customer data together. And that was where I met Medallia, and we implemented over 15 programs in employee and customer experience, by programs I mean surveys, and we will talk a little bit about that. I think the last point is I have a PhD, which I have found very valuable in my current job, as well as my prior jobs.
David Green: Thank you, firstly, for the kind words, Melissa. I am glad that someone reads those monthly updates, so that's really cool. I am interested actually, because you have had extensive experience as a practitioner and actually have been in the people analytics field for a long time. 15 years is a long time in people analytics because there weren't that many companies doing people analytics 15 years ago. I am just wondering how that experience, and then of course at Citizens working on the customer experience side, how that has helped you in your current role at Medallia, and helped Medallia as well?
Melissa Arronte: Thank you. So it is interesting when you say, 15 years is a long time. This is what I always wanted to do, but I didn't know it was called people analytics, I used to call it internal research. So when I finished my PhD, I was looking for a job like this, but nobody was looking for me.
So I first started doing compensation analysis with Towers Perrin at the time and after many compensation jobs, one day I saw a job opening looking for someone with a degree in industrial relations who can do analytics. And I don't even think that is what we called it back then, it might have just been called prediction or regression or something. And that is how it started, that long ago. But it has been immensely helpful working at Medallia, to have the background in people analytics, because when we talk about survey research, and we do so much more than just surveys at Medallia, we also bring in what we call signals, which to any other people analytics person would mean just other pieces of data to better understand the employee experience. But what has been so helpful is to have done that kind of research in my past. Often we will get asked about, how can you better understand inclusion? We actually did that for years, bringing all sorts of data together. We were doing it very manually and it might take us six months, with a small team of people and several different software packages because everything was dispersed, but we did do that kind of work.
Now so much is automated in platforms like Medallia, so being able to share how hard it was, but also the findings and how we can build some of that out in Medallia today, has been immensely helpful.
David Green: It is interesting, isn't it, because obviously you said you spent some time at Citizens in customer experience, and I know Medallia came from customer experience and broadened into employee experience. And I think it is probably fair to say that employee experience as a concept is a few years behind customer experience. So I guess Medallia has able to bring up a fair amount of experience from the CX world into the EX world.
Obviously in the last two years, there has been so much more alliance on organisations around employee experience and listening, and thank God it has been at the forefront of many organisations mind. From someone that is working in that field I would love to understand, from your perspective, how has the typical organisation's approach to EX changed in the last year since the start of the pandemic?
Melissa Arronte: Yeah. I love how you mentioned the roots of Medallia being in customer experience and how now, people have so much focus on employee experience, we feel really at an advantage at Medallia because we are able to bring all those practices forward that we have used in customer, for so long.
If you think about something simple, like what Medallia first set out to do, and successfully did, more than 20 years ago, was understand the customer journey across all the touch points. Which is much harder to do actually then the employee side. Having done both it is much easier to get data about employees. They are a captive audience and we know so much about them, that is easily accessible. Customers, it is so hard and especially the people we want to be customers, who come into our website or into our store and don't purchase and leave, it is almost impossible to get information about them.
So we are at a real advantage in EX, so I believe we should be able to fly right past CX by using many of the techniques that they have used but we have better access to data, we can do things faster, our managers, the people who want to take action are right here under our control. It is easy to reach employees, much harder to reach customers. So we have such an opportunity. When I was running people analytics, I would borrow ideas that I would see in the customer surveys I would participate in. I participate in every survey I get, because it is always a chance to learn, usually how a survey shouldn't be done, but sometimes you learn how a survey could be done. One of my experiences, I will call out as Sweetgreen. I don’t know if you get Sweetgreen, if you have that, but they create amazing salads and if you call their contact centre you get a survey from a company called Stella. Which is actually a recent Medallia acquisition. And they have the most beautiful, elegant, surveys I had ever seen and I was copying them years ago, in employee experience, and then came to Medallia and found them here.
