Listen up: how to find out what employees really want

Tak­ing employ­ee voice seri­ous­ly will be key to recruit­ment and reten­tion suc­cess in a peri­od defined by wide­spread skills short­ages, high lev­els of job-switch­ing and the mass uptake of hybrid work­ing.

So says Neil Hay­ward, who has just come to the end of his four-year tenure as chief peo­ple offi­cer on the HS2 rail­way project. In a world of work that’s trans­formed since he first became an HR direc­tor just over three decades ago, it’s impos­si­ble to improve the employ­ee expe­ri­ence “with­out hav­ing embed­ded the idea that you’re talk­ing – and lis­ten­ing – to your peo­ple” into the organisation’s cul­ture. 

For a long time, “UK plc saw peo­ple as com­modi­ties”, observes Hay­ward, who is now “going plur­al” as an inde­pen­dent HR con­sul­tant. But the bal­ance of pow­er is shift­ing towards work­ers as the nation con­tin­ues to suf­fer skills short­ages, which will be here “for a long time to come. You can’t just assume that the right peo­ple will be out there. You need to keep hold of the ones you have, so employ­ee expe­ri­ence and employ­ee voice will be cru­cial in the war for tal­ent.”

Yet in many organ­i­sa­tions there seems to be a gulf between what employ­ees are expe­ri­enc­ing and what their employ­ers think they’re expe­ri­enc­ing. For instance, recent research by Gart­ner has found that, while 75% of senior exec­u­tives believe that their organ­i­sa­tions have a flex­i­ble cul­ture, only 57% of their staff agree. Even more telling­ly, while 77% of exec­u­tives say that their employ­ees have oppor­tu­ni­ties to give feed­back on how to improve their expe­ri­ence of work, only 40% of their staff share this view.

Helen Matthews, chief peo­ple offi­cer at mar­ket­ing agency Ogilvy UK, believes that ensur­ing that everyone’s voic­es are heard is “crit­i­cal” in pro­vid­ing a pos­i­tive employ­ee expe­ri­ence. 

“You can only tru­ly under­stand the needs and wants of your employ­ees by talk­ing to them – reg­u­lar­ly,” she stress­es. “Their needs evolve con­tin­u­ous­ly.”

Yves Duhalde­bor­de, a senior direc­tor in Willis Tow­ers Watson’s work and reward busi­ness, agrees. He con­sid­ers it vital to seek feed­back from employ­ees to uncov­er “under­ly­ing intel­li­gence and organ­i­sa­tion­al insight. You’re miss­ing out if you’re not ask­ing peo­ple what they think and under­stand­ing what could be done bet­ter.” 

In oth­er words, Hay­ward says, there are con­crete busi­ness ben­e­fits to be gained from enhanc­ing the employ­ee expe­ri­ence and boost­ing engage­ment lev­els in the process.

“The cumu­la­tive weight of research sug­gests that, as well as offer­ing per­for­mance and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains, high lev­els of employ­ee engage­ment have a pos­i­tive impact on reten­tion, inno­va­tion and cus­tomer ser­vice. They reduce absen­teeism and make peo­ple more like­ly to be advo­cates for their organ­i­sa­tions too,” he notes. “It’s also clear that engage­ment affects per­for­mance more than the oth­er way round.”

Despite the obvi­ous role that employ­ee voice can play in enabling such engage­ment, many organ­i­sa­tions are fail­ing to make the most of its poten­tial. That’s the view of Alex­ia Cam­bon, direc­tor of research at Gartner’s HR prac­tice. She believes that a key inhibit­ing fac­tor is that, “while clas­sic tech­niques, such as annu­al sur­veys, worked when there was a con­sis­tent, office-based organ­i­sa­tion­al expe­ri­ence, this sta­t­ic, quan­ti­ta­tive approach isn’t help­ful in the new work­ing envi­ron­ment, which is very incon­sis­tent.”

Under hybrid mod­els of employ­ment, where people’s loca­tions and work­ing hours can vary wide­ly, the use of lis­ten­ing meth­ods that are more dynam­ic and qual­i­ta­tive – for instance, fre­quent ‘pulse sur­veys’, focus groups and even one-to-one inter­views – is becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant. 

Matthews, who has adopt­ed such process­es at Ogilvy UK, says: “We see employ­ee expe­ri­ence as a live, con­tin­u­ous­ly evolv­ing project. This entails con­tin­u­ous­ly under­stand­ing what our employ­ees want, so we look at any mech­a­nism we can to col­late feed­back.”

Although it has yet to be wide­ly adopt­ed, the con­cept of seg­ment­ing the work­force and ask­ing dif­fer­ent groups par­tic­u­lar ques­tions has great poten­tial, accord­ing to Cam­bon.

She explains: “It’s how you’ll under­stand where the gaps, ten­sions and diver­gences are, which is impor­tant to con­sid­er when you’re craft­ing your employ­ee expe­ri­ence. You’ll nev­er be able to sat­is­fy every­one 100%, but you’ll be able to iden­ti­fy the ‘moments that mat­ter’ for each seg­ment, which cre­ates more emo­tion­al invest­ment.”

An impor­tant, yet often neglect­ed, aspect of seek­ing people’s feed­back is act­ing swift­ly enough on the infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed and involv­ing employ­ees in imple­ment­ing any changes. As Duhalde­bor­de says: “Lis­ten­ing is the easy part. Ask­ing with a clear pur­pose and intent to act is cru­cial. Oth­er­wise, you won’t reap the ben­e­fits.”

Hay­ward notes that there’s even a dan­ger that, by rais­ing expec­ta­tions and not ful­fill­ing them, a com­pa­ny could actu­al­ly dis­en­gage its employ­ees. “If you ask peo­ple what they think and then do noth­ing to address their views, that’s worse than not ask­ing them any­thing at all,” he warns.

Trust is key in this con­text, If employ­ees have lit­tle faith in their lead­ers to start with, they will be unwill­ing to share any use­ful infor­ma­tion. Instead, they’ll either opt out of the process or sim­ply tell their employ­er what they think it wants to hear.

Cambon’s advice for employ­ers is that “you need to make it feel like a part­ner­ship to build some­thing bet­ter. When you’re ask­ing peo­ple for data, give them a clear rea­son why that is, stat­ing a clear action plan. So com­mu­ni­cate that ‘we’re col­lect­ing X data to do Y’, for instance.’

Claire Ross, head of cul­ture and engage­ment at IT com­pa­ny Advanced, agrees that this can be an effec­tive way to build trust. “Explain­ing the ‘why’ behind deci­sions brings under­stand­ing, even if peo­ple don’t agree with them,” she says. “It’s impor­tant to have a lead­er­ship team that’s less about push­ing its views out and more about hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with staff.”

As a final point, Hay­ward stress­es that all mem­bers of the exec­u­tive team need to be invest­ed in the process of obtain­ing high-qual­i­ty feed­back from staff.

“The more that this is seen as ‘just an HR issue’, the more like­ly it is to go wrong,” he warns. “Instead, it has to be root­ed in wider strate­gic busi­ness think­ing and an aware­ness that cre­at­ing a pos­i­tive cul­ture takes time and effort. You can’t just pay it lip ser­vice.”