Employee Listening: The Underdog in Your Engagement Toolkit

Employee listening could help your organization unlock the key to employee engagement. Many (if not most) companies have some kind of employee feedback mechanisms (like surveys), but given the way employers in almost every industry are grappling with low engagement levels, we suspect there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement out there.

Disengagement costs employers roughly $8.8 trillion each year in lost productivity on a global scale, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report. Employee listening (done well, of course) can lead to higher engagement levels, which are historically associated with lower hiring costs (due to better retention), more productivity, higher revenue, and bigger profit margins.

What is employee listening?

Employee listening may sound a little suspect, but it doesn’t have anything to do with spying on your team. Put simply, employee listening is the practice of listening to what employees have to say – inviting and collecting their input, evaluating it, and using those insights to drive strategic planning and action that directly addresses employees’ biggest concerns, observations, and challenges.

In recent years, the market for employee listening technology solutions has expanded – mostly in response to unsteady engagement levels in nearly every industry.

But as more companies prioritize investments in enhancing the employee experience, it’s become a little more complicated to find the right solution for your organization. Fortunately, Forrester and Gartner have both published reports that introduce people leaders to the top vendors in the field. (Not to brag, but Workvivo’s Employee Insights solution appears on both lists.)

Benefits of effective employee listening

In addition to the financial benefits mentioned above, employee listening can have a variety of other positive impacts on an organization.

Improved work culture and employee experience

When done well, employee listening can help employees feel heard and understood by senior leadership, boosting feelings of inclusion and belonging. Because employee feedback can be used to fuel strategic action, feeling heard can empower employees to influence their experience on the job. This is possible at the team and department level, as well as organization-wide.

Enhanced organizational performance

Meaningful feedback loops can help create an environment in which innovation can thrive, fueling productivity and growth. Done correctly, employee listening can become a competitive advantage. When employee feedback is collected and evaluated, leadership can act swiftly with relevant solutions that can translate into reduced absenteeism, better retention rates, and even an increase in customer satisfaction.

Possible improvements in overall employee wellbeing

Since one of the key advantages of effective employee listening is higher employee engagement, companies that adopt these strategies may also see improvements in overall employee wellbeing, further boosting productivity, helping reduce missed work time, and potentially even reducing healthcare costs.

Research has consistently linked higher rates of employee engagement with better wellbeing. Likewise, companies with wellness programs tend to have high rates of productivity and engagement.

Nobody is sure which comes first in this chicken-and-egg scenario, but one thing is clear: companies that proactively work to deliver what employees need may be more likely to see happier, more productive teams.

Best practices for employee listening strategies

Leveraging tools and technologies that are purpose-built to reveal the most accurate and actionable insights is the number-one best practice for launching an effective employee listening program. The crux of this, of course, is in finding the right partner – and I’ll offer some tips on how to do that in the next section.

Once you have the right solution in place, it’s crucial to communicate transparently with your employees about the tools you’ve decided to use, what you hope to learn from them, and how you’ll use the information you collect. Naturally, employees will likely have concerns about privacy and anonymity – and they need to feel confident that they won’t suffer any negative repercussions for sharing their honest feedback.

It’s also essential to create a detailed strategy for how and when you’ll collect feedback, how it will be analyzed, and how those insights will be used to direct or influence the decisions you make about employee perks and benefits, project management, team structure, and more. Create a plan that includes all of this, as well as a schedule for reviewing and updating your employee listening strategy in the future.

Key features to look for

Finding the right employee listening solution for your organization is crucial to nailing best practices and reaping the benefits. And while effective employee listening involves much, much more than an annual employee survey, surveys are a crucial cornerstone of a successful employee listening strategy.

But we don’t suggest adopting just any survey tool when there is so much more to consider.

Any employee listening solution you evaluate should also offer:

• Easy access to feedback data
• Digestible data visualizations and data analytics for employee feedback, including on-demand reporting
• Ability to conduct quick polls, pulse surveys, and automated engagement surveys (good for topic-specific feedback, e.g. ‘what did you think of the benefits webinar?’ or ‘what new employee resource groups would you like to see?’)
• Expert support and guidance on how to implement feedback and improve engagement
• Digital roadmap for new features, future add-ons, and other plans to help you grow and enhance your employee listening strategies

Maybe you already know you need every feature on this list to effectively collect and evaluate employee feedback, or perhaps you’ve decided you don’t need every component just yet. Either way, it’s crucial to partner with a provider who can offer them, so you can evolve your Listening strategy over time, without needing to source additional third-party tools.

Another key consideration is directly related to building trust among your employees. To get honest feedback, it’s crucial that employee engagement surveys and other mechanisms be anonymous – and remain anonymous. It’s common for HR to track which employees have and have not completed a survey by using unique tracking links for each person and, typically, this is used to send reminders to ensure everyone has an opportunity to share their feedback. While an employee’s responses may in fact be anonymous, trust can fall apart if an employee is singled out for being the last to complete a survey.

Transforming employee listening insights into strategic action

At this point, you might feel like your company could benefit from an employee listening solution – but don’t rush out and sign up for a standalone tool that won’t talk to your other engagement systems. There’s an even smarter way to reap the benefits of employee listening while simultaneously integrating that practice into your larger employee engagement strategy.

Look for partners that have an employee listening tool as part of a holistic employee experience platform. One of the benefits of a unified solution like Workvivo is you can gather feedback, take action on it, and track it, all from within the same platform.

With improved engagement levels, organizations can expect higher productivity, better retention rates, and a more innovative work environment. Additionally, by ensuring anonymity and leveraging advanced analytics, companies can gain deep, actionable insights that drive strategic decisions and foster a more satisfied, motivated workforce.

In a competitive market, having a robust employee listening strategy can be a key differentiator, paving the way for sustainable growth and success.

To learn about Workvivo’s Employee Insights solution, check out this article or reach out to a sales rep for more details.