David Green: Small world, isn't it. So looking at the employee experience perspective now then, how has a typical organisation's approach to employee experience changed, since the pandemic started two years ago?
Melissa Arronte: So when you ask about how companies are changing, there are some really fascinating ways and I am excited to see.
One, is that I see companies more interested in reaching employees in different ways than the traditional kiosk and an email survey. And there are so many issues, and I don't need to go into them, that we all know when we ask employees to participate in an annual engagement survey, for example, with a kiosk, with privacy and all the other complications that come with it.
Allowing employees to complete a survey with something as old fashioned as a QR code and then they can quickly do it on their phone, and making the survey shorter. Or a lot of times we will use what we call a digital survey, which means we put a survey in something like their clock in clock out system. So if you can imagine an employee clocks in, it could be on their cell phone or it could be in something as they walk in, or it could be multiple I-pads, or it could be in their point of sale system. There are so many different ways that companies interact with their employees digitally and that gives us an easy opportunity to survey them. But these aren't 60 question surveys, they might be two, maybe three questions. Another way to make it faster and more accessible for employees is by letting them have more freedom to just say what they want to say, fewer structured questions, more just user voice, or even video, so that you can quickly record your response and then we can analyse it on the back end.
So we are seeing many more companies adopting that kind of approach, of meeting employees where they are instead of having employees chase an email somewhere, or line up to use a kiosk.
Another thing that we are seeing is getting employees involved in the action planning. So traditionally there would be an action planning library, that would help get managers inspired.
I am really interested in writing this article about the middle managers and the pressure that is put on them, that is a little bit of an aside, but this is one more place where we put so much pressure on managers and not too much support for them. Senior leaders say, oh, we got negative scores on the survey. The managers need to do something about it.
And employees are looking up and saying, I gave you my feedback or my complaints, I need you to do something about it.
Why is it all put on the managers? Together as a team we can solve for it, that is what we do every day in the work we do, we come together as a team or manager and the team members, and we figure out how we are going to better serve our customers or solve a system problem. Let's do that with employee experience too and I am excited to see some companies working on that. So those are a couple of examples of how I am seeing things change.
David Green: Do you think that it has been partly driven by this desire to understand, for employees, how they feel on a more continuous basis, partly because we have been in this health crisis? I know companies were starting to ask their employees questions more often and with shorter, as you said 1 or 2 questions rather than 60 questions, every year and stuff like that. But has it changed or has it been catalysed a little bit by the pandemic?
Melissa Arronte: I definitely think so because employees can tell us what is happening, what they are anticipating, what they can see that is happening with customers. We call it the untapped power of people and to be able to ask employees, they will tell you the problems that are coming up.
We had a customer working with us, on both employee and customers, at the very beginning of the pandemic. It happened to be a bank in the UK. They asked both customers and employees about, how do we come together in the branches? It was at the beginning of COVID when we hadn’t figured out the plexiglass and everything, and they both had really good insight, the employees and customers, and were able to bring that information together to design an in-branch experience where both felt comfortable.
So employees can give us a lot of good information about what is coming, or what customers are experiencing, or explain to us the problems customers are having. When a customer just says, I am unhappy, or the line is long, or I'm leaving, or I'm frustrated. They don't know the processes and systems behind it, but employees can tell us that.
David Green: Yes, otherwise you are only really getting one side of the story and you need both sides to create a better experience for both.
Melissa Arronte: And to really understand the root cause, often employees know. Employees will even say, and we give them an opportunity to provide feedback about their own experience, they are so dedicated to their customers that they use that opportunity to talk about customer problems because they are engaged and they want to solve for them. Let's use that. Let's take that un-tapped power and help use it to make the experience better for both. Because that is what our employees came to work for, to serve their customer, to make a difference, to have an impact on the lives of their customers.
