3 Rules when using Continuous Listening to drive Organization Transformation

In this world of fast and exponential innovation, the ability to successfully manage pervasive change will affect which organizations will survive and which will not. Whatever the reason or end game is (efficiency, cost reduction and customer experience), pervasive changes only rarely just affect the way companies do business; they also fundamentally transform the competencies, behaviors and mindsets required from their workforce. Leaders have to make decisions more quickly; managers have to support and encourage innovation and employees have to be more customer-oriented, flexible and ambiguity tolerant.

HR's change management still in the predigital era

Accordingly, HR’s core mission will increasingly be revolving around engaging and enabling the workforce to act in accordance and contribute to the new organizational mission and objectives. While mastering this art is becoming a critical competitive advantage, most organization’s change management methodologies are still illustrative of a predigital era.

Time for HR to redefine its mode of working and start actively driving the people side of business transformations. In this challenge, I believe that Continuous Listening and the use of data-driving insights to steer and personalize change programs can provide an ultimate advantage. Therefore, I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned while working with innovative companies in implementing Continuous Listening programs as a part of their organization transformation.

Rule #1 - Ensure Continuous Listening is embedded in the broader transformation context

Whether the goal of your Continuous Listening program is to monitor and activate culture, engagement or technology adoption, the efforts should be closely connected to the broader transformation program. This requires:

• Planning: Measurement cycles should be deliberately planned around key transformation events and milestones in order to facilitate the interpretation of results. Similarly, planning should ensure that critical insights are available for consideration at strategic leadership meetings. At the same time, avoid placing too much burden on the organization and its employees (e.g. surveying during periods of high workload or massive layoffs).
• Content/focus: Ensure that the measurement content of your Continuous Listening initiatives are clearly linked to transformation objectives. That’s why I recommend staying away from pre-packaged survey or measurement solutions, and making a list of topics and themes that are customized to your company’s needs, capacities, and transformation goals.
• Search for synergies: As explained in my earlier article, capturing tangible results from Continuous Listening requires combining a variety of data. I often see organizations undergoing a large-scale transformation simultaneously run several independent people measurement initiatives, each with its own agenda. However, relationships within an organization do not exist or occur in isolation and failing to combine different data sources runs a serious risk of oversimplifying these relationships and deriving meaningless findings.

Rule #2 - Focus on the value of the insights as opposed to tools and models

Many organizations start their search for a Continuous Listening partner by browsing through the various tools and solutions on the market. Yes, some measurement solutions may have shiny interfaces that display elaborate results and relations, but that doesn’t mean they deliver true value.

That’s why it’s crucial to first identify clear goals and topics of the listening program and map out the approach you need to make it happen. If you cannot create an overall measurement plan at once, I recommend opting for an iterative approach that will allow you to learn and adapt as you go (see Rule #3). If innovation and prototyping is high on the agenda of your business transformation (which is the case for most of the organizations I’ve worked with), make sure this is mirrored in your Continuous Listening program.

Similarly, don’t get distracted by the machine learning enabled ‘advanced analytics’ features of pre-packaged solutions. In order to base your decisions on the predictions of an analytical model, you must first trust the model behind it. And, in order to do so, you have to be able to understand the algorithm behind it, which is often times extremely hard to do with the barely interpretable results of black box or ‘advanced analytics’ solutions.

Finally, make sure that the results derived from analytical projects directly correspond with the transformation needs of your business. While attending conferences, I’ve spoken to numerous data scientists who would enthusiastically talk about the analytical models they’ve developed, yet fail to give a satisfying answer as to how these models helped accelerate the transformation at hand.  

Rule #3 - Take an iterative approach: experiment, learn, and grow

Continuous listening to employees is a relatively new concept for business and HR leaders. In my experience working with clients, it always pays off to spend some time helping them understand what the process entails: which factors to consider, what choices are available to them, and which milestones to target. This conversation explores, amongst others, the value drivers behind a Continuous Listening program and its objectives. Ask your team and yourself the following questions:

• Objective: Are you looking to measure the effectiveness of change management in order to make adjustments when necessary? Or do you simply want to keep your finger on the overall pulse of the organization, without necessarily translating the insights into structural action plans?
• Insights: What type of people insights do you want to gain? Is it about understanding the status of employee engagement and satisfaction, work conditions, and/or services provided? Or are you looking to get deeper insights into actual behavioral adoption?
• Customer/audience: Who will ultimately benefit from the insights generated and how? Are the results primarily geared towards the board or are they meant to assist line managers in their daily work with their teams?

Posing and answering these questions will help you define a deliberate Continuous Listening strategy, including such aspect as the right measurement cadence, a repeatable sampling approach, and a methodology of measurement. Unfortunately, organizations don’t always have the time to deliberately reflect on these points. More often than not, clients come to me when they are already facing strong internal pressures to deliver fast value and insights. In these situations, I recommend to adopt an iterative approach, which allows a prototype phase or a pilot program to precede a more automated continuous listening solution.

Experimenting with a pilot allows you to refine the process and scale up a single experiment into a solution for analytical, data-driven insights. It gives you some ‘learning time’ before you commit to makings investments into technology, while enabling you to deliver value to stakeholders from the start. Therefore, when searching for a partner, I suggest finding one that offers you flexibility and support in gradually growing your measurement maturity, remaining open to continuous experimentation and growth.

Conclusion

There are numerous reasons a business decides to go through a transformation, be it to cut costs, widen its service portfolio, digitalize various processes, or reorganize internal structures and hierarchies. Whatever the reason, the full potential of transformations are unlikely to be accomplished if the role of human factors in transformation success is not better understood and managed accordingly.

Continuous Listening can consistently deliver data-backed insights to pinpoint areas requiring fundamental change (organizational or work characteristics, employee attitudes or behaviors), direct and personalize your change efforts and to demonstrate what works for whom. Ultimately, and if designed well, it will allow us to move away from the one-size-fits-all change management approaches that have dominated the field for too long now.

Want to discuss the challenges your organization is facing in designing or implementing Continuous Listening programs? Feel free to reach out!

You can also read:

The 4 Guiding Principles of a Successful Continuous Listening Program

Why Continuous Listening is critical to Customer Experience Transformations

Why Data-Driven Employee Experience Should Include a Continuous Listening Strategy