Guide: How to Listen to Your Employees

Guide: How to listen to your employees | Ennova

Many organizations have started listening to their employees more frequently and with a broader scope than ever before. And for good reason. In this guide, you get all the insights you need to know if you want to be (even) better at listening to your employees. And the best way to do that is by getting more frequent, wide-ranging insights throughout your employees and your employee journey.  

 If you want to create the best employee experience, which is a must-have today to 1) retain your employees and 2) attract the most competent employees, you should start measuring your employee experience throughout the employee journey. 

 

3 Organizational Wins from Listening to your Employees

Here are some organizational wins you can gain from listening more frequently to your employee experience throughout the journey:  

  1. More frequent surveys can increase an organization’s probability of keeping EX in focus for the entire organization and acting on problem areas more efficiently when they arise.

  2. A steadier flow of feedback from your employees can guarantee more rapid action in response to problems that crop up throughout the year, which is most definitely appreciated by the employees. This will also affect the employee engagement. 

  3. The organization gets insight into the most significant touchpoints on the employee journey, especially the critical moments of truth that are closely linked to the customer experience, as well as the top and bottom lines. A very important insight for every organization. 

In this guide, we dive deeper into what you should know about continuous and intelligent listening and what to know before setting up a more frequent and broader survey to gather feedback intelligently throughout the year. 

 

What does 'Continuous Listening' mean? 

A continuous listening and action system is an approach for gathering, combining, and analyzing a broad array of data sources in a continuous but smart and intelligent manner. But it does not mean 24/7/365 even though technological opportunities make it possible for you to measure your employee experience every day. 

Read more about our recommendations in the guide and what you should avoid doing! 

 

Which Sources Lead to Employee Experience Insights? 

Conducting a survey is one source of getting your employee insights, but there is a whole array of other sources.

If you work to establish a continuous listening and action system, you can intelligently mix data from various sources to create a 360-degree system that covers the entire employee journey, delivering insight at an appropriate tempo. 

Choose the right source to gain the EX insights you need. Because there are many different ways to listen. 

 

Who Should Listen - and to What? 

When building a system of broader, more frequent employee insight, you should be very clear on who exactly in the organization you want to listen to the insight – and not least to which insights.

In the guide, you get to know the most important stakeholders and which different kinds of insights you should present to them. 

 

How to Find the Right Balance Between Insights and Action?

If you decide to turn the survey tempo up a notch, you must demonstrate to employees that the resulting insight will also be acted on. This is very important and should be a priority interest of yours. 

The data results have to be backed up with recommendations for action. If that is unrealistic to manage in your organization, it would just be a waste of energy, time, money, and resources to increase your survey frequency.

No organization, regardless of industry and size, should perform surveys more frequently than they can follow up on the results, concerning the available time, resources, and energy.

But the opposite of this situation is also possible. Imagine that the organization is mobilized to work on employee experiences but lacks a steady flow of facts and insight to guide it in the right direction and ensure that people are not left to work in the dark. There is vast untapped potential in this scenario.

Many organizations find themselves in the first mentioned scenario – the one with a flood of insight that nobody acts on. 

 

How to Design a Frequent Survey Setup?

Download the guide and see how to find the right balance between insights and action - it is one of the most important things to master. 

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In the download, you can see the design criteria you can consider if you are thinking about introducing a more frequent survey setup.

Three of the design criteria you should consider are: 

1. Organizationally stability versus transformation

2. Large versus small HR functions

3. Blue versus white-collar distribution 

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