David Green: And I think one of the other things you mentioned, and I would love to develop it further, people still traditionally view surveys as lots of questions. A scale of 1-5 or 1-7, depending on the methodology used. You talked about video, you talked about open questions, and obviously now we have the technology that we can analyse both voice and words, and we can pull out much deeper insights from that than maybe we can from the way people might respond to a 1-5 survey where you have to mark it. I guess you get insight from both, but presumably you get deeper insights from text and from video?
Melissa Arronte: You definitely do. After having run engagement survey for over nine years, I had 60 plus questions, and that was after I had reduced it from 80, and I was excited that I got it down to 60 back then. But what I always found is that when doing our analytics, we got more insight from the text in the comments than we did from the close ended questions. Because the questions are just our hypothesis but what employees have to tell us, there is a whole universe of things that they could tell us and our hypothesis are only a small subset.
I now put my effort into the backend and analysing the feedback from the employees. So rather than spending so much time on survey design, I design two or three good questions and then use the natural language processing, and other forms of text analytics on the backend, to really understand what employees are saying and how that is related to their behaviour, turnover, productivity, sales performance.
David Green: So that is one of the misnomers, perhaps, about using surveys as part of understanding employee experience and improving products.
What are the other things that people commonly get wrong about employee experience?
Melissa Arronte: I don't know if they are wrong. I just think that our opportunity to think about how to get employee feedback is really evolving. So we used to think that a really high response rate, and some people may still think this, is really important. I certainly used to think that and took a lot of pride in the fact that we had typically an 87% response rate on our engagement survey and I have seen companies with as high as 95%, and that if it was too low, it wasn't healthy.
But we were only serving them once a year and we spent three weeks or a month encouraging them with all kinds of enticements to fill it out. I don't know that we were always getting honest feedback.
And so I think, the opportunity that we could drop the idea that we need a high response rate and allow employees to respond when they have feedback, instead of one particular month that we decide to drop the survey, because at the moment we drop the survey any employee is experiencing a myriad of things, right? Maybe they have just had turnover on their team, or their manager just left, or a new process was just put in, or they are behind in a project. There is a million things that they could be focused on and now suddenly we are asking them about 60 different things and they have to stop and answer those things at that moment.
But, give them the power to provide the feedback when they have it, here is the impact to me and my team when we have turnover, here is how hard it has been for me when my manager has changed, or the system just changed and I have an idea about how it can be better. But not everyone is going to respond at the same time. And so we are going to have much lower response rates, but we have seen great response rates in what we call, continuous understanding programs. Just allowing employees to provide feedback at any time. It can be 20, 25%, but if you have a good handful of employees raising an issue or suggesting an idea, it seems worth pursuing. We don't need 90% of the population to tell us.
David Green: One of the other misnomers that I hear from a lot of practitioners, is when they want to move to more frequent surveys or more frequent opportunities for employees to be able to provide feedback, the message that comes back sometimes from people in HR, sometimes people in the business, is survey fatigue. I would love to hear your views on survey fatigue. Is it more that what frustrates employees is when there is no actions taken or no communication, less than survey fatigue? I would love to hear your views.
Melissa Arronte: I think you are exactly right, David. I think that is often what we say. It is not that people are tired of being asked how they feel, they are tired of being asked but then no action being taken. But myself, I ran an always on at Citizens, for over five years and it continues to run today. And those employees are not tired of responding because that data was used. It was used for senior leaders to make decisions and it was also used locally in the branches, where the teams could come together on their weekly huddle and use that as some of the input, the employee feedback, the customer feedback, the sales. All the pieces come together to make good decisions.
It is hard to make decisions about employee experience without information and our managers are doing that every day. If they can bring their team together and make the employees part of it, it just helps in problem solving. It helps us know if something we think is going on, that is typically anecdotal, we heard in the hallway or there is a rumour, let's find out in the survey. If it is running all the time, just ask your employees. Everybody tell us how that new system is working? Now we have data and we can all talk about it and make a decision.
David Green: Yeah and I mean if you don't ask employees, how do you know what is going on and how can you then improve things? Or if things are good, how would you know? So yes, really important.
