Transforming Feedback from Employee Listening into Action

Today I am going to share with you the building blocks of what makes a human-centric listening strategy and how it will allow you to go above and beyond a typical survey. The call to action is clear: approach employee listening, in the same way, successful companies around the world approach product listening. If done right, the results are:

• A clear signal to employees that you care.

• Identifying early trends and signals.

• More impact and focus with resources.

• Helping give clarity to the direction of the people strategy.

• Internal and external impact, i.e., brand awareness and EVP, among many other things.

When done right, the returns are often seen in attrition rates, engagement, and external brand ambassadors. If done wrong, you can find yourself being the problem to the problem.

Here is how to do it right 👇

Continuous Discovery

If you ever spend time designing products, you will hear “customer obsession” a lot. Yet in EX, it’s often like shouting into a cave waiting for the echo to hit you.

PX teams need to get obsessed, I mean like semi-stalker obsessed. If you honestly want to design these SPIES

(Services, Products, Interactions, Experiences, Subscription),

then you need to change the default from once-or-twice-a-year surveys to an always-on-listening approach. The results from this change are often:

• A shift from superficial to meaningful conversations.

• Natural forming of trust and feedback loops.

• A pivot from a stale people strategy to an adaptive people strategy.

• Adaptable resource alignment.

• A self-awareness that your baby (current approach) is ugly.

• Application of alternative approaches such as JTBD, pop-up shops, immersion, etc. (more about this in the next newsletter).

It all starts with looking at the levels of how you are currently listening and identifying any missed opportunities or levels you may have overlooked.

Hierarchy of Listening

The super six levels to listening might seem like a no-brainer, but a lot of the listening approaches I’ve seen over-index or under-index in one or more of the below:

• External: Goes without saying, but using social listening on platforms such as Glassdoor, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, and so forth is a no-brainer.

• Organisation: This looks at more than just employees. It covers your partners, vendors, contract staff, gig workers, and so on. I’ve seen many mid- and end-of-year surveys skip these massive opportunities because “they’re not employees.” Yet, these people have spent time in your organisation, have experienced working there, and have seen and heard things. This insight is golddust and often provides way more honest, non-biased feedback. Overlook this at your peril.

• Group: Director-level. It’s here where you may think that’s a no-brainer, yet if I were to challenge you and ask when was the last time you sat down with directors and interviewed them on their experience of work, how would you respond?

• Function: This includes departments like marketing, HR, and so on. Pretty self-explanatory.

• Team: This, as I am sure you can gather, is at the team level, i.e., Team 1, 2, 3 within a function.

• Individual: This is you, the individual, the team members within the team. It’s important to note this level of listening is a solid foundation and needs to exist before anything else.

Outcomes Over Output

Often clients talk about the high survey participation rate, but to me, that’s just an output with little meaning.

We’ve collected 80,000 data points—great, now what? All this is just output, yet we put it on a mantelpiece and show it off. This is usually because the organisation is valuing the wrong thing… what we need are outcomes.

Outcomes are the bigger, more impactful things. At a simplified level, outcomes are the values and benefits of doing something with the data. For example, a drop in attrition due to a better understanding of onboarding, and an increase in productivity due to the identification of a tech stack fault.

To move from output to outcomes, we have to get better at sensemaking and finding insights that resonate with both the people and the business.

Two Buckets of Insights

I won’t go into detail about how to move from data to themed insights and MOOs (I cover that in my book The Insightful Innovator).

For me, there are two types of insight: the mundane and the magical. Both are important.

• Mundane Insights: These are often what you kind of already know; they don’t surprise you as such. Often these are just validating what your gut already knew, i.e., people are overworked, people don’t receive tech on day one, people like free coffee but they would like hot chocolate as well.

• Magical Insights: These are where you interrogate the insights a little more, and make them sweat. It’s only when you start to challenge them with ‘why’ questions and spar two insights together that you start to uproot Moments of Opportunity (MOO). When these are presented back, they slap you across your face like the bass from your old Ford Escort when you used to go to car park meet-ups. They shock and inspire you and uproot something much more impactful.

Both these types of insights are vital. The trick is balancing them. Often, I see the focus being more on the mundane and no thought or action being given to the magical. The way I see it, act on the mundane because they are the expectations, wants, and needs of your people; they are the hygiene factors.

Use the magical insight as a springboard to look at where you can truly offer or create something special. It’s the magical insight that separates you from other businesses. It’s the magical insight that elevates your USP and EVP to potential new customers (future talent and employees).

Tech Is Not the Answer

When it comes to designing a people-listening strategy, the tech industry is ripe with potential offers. It’s easy to get magpie syndrome and buy into the latest platform as the solution, only to cry into your pillow months later when it doesn’t work. The reason is you’re seeing tech as the answer rather than just an enabler.

Culture Amp, Glint, Tableau, Power BI, and many more all dig deep into feedback and help find the patterns and trends, but they will not tell you the full 360-degree picture. To get the full picture, at some point, we have to roll our sleeves up, immerse ourselves into the world of our customers, and be prepared to get our hands dirty. It is only by walking in our customers’ shoes that we will truly start to understand the human elements and tensions at play in their day-to-day lives. So, yes, use tech such as Glint, Culture Amp, and others to analyse feedback, but don’t just stop there. Move tech to the side and bring humans to the front by getting out into the trenches to understand at a human level.

The Rub

Adopting a Product Listening Approach is not just a strategic choice but a necessity for modern HR. We must become customer-obsessed, and that cannot be done by just doing an annual survey.

A great listening strategy mirrors a great product listening approach. It moves away from a shot-in-the-arm approach to one that is always on, listening, discovering, and prioritising between the mundane and the magical.

Apply an approach that uses tech as the enabler to overcome any scale problems, but then bring the human touch in by zooming in on any themes and immersing yourself in the challenge by walking in the shoes of the people.

Only by applying a similar product listening strategy to employee listening can People Ops and HR create a more responsive, inclusive, and adaptive organisational culture. This will also set up sustained growth and success in the competitive corporate landscape.