Continuous Listening: Are We There Yet?

Continuous Listening programs have rapidly gained traction over the years, becoming a fast-growing segment of a robust talent strategy for leading organizations. The COVID-19 outbreak – which has forced many companies to support remote working at scale and more deliberately invest in the wellbeing of its workforce - visibly accelerated this trend. During times of crisis, the criticality of giving employees an opportunity to voice their questions, share their concerns, and identify emerging issues becomes strikingly clear.

At the same time, COVID-19 is temporary, but the changes we are seeing now are likely to stay. Companies across the globe are planning for a ‘new normal’ to thrive in an uncertain and changing world. That includes reflecting on how Continuous Listening can be become a core part of their strategy, an enabler to successfully build and manage a motivated, engaged, and productive workforce in a more hybrid way than ever before.

Hence, there has probably never been a better time to reflect on the state of this emerging field. What are leading organizations doing in this space? What are their biggest challenges and how will Continuous Listening be evolving?

Since Continuous Listening is a relatively new concept in HR, there is only a handful of best practices to learn from. If you have been looking out for these, you landed on the right post. This article provides insights from leading organizations in this space – those that have made employee listening a central part of their strategy. I’ve included four in-depth insights of leading Employee Experience and Continuous Listening companies – AB InBev, ABN AMRO, Adidas Group and Rabobank, each illustrating different ways of listening to their employees.

1. Continuous Listening enters a new phase

Covid-19 has significantly accelerated Continuous Listening

The COVID-19 pandemic is clearly a tragedy that is playing out across the globe. If there is a silver lining in all of this, it’s that companies are stepping up in key areas, including Continuous Listening. For most organizations I spoke to, Continuous Listening programs were already well established pre-COVID. Still, there is no doubt that the pandemic outbreak has served as a substantial accelerator to prove the business case and drive further investments in listening programs.

COVID-19 made it clear that we actually need to be listening more in order to take fast, meaningful actions to better serve employees. This is something we’ve seen along with the importance the whole employee experience topic now has.

The crisis posed the biggest opportunity for AB InBev to kick-start their Continuous Listening program. During this time of uncertainty and stress, it was more important than ever for AB InBev to quickly uncover and address employee concerns. "Moving towards Continuous Listening was already on the agenda, but COVID brought urgency and really kicked it off. The pandemic outbreak made us understand how powerful Continuous Listening could be. In a rapidly changing environment, it helped us to understand what our people needed week over week so we could respond right away. In addition, it was a great opportunity to develop our listening capabilities at a fast pace as an Employee Experience team", says Valérie DuBois, Global Head of Employee Experience at AB InBev.

At ABN AMRO, Continuous Listening was already quite established, but the pandemic gave it a more fundamental purpose and reinforced the business case. "The pandemic outbreak served as a clear illustration of the criticality of being able to continuously listen to the voice and sentiment of our workforce. Capturing their voices on a regular basis became a crucial way to fuel our future way of work strategy", says Patrick Coolen, Global Head of People Analytics at ABN AMRO.

Back in March, Rabobank decided to shift its employees to working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak. "That’s quite a substantial change", says Tertia Wiedenhof, Product Owner People Analytics & Insights. "Given the scale of the disruption to people’s normal working lives and the speed at which we had to react, capturing continuous feedback from our employees was crucial to identifying and addressing emerging needs and became pivotal to stay closely connected as an organization. Without soliciting feedback regularly and at scale, we would simply have been guessing how our employees were coping and which elements to take into account."

Without soliciting feedback regularly and at scale, we would simply have been guessing how our employees were coping and which elements to take into account - Tertia Wiedenhof

Martijn Wiertz – Lead Employee Listening at Rabobank - identified another important benefit of Continuous Listening. "Listening to your employees during these unprecedented times demonstrates you care about their wellbeing. Simple things can be big things. Within one week, we developed a questionnaire in which we asked our people how they were doing and what our company could do in order to best support them."