That kind of leads into the next question, who in the organisation owns, or should own, employee experience?
Melissa Arronte: Yeah, that is a great question. And it is interesting, being at Medallia, seeing more and more CX practitioners wanting to own EX because it is so influential and in some industries, it is the main driver of customer experience. Because it is so much more than the product, the service, and the whole environment, the vibe, the way it feels to interact with this brand. So I am seeing it more and more in customer experience and I think it is because, too often HR teams can be too tied to the ways we used to do things. Which provided us so much great insight, but now we have an opportunity to do more, and better, and get more insight than just what we have done in the past. I do see employee experience teams coming up, which is exciting to see. Most often employee experience is in the HR organisation, maybe in a people analytics team, or organisation design team. Sometimes I see it in operations. Actually, a number of our customers, it is an operations group who are supporting the frontline, and they need information in order to better support the frontline, and so they are getting feedback on systems and processes.
We see IT sometimes, as a customer, wanting to understand the employee experience with all the systems they use.
So it is not in any one place. No one has really figured out the one central place it should be, and it should be owned by everyone as arguably everyone in the company has input on the employee experience. But often we are prioritising something else instead.
David Green: And I suppose wherever it is owned, whether it is in HR, if it is in operations, whether it is in IT, it is all about making sure that you link everything together. Employee experience is essentially in every touch point that you have, within the organisation, which could be with your manager in whichever function you are working with, obviously we experienced things from IT, we experience things from our estates when we actually are in the office, which obviously isn't often at the moment. We experience certain things from HR obviously, and other support functions as well.
So it is making sure that you link all that together, that you listen, and that you take action at the necessary place in the organisation.
Melissa Arronte: And I think the struggle there for people is, how do you link it? We have all these different experiences coming from all these support groups in the company and all these different, hundreds or thousands of managers, how do we link it? My suggestion is the way we link it is, we look at our brand, which is our promise to our customers. So having worked for a bank, a promise from a bank is typically something about, we respect you, or you can trust us. So there is some sort of a value or an emotion or something that we are trying to deliver. We have worked with a jewellery store and it was about making people feel special. And a beauty retailer about making people feel beautiful. But if we don't make employees feel that same way, for example, in the bank, if we are not treating our employees with trust, telling them that they can't refund a customer when we know there has been an error on the bank side. The regulatory agencies told us we must refund them in 12 days. So we refund them in 12 days. But we might know right away that it was our error and we could refund it now, but banks don't have to because the regulations only said 12. So if we had prioritised trusting our customers and trusting our employees, and that was what we looked at across all of the touch points, we wouldn’t need any customer experience training because employees would treat customers just as they are treated internally, and in this example, with trust.
I think that is how you bring it together and I think that is the key. What is it that our brand represents and how do we deliver that, not just to our customers, but to our employees?
David Green: Yes. That is really powerful. I think, that link is so important. Let's talk a little bit about the technology buying journey for getting into employee experience. Now, most of our listeners are HR professionals, some of them are leaders, what advice would you give to them as they assess vendors or technologies that will help them to do employee experience well?
Melissa Arronte: I see so many companies coming to us and they are very focused on what their current platform or vendor is not providing to them and so they can ask us some really detailed questions about this process or this pain point, but you are looking at a whole new platform, you are talking to all new vendors who may have a completely new way of thinking, but they are still focused on solving the problems they have today with their current system. And so I would suggest letting go of that and looking at what the whole new process can be. I think it can open you up to completely new ideas and free you up from those constraints of, we couldn't get this certain type of report, or we couldn't get….. Your whole new system may have none of that. It may not send out reports, you may just have dashboards. You may have just an app, it could be so different. The other thing of course, any software vendor will tell you, it is about partnership. You need to make sure that you are assessing the quality of people that you are going to work with and how they support every vendor. Customer relationship is going to have a bumpy time at some point, somewhere, there will be a miscommunication, it is how they respond to it. It is not that there is zero, it is how they respond.
