The best employers are the ones who want to know how their people feel about work. Certainly, over the last decade, there has been a huge focus on employee engagement in pursuit of discretionary and positive behaviour, which we know, makes good business sense.
Nowadays, conducting engagement surveys has become the norm rather than the exception. These surveys are an important tool in an organisation’s toolkit to gather feedback and insight into how people are feeling.
However, engagement surveys are just one piece of the employee experience jigsaw. To properly understand what people are thinking, feeling, and need, we must build and implement a comprehensive listening strategy.
What is a listening strategy?
In its simplest form, a listening strategy is a holistic approach to gathering insights into employees’ experiences. It is a way of understanding how employees feel about their work, their relationships at work and the culture, as well as what they need to feel engaged.
An effective listening strategy creates an environment and mechanisms for employees to use their voice. Employee voice is critical to organisational health, resilience and performance. Listening is not just about hearing what employees are saying, it has to be about the action that follows.
Listening strategies must employ different techniques and channels at different points in the employee life cycle to build data and insight that enables organisations to make impactful and incisive people and culture decisions. More about this later.
So, why is a listening strategy important?
It is beneficial for employees and their employers to have a listening strategy in place. A growing body of research has consistently found that having a high-quality listening strategy can improve business performance, teamwork, trust, organisational resilience, and leadership. Additionally, it can boost productivity, confidence, and employee wellbeing.
Culture of sharing and innovation
Valuing and respecting employees’ ideas, concerns, and feedback can increase engagement and productivity. The extent to which an organisation’s leadership is perceived to care about their employees, listen, and respond to their opinions further drives employee engagement. Encouraging active listening among employees fosters a culture of innovation and creativity, driving continuous improvement and adaptation in response to changing market conditions.
“To listen is to learn, to learn is to innovate, adapt and thrive” Julia Smith, Chief Business Psychologist – MI-Say
Employer brand, attraction, and retention
A listening strategy can significantly enhance its employee brand and retention. Through fostering trust, engagement, satisfaction, loyalty, a positive workplace culture where people feel valued and supported, advocacy, and alignment with the organisation’s values. This, in turn, helps the organisation attract and retain top talent and maintain a competitive edge in the talent market.
Resilience and wellbeing
In today’s fast-paced business world, it is crucial for organisations to be flexible and responsive to the constantly emerging challenges and opportunities. A robust listening strategy can help organisations collect valuable feedback from their people, which in turn can promote emotional support, empathy, and understanding. This can lead to better employee wellbeing, agility, and resilience when navigating changes. Actively listening to employees can contribute to their personal and professional fulfilment.
Having a listening strategy is essential for any organisation. It involves collecting data and implementing it to make a positive impact. However, it takes resources and effort to do so. In addition, it requires organisational courage to listen to employee feedback, whether it is positive or negative. Despite these challenges, the benefits and importance of having a listening strategy far outweigh the costs.
What does a good listening strategy look like?
- Dynamic – A successful listening strategy should tap into different crucial parts of employee experience. For example, when an employee has decided to join or leave an organisation, they have just made a big decision and so at their most reflective. Having listening channels and mechanisms to understand the decision-making process is hugely insightful. Another time when it is important for organisations to listen to their people is after or better still, during an organisational change. It is important to gather insights from these types of events, so we can fully understand employee sentiment following a change program and whether it was successful.
- Inclusive – A listening strategy should be inclusive so that all employees are able to use their voice. After the COVID-19 pandemic, more employees are hybrid working or entirely working from home. Some people do not use the same form of communication. Not all employees for example have access to a work email or they may be out in the field without access to reliable technology. It is important to use a variety of communication methods and mediums so that everyone has the same opportunity to use their voice and be heard. A listening strategy will find ways to enable people to share their feedback and to hear about its impact.
- Tapping into different types of employee voice – There are two types of voice that employees can use to communicate their thoughts and concerns. The first is called a promotive voice, where employees suggest new ideas and improvements for the advancement of their team or organisation. The second is called a prohibitive voice, where employees express their concerns about work practices, incidents, or employee behaviour that could be harmful to their organisation. Both are vital for organisational health and success.
It is important to have channels that allow for both types of employee voice. For instance, an engagement survey can be used to gather promotive voice by asking employees for their ideas and suggestions. On the other hand, exit interview surveys can be used to gather both promotive and prohibitive voice by asking employees who are leaving about the positive and negative aspects of their job and organisation.
- Psychological Safety – It is important to include psychological safety as a crucial component of any listening strategy. Psychological safety is the belief that there will be no negative consequences for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Employees will use their voice if they feel confident that their perspectives will be taken in the spirit they were given and that they feel something will be done with the feedback, thoughts and ideas they give. Which leads us to the biggest risk of having a listening strategy, the action-feedback gap.
The action-feedback gap
The action-feedback gap refers to the delay or disconnect between taking action on employee feedback. The consequence of the action-feedback gap is employees will stop using their voice if they see no impact is being made. In a Gartner survey last year, only 34% of employees believed companies would act on feedback. 60% did not know what the organisation was doing to improve engagement.
One of the strongest predictors of employee voice is the perceived impact. If employees see that their voice has no impact, they will stop using it. Often, the impact is related to employees’ feelings and perceptions, rather than reality. Organisations can have a greater impact if they focus on employees’ feelings, as this is what will drive their behaviours. Implementing a listening strategy is pointless if the organisation does nothing with the data collected or does not communicate what it has done with the feedback.
Closing the action-feedback gap is crucial for organisations to effectively address employee feedback and continuously improve their employee listening strategies. To minimise the gap, organisations can implement various strategies:
- Prioritise acting on feedback where people will feel and/or experience quickly. For example, simplification of a work process or system improvement will be felt and experienced directly by employees.
- Regularly communicate with people about the decisions made in response to feedback given. For this to be effective, it needs to happen more than once. Ideally, it needs to happen at least three times.
- Once a change has been implemented, as a result of the feedback, go back and ask how it has gone and adapt accordingly.
- Stick to no more than 4 ‘big-ticket’ items in response to employee feedback. Prioritise them and communicate them regularly back to the employees.
By closing the action-feedback gap, organisations can demonstrate their commitment to listening to employees, improve employee satisfaction and engagement, and drive positive organisational outcomes.
At MI-Say we conduct new starter, stay and exit interviews for employers and we provide real-time feedback and insight that enables more impactful decision-making. We are a partner in developing and executing our clients’ listening strategy.
If you missed our Listen Up! Conversation with our CEO Mo and Chief Business Psychologist, Julia, you can watch it here.
Want to learn more? Contact us at jo-anne@mi-say.com.