The pandemic confronted us with the harsh reality that – in times of an outlier event that catches the world unprepared – the limitations of all sorts of historical data become painfully apparent. In this context, capturing workforce data, especially those that help to understand current concerns, needs and expectations, may be one of the few ways to manage the present and start preparing for the future. For instance, whereas initial results highlighted a great deal of enthusiasm for remote work at scale, it is unlikely that we properly understand the longer-term consequences of more structural remote working arrangements. The switch to vastly different working models calls for a more sophisticated and dynamic approach to Continuous Listening.

As we inch out of the pandemic, organizations will need to upgrade their listening strategies and make them fit the parameters of the new world we’re entering. Employee needs will continue to evolve and using initial experiences to fuel long-term plans may be inadequate - Laura Stevens

Continuous Listening is finally starting to mirror marketing and customer experience management

For most organizations today, improving the Customer Experience is a top strategic priority. One of the primary building blocks of best-in-class Customer Experience transformations is investing substantially in ‘knowing your customers’ to continuously improve their experience. Despite its equal relevance and applicability to employees, not even a handful of organizations seems to devote as much energy to employee feedback systems.

Still too often, Continuous Listening is being approached as doing more of the same things HR has been doing for years. As explained in one of my previous articles however, unlocking the true transformative power of it requires us to embrace the same approach in terms of frequency, diligence, speed, and depth as marketing initiatives that target customers. Fortunately, this new paradigm is gradually entering the space of employee and talent management.

"Whereas continuous ways of listening to build customer loyalty and engagement have been central to Consumer Experience Management for many years, we realized we were using archaic ways of listening to our employees", says Stefan Hierl, Director People Analytics at Adidas Group. "We decided to do things radically different and to adopt principles from marketing to the way we listen to our employees. This new way of listening to our employees turned out to provide a much better fit to our company than our annual engagement survey. On top, the Consumer Experience paradigm was one that really resonated well with our leadership."

We decided to do things radically different and to adopt principles from marketing to the way we listen to our employees. This new way of listening to our employees turned out to provide a much better fit to our company than our annual engagement survey. On top, the Consumer Experience paradigm was one that really resonated well with our leadership - Stefan Hierl, Director People Analytics at Adidas Group

Today, the range of Employee Experience data collected beyond traditional engagement surveys is dramatically growing. Increasingly, organizations are designing more holistic listening strategies, covering topics that go far beyond engagement surveys and expanding feedback channels to include shorter pulses, passive listening, and event-triggered feedback throughout the employee lifecycle.

Continuous Listening now covers nearly everything

While employee listening may have started with a predominant focus on employee engagement, it now spans everything: leadership, culture, wellbeing, diversity & inclusion, safety, strategy-specific topics, etc. Furthermore, listening initiatives around these diverse topics used to be driven by different functional areas. Today, they are increasingly becoming part of a company-wide unified Continuous Listening program.

Top-down listening: Connecting to strategic priorities

Continuous Listening is not a “feel good” concept. It’s a deliberate effort, which, if designed holistically and executed rigorously, helps reinforce your business objectives and growth targets, as argued in one of my previous articles.

"Continuous Listening can be a really powerful mechanism to monitor and evaluate whether the often significant investments in talent are well spent. That means, when combined with advanced analytics, the insights collected through Continuous Listening help us better understand which interventions matter most to whom, and, therefore, have the ability to drive measurable business impact", says Stefan Hierl.

In the same vein, leading companies emphasize the power of staying closely connected to strategic priorities in their listening efforts. Designing a listening program around strategic initiatives enables People Analytics, Employee Experience or Continuous Listening teams to come to the table with facts that allow senior leaders to make sound data-driven decisions about talent.

"Happy people, happy customers" is our mission, says Tertia. "It sets the tone for our people strategy. Our workforce determines our success as an organization. Being able to better listen to and understand their needs is essential in helping our people and therefore our organization to be successful in delivering on customer demands."