And then the last would be looking to the future, are they innovating in ways that are consistent with your vision? So that when you are able to move forward with something new, in a year or two years from now, that they already have it in place, that you are not on the bleeding edge, as they say, it is already set up for you to use.
Those would be my key points.
David Green: I think because it is challenging for HR professionals, HR leaders, whoever is involved in that process, because there are a lot of vendors out there and as you said, it is not like you all do the same thing. So focus on the vision, or focus on the outcomes that you are trying to achieve, and pick the right partner to help you to do that. But yeah, as you said, if you bring new technology in, lets even take it outside the EX experience, if you bring new technology in, there is a chance to change the processes that will make it even better. Can you share some examples of organisations that, you think, are approaching employee experience particularly well? I think you have done some research on this recently, at Medallia.
Melissa Arronte: Yeah. So many great examples. I will just pick a couple. One is a hotel chain, and it isn't even one of the largest hotel chains, but their housekeepers are rarely surveyed. They were surveyed once every other year and they had to use a translator because their first language was not English. So they were in a focus group, it wasn't even the ability to privately provide your feedback and your ideas. But what an incredibly important population in the hotel, arguably who knows more about what is happening and what could be improved, than the housekeepers who really see the detail of the experience their guests have had.
So they empowered them to provide their feedback and ideas in the flow of their work, by each time they checked in to get their schedule for the day, they could answer a question and then with their voice, just record how things are for them. Ideas that they have. Ways things could be improved. So again, talking about the un-tapped power, we hear so many stories about different companies like Subway. The $5 foot-long came from an employee, a very determined employee who got the idea through but how many of those have we missed. And by being able to empower them to provide that feedback, in their native language and have it translated to English for executives to read, they can gather that feedback and quickly make improvements. And often cost savings and improving the experience for their customers. Another example I will give is, many of our customers are looking to, as I mentioned, improve customer experience through employee experience. So giving employees the opportunity to provide an idea, anytime they complete a transaction with a customer. So we are not pinging them and asking them, how was that transaction? How was that transaction? We know some of the webinars tools, each time you finish a webinar, they ask you how it was and you just stop answering. But for you to have a little button that is always sitting there that gives you the opportunity to click it and say, I had an idea this time, or actually this transaction with this customer was really hard, well here is a way things could be better.
It just makes it easy at that moment. I have an idea, it takes me seconds, click the button, type it in, and back to work again. So you don't lose the idea.
So we have a customer doing that in a handheld point of sale solution that they use. Their retail employees can check out a customer, as well as check the inventory, and provide ideas, all in their little handheld device that each retail employee carries in the store.
David Green: I mean both of those sound absolutely brilliant. At the end of the day you are soliciting ideas out of your employees to help improve the experience for your customers, this makes a lot of sense.
Obviously what you want is honest feedback, so again, what would you recommend that companies do to build that trust with the employees, that you want that honest feedback and they won’t be penalised for it or it won't be attributed to an individual?
Melissa Arronte: So you won't be surprised at my answer, it starts from the top. Is our leadership saying that I better get all greens or we better hit all our goals, or are they saying, our goal here is to understand where we need to improve. It is not a bad thing to find a place to improve, unless you don't improve it.
Our goal is to find where we can continually get better and that message from leadership of continuous improvement, because we want to improve too as employees, we want to keep making things better, we want to bring our ideas. But I think what prevents that is when you say everything is good and that is what shuts it all down.
David Green: Yeah, good advice. Now, lots of talk about the business impact, obviously I am sure you would agree having spent all that time in people analytics, that ultimately people analytics is about the impact it has on the business. That obviously can have a positive impact on employees as well. But how do you measure the business impact of employee experience?
Melissa Arronte: So many ways? And I think that it is critical that we always do it because we don't want people thinking we are just doing this to make employees happy. Employees aren't coming to work for happiness and to play video games, they are coming to work to make a difference. And the way they make a difference is doing something that is meaningful, by making changes, by doing a good job, by putting their self into their work and seeing that they are working on something that is meaningful, that is progressing. And there are some great articles about these theories and have shown them out. So really, the way we show the business impact, often is showing reduced turnover. That is the biggest number we can get and it is going to be far bigger than any other department in the company, typically, that if we improve the employee experience to reduce the cost of turnover. There are so many other unmeasured costs that go along with that. Other great metrics that we can show is improvement in productivity or sales. I think sales employees is one of the areas that is so un-tapped. We are so worried about making sure that they are spending every moment selling, we are not spending enough time just getting small insights from them on how we can improve our selling. And then using that both to predict their likelihood of turnover, because typically we shouldn't be surprised when a sales person turns over because we can see it already happening, in looking at our sales data. And we can also show it in terms of productivity, for other employees, whether that is call handle time and also of course, customer experience. That is a critical outcome that we spend a lot of time looking at and it is not hard to find the link between customer and employee experience, but if you read a lot of the practitioner literature, it just says happy employees equal happy customers. And I think it is just too simplistic. We are missing the point when we say happy employees.
Let’s use a retail example. Let's tell the retail employees, they no longer have to work evenings or weekends, and they are going to be thrilled, but no customer is going to be thrilled because those are the peak shopping hours. We need to get to the next level down and understand it is about enablement, empowerment and feedback. There are some key areas in employee experience that have a significant impact on customer experience and we just need to get that next level down to show that relationship.
David Green: And I think the fact that you have talked, pretty much throughout the conversation, looking at employee experience as a way of improving customer experience, and if you improve customer experience, you are probably going to improve customer loyalty, customer revenue, and everything else. So I think there is a good link there.
We have talked a little bit about it, but let’s sort of focus now a bit more about continuous listening. What role does this play in employee experience? And, how does continuous listening enable organisations to be more employee centric?
Melissa Arronte: So, we actually like to call it continuous understanding. It is often called continuous listening because there is so much of a focus on the surveys, which as we have talked about a lot, are incredibly valuable. But there is more that we can do and many organisations are already doing, we call it signals. So bringing in data about employees that help us better understand their experience, before we ever send them a survey.
So a really simple example I like to give is, who is the employee's manager, is it a high-performing manager or a low performing manager? That simple piece of information is just one example.
We have lots of great information about our employees and the kind of experience that they are having. We partner closely with Visier, and they have so many great metrics already calculated that we can combine with surveys, or even bring in independently, to understand what kind of experience our employees are having and then being able to make some predictions. That is really what we are looking for. We want to make some predictions about where are we likely to experience turnover, decline in productivity, decline in customer experience, decline in any of our metrics that we can have about our employees, and proactively intervene to prevent it. To prevent it in a good way. Are employees likely to turn over because the schedule is not consistent for them? That is a common reason for turnover of non-exempt employees. We all know we should have consistent scheduling, it is an important training for any supervisor, right? But in the moment, in the stress, they don't plan as well. These are critical things we can remind managers of, show them the link between scheduling and turnover, as a simple example. And improve the scheduling so that employees can balance their life outside of work and continue to stay employed with us, instead of finding a situation untenable and having no choice, but to leave.
David Green: And of course you need that continuous understanding rather than if we go back to doing a big survey once a year, because as you said, something may have been happening within a team, even within the company, so if you do a big transformation that starts in September and you survey in November, don't be surprised if the sentiment is not as good as it was the previous year. But maybe two months later, with the transformation going well, they do sometimes, maybe the sentiment would be a lot better.
So if you have got that continuous understanding, you can be continually adjusting and taking action and again, to your point, you are getting that continuous feedback that you can then improve the customer experience and customer outcomes as well. What are some of the key challenges with continuous listening or continuous understanding? Acquiring the data is just one piece of the puzzle. What else matters as part of this?