Patrick Coolen from ABN AMRO highlights a similar principle. "In the end, we want to better understand perceived barriers to progress on our strategic objectives. If we better understand people’s concerns, we will be able to better drive our strategic priorities forward. Being able to connect the strategic context of the bank to the concerns and priorities of our employees delivers powerful insights that can be used to accelerate our strategic imperative."

Bottom-up Listening: Employee Experience

Today, it’s hard to find an organization that hasn’t recognized the criticality of becoming more employee-centric and investing in the Employee Experience. Yet, there is still no agreement on the definition of Employee Experience. Some equate the concept to employee engagement, while others see it as primarily related to service delivery satisfaction.

"We started our discussions with a solid reflection and conversation on what ‘Employee Experience’ actually means", says Patrick Coolen. "With every person we spoke to, a new dimension was added. There are a lot of fancy Employee Experience framework available on the market, but many of them don’t really get to the heart of what matters to employees and what keeps them awake at night."

There are a lot of fancy Employee Experience framework available on the market, but many of them don’t really get to the heart of what matters to employees and what keeps them awake at night - Patrick Coolen

In the absence of a single definition, it comes as no surprise that numerous ideas exist on how to ‘create’ positive Employee Experiences. Most organizations approach it as a digital issue, starting their transformation by investing in digital apps, tools or a piece of game-changing technology. Still, as stated in one of my previous articles, I believe its far more relevant to begin with a thorough understanding of employee perceptions, experiences and needs – capturing and analyzing an ongoing flow of direct, indirect or inferred feedback.

Employee Experience is not just a framework or tool an organization throws at its employees. It’s about connecting to what matters most to the workforce, and understanding how employees perceive and interpret it - Laura Stevens

One of the primary trends that came out of the interviews was that Employee Experience approaches are now marking a clear departure from the old top-down way of listening, in which employees are forced into frameworks developed by organizations, often with little input from employees. Instead, companies are now combining strategic listening initiatives with mechanisms that allow employees to share feedback on their own terms.

"Instead of relying only on external frameworks and benchmarks, we find it essential to also collect our own insights on how our employees experience their work as well as their specific needs and drivers. We think this can be far more impactful in showing where we can make an impact", says Valérie DuBois.

In the same line, Patrick Coolen argues that "It’s about letting employees speak in their own words and capture their spontaneous or emotional cues, instead of forcing their voices into one of the many existing Employee Experience frameworks." As a result of this more open way of capturing employee feedback, ABN AMRO is able to understand what employees really want, what pain points and challenges they experience at work, and how the company can better enable and empower them in their day-to-day work. "We launch a monthly Employee Experience survey with the main question being ‘Would you recommend ABN AMRO as an employer to your friends and family?'. Then we have some open questions, asking people what they are happy about and what we can improve. If we want to deep dive into specific topics, we leverage our online employee community, where employees can provide valuable insights to us around particular topics - which helps us better understanding their needs."

Along the same lines, Adidas asks its workforce what they would tell their friends and family is great about working for the company. "While you may think this is a rather generic question, it’s the only box for employees to talk about the organization, so they use this box to express what’s top of mind. It’s an essential way for them to voice their opinion openly. Open-ended text boxes, text analytics and sentiment analysis capture real needs and pain points vividly", says Stefan Hierl.

Listening in a more open manner is a great way to make employees feel empowered to share their feedback on their own terms - Laura Stevens

Participants acknowledged that listening to employees in this more open manner quickly reveals that Employee Experience expands far beyond HR. Employees look at everything that happens at work as an integrated experience and expect you to operate as one seamless organization. Failing to appreciate this can prompt a cascade of negative, most notable lower employee morale, survey fatigue, poor productivity and higher turnover.