Melissa Arronte: Yes. People do raise a lot of challenges to it, and having run an always on, I feel like we figured out most of the challenges. So the first one they will often say is, how can we possibly act that fast? If we run an annual survey, it takes us months to work through everything and get to action planning. But this is working at a really different level. We don't want to apply the same ideas we have about the annual engagement survey, it is a really different endeavour. When we are doing continuous listening, that could be allowing employees to provide feedback anytime, or it could be pinging them weekly or monthly. We are doing quick action. We are not doing action plans. We are getting ideas together, we are meeting with our teams so that we can raise up issues, ideas, solve for them, and move on. Just like we do every day, in all the other kinds of work we do, trying to figure out how we get something done. Employee experience should be no different. So we really just want to change the thought from action planning, to simply taking action with your team.
Much more local level. You can still aggregate that data and at the highest levels in the organisation do strategic planning that is longer term, but this continuous listening wasn't intended for the senior leadership team. This was intended for local teams to quickly come together, get feedback, take action, move on. Another is, how do you get to insights that fast, because usually it takes a long time to do analysis? So you do need a platform that can run in real time and that is analysing text. You do need at least one person who is checking in on a regular basis, to make sure that your text is still coding and capturing topics, so that you don't have managers trying to figure this out. You want insights right to them. Themes and topics being surfaced so that they can quickly see them, and not being buried in tables of numbers.
So those are two examples.
David Green: Two very good examples and actually, that extends quite nicely into the next question. Obviously survey data is one source of data for continuous listening, or continuous understanding. What are some of the other data sources, both active and passive data?
Melissa Arronte: There are so many great sources, even just HRIS gives us so many insights. What's been happening to employees. What's been happening to their team. We see so much where nothing happened to that exact employee, they didn't turn over, but other people on their team turned over, or the manager turned over, or they re-organised the whole team. So looking at the team context in which they are working, or their location. So that is simple HRIS data.
Time data. How are they taking time off? Are they saving up for long-term to take a vacation? Or, are they using the time as fast as they get it, avoiding work or job searching? Other examples can be social data. I know a lot of people look at, could you bring in Glassdoor? What I have found is, often looking at the Glassdoor comments, I just find the same sort of feedback that I get from the employees at the company so they are pretty duplicative. But there are other forms. Are we seeing that people are posting? A lot of companies have different socials, so it is not so much the text, but the patterns. Are we having more? Are we having less? Are new employees in or more employees coming out of it?
So those are some top examples.
David Green: We have seen a little bit, during the crisis, people are looking at collaboration data as well. So for example, one of the big concerns that I think people have had is that people are working longer hours, that we are always on Zoom calls or Teams calls, and people aren't having as much focus time. There, you can ask for that in a survey, but you can also analyse collaboration data, and you can see that as well by people's calendar data. Are you seeing that being used more and more as well?
Melissa Arronte: There is so much interest in it and I think actually, where I see a lot of good work being done is another partner organisation, Humanyze, because they are digging a level deeper. It isn't just, are you working more? They are looking at who you are interacting with. For example, they have a great example of a study of looking at salespeople and who are the salespeople that are producing the most sales, who do they interact with in the organisation? And finding that the more efficiency in the salespeople, it was software sales, they were interacting with the engineering team, which isn't too common. But they were understanding product roadmap, understanding what was coming next, what could be possible for customisation, so they were better able to serve their customers than other salespeople. So instead of just focusing on the hours, which I think we know, and I think employees can self-report. Again, it is getting to that next level deeper, finding a way that they can be more effective, and giving them that information by comparing those high performing salespeople to the lower performing salespeople say, you can actually work less, but work better by working with these other people.
David Green: Yes it is interesting and it is still at a reasonably early stage of actually using some of that data, but I think as you said, it has many potential benefits for companies and for employees, frankly, because if you are a medium performing salesperson, you want to be a high-performing sales person. So understanding what high performing salespeople do, is great insight, isn't it? Can you share some examples of organisations you think are doing the continuous listening part, the continuous understanding part, particularly well?
Melissa Arronte: Yes, so we did a couple with the hotel employees and then the handheld device. Another one that I have seen that I really liked was actually a consulting company that is working with us. So teams come together for consulting to support a client and so they were surveying the client and the consulting team, at multiple times during the project, so that they were essentially giving each other feedback so they could form, storm, norm, perform, faster because it takes a while for these groups to get up and running and they wanted them to be more efficient, faster. They were doing that by giving, I think of it as like a real-time 360, because they would ping them at certain times to provide feedback, but you could also provide feedback at any time. And we probably all know examples of when you first start working with a consulting team, you are figuring them out, and how do you work together. It takes a while. But being able to provide quick feedback, to understand that, and learn from it, they can move forward much faster. So I thought that was a unique application of continuous understanding, that got two teams working together very fast and when you do it across all your teams, you are saving a lot of hours.
David Green: Yeah, good example.
We have got to the last question, this is the one we are asking everyone in this series and I will definitely allow you to go beyond 2022. What is the future of employee experience in 2022 and beyond?
Melissa Arronte: What I would like it to be, that it becomes so much more of the norm, that we can even have our names and IDs attached to our feedback because it isn't about having to try and protect you from your employer. That employers want to hear this feedback. They want to find out where they can prove that we create this different culture, where we are all contributing ideas to make things better because that is why we are here. We are all on the same side, so we can get rid of anonymous and confidential and focus on identifying feedback.
And that the feedback isn't just to go to senior leadership, it can go to each other, to help each other be better. I think too often we hold back our feedback, or the feedback that is given is really negative, or only given to a manager. There are a lot of ways to listen. It is not just this one way up to leaders. I think also getting really comfortable with technologies like video and voice. I remember, quite a few years ago, but it wasn't that long ago like maybe 11 years ago, when we were first going to allow pictures in our company, next to people's names. This was going to be so great because we are a global company and we will finally be able to see each other when you can't fly and see everyone. There was a lot of concern about what kinds of pictures people would put. Would they be inappropriate? Would they put Bart Simpson instead of themselves? And now that is so common and actually it is encouraged. My picture I use, is a picture of my dog instead of me, but it actually shows a little bit about me. I am thinking video and voice feedback is going to be that in just a couple of years, where we are just used to type things out, instead we just quickly say in our phone this is how I am feeling, or here is my idea. Quick. I'm done. So those are a couple of my predictions or hopes, anyway.
David Green: What do you think for the first one, around attaching your name to everything, what do companies need to do to enable that sort of climate of trust?
Melissa Arronte: And that is partly how we build trust. When you read the literature about how do people create trust, it is when you are vulnerable to someone else and they don't hurt you, and they can be vulnerable back to you. So that is why I think it starts with leadership. Leadership using videos and sharing how they feel, their fears, how they are dealing with things. I think we start needing to be a little bit vulnerable to each other and take care of each other, not exploit that. I think too often in work we don't act at work, the way we act at home. We think there is some different way we should be interacting, of course more professional, but what we shouldn't lose is that part of taking care of each other and wanting to help each other and build each other up. I think that can get so lost at work, and I think that is what is needed to allow identified feedback.
David Green: What a perfect way to close our discussion, Melissa. It has been fantastic having you on the show and I really look forward to learning more about voice and video feedback, I think as the year and maybe a couple of years go past.
How can listeners stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, and find out more about Medallia?
Melissa Arronte: Thank you. Yes. I am on LinkedIn, so please feel free to connect with me, I would love to connect with you. And of course you can visit the Medallia website. We have a number of case studies and examples you can see there, and of course you can have a demo anytime.
David Green: Brilliant Melissa, thanks very much for being on the show. I look forward to hopefully seeing you again in person, at some point later in 2022.
Melissa Arronte: I hope so, David. Thank you for having me on.