2. Prioritization is a key success factor for Continuous Listening programs

As much as we’d like to deliberately listen to all aspects of Employee Experiences, mindsets and behaviors, doing so is virtually impossible. Organizations need to determine which areas are most important. Indeed, as companies are making the shift towards more dedicated and integrated ways of listening, prioritization becomes key.

"The key success factors for us are to select measurements that drive action and to put the insights in the hands of those who actually own the critical touchpoints. For engagement, this means empowering managers to own and drive their team’s engagement. From an employee lifecycle point of view, we are going to start with simple measures for each of our key journeys instead of measuring every single touchpoint or moment across all journeys fully. As a next step, we will evaluate and determine how many moments that matter can be built in below that journey", says Valérie DuBois.

The key success factors for us are to select measurements that drive action and to put the insights in the hands of those who actually own the critical touchpoints. - Valérie DuBois

Similarly, Patrick Coolen shares how ABN AMRO decided deliberately which listening services to provide to which internal stakeholders. While some receive end-to-end support (from designing listening initiatives to launching them, analyzing and reporting back on detailed results), others are simply provided with higher-level insights on a quarterly basis to monitor trends over time.

At Rabobank, the People Analytics & Insights team became the organization’s central body to collect and coordinate the voice of its employees. The goal is not to turn the team into a highly centralized function, but rather help the entire organization develop the habit of collecting and understanding employee needs, translating this understanding into actions, and monitoring the effectiveness of these actions needs to become an organizational capability.

3. Many still struggle with translating feedback into nimble and responsive actions

Most companies are still paying a large amount of money for an annual survey that is way too time consuming and slow to deliver insights. Post-listening action planning efforts still take weeks or months and, by the time the organization has identified and aligned on actions, interventions are no longer relevant to original employee concerns.

As companies are now making the shift towards more regular and embedded ways of listening, there is strong need for more effective, efficient and light ways to translate insights into action and embed them as a part of business as usual. Indeed, as the frequency of listening increases, so should be the responsivity of an organization. This is even more true in a continually changing and highly uncertain business climate, in which the ability to quickly respond to employee feedback is paramount. Not surprisingly, this appears to be one of the biggest challenges for organizations today.

As companies are now making the shift towards more regular and embedded ways of listening, there is strong need for more effective, efficient and light ways to translate insights into action and embed them as a part of business as usual - Laura Stevens

"We conducted a small study and found that, whereas the majority of stakeholders consulted Continuous Listening insights, it was unclear to what extent insights were really being discussed, and even more questionable to what extent something was actually being done with the results", says Patrick Coolen.

What is often missing in my experience is a deliberate, smart and responsive strategy that helps companies effectively use Continuous Listening insights to fuel meaningful change. One of the core questions of such a strategy is who is best positioned or mandated to drive which type of actions. Certain systemic or organizational drivers of employee engagement or experience - such as growth opportunities or performance management - lend themselves to formal action planning and enterprise-wide programs. But equally, there are aspects such as team climate, cohesion, and collaboration, where managers, teams and even individuals should have the leeway to create their own action plans.

With traditional employee engagement surveys or listening initiatives, companies collect data and next create reports and action plans for managers, HR, or senior leaders. While this is useful and informative, the process doesn’t necessarily send signals to those who need to take action.

4. Continuous Listening empowers teams and fuels dialogue

Streamlining your action process doesn’t have to be a disruptive or exclusively top-down process. Increasingly, companies start to recognize the value of using Continuous Listening insights to foster continuous team dialogues for instance. Continuous feedback - captured through a variety of online mechanisms and channels - can be greatly enriched when further discussed during in-person conversations. It empowers leaders and teams to collectively reflect upon results and spur innovative ideas on how to improve.

As agile ways of working are becoming more mainstream, the importance of empowering teams and installing feedback-driven team dialogues is gaining traction. We are currently looking for mechanisms where Continuous Listening insights can nurture meaningful team dialogues. Creating such continuous feedback loops at the team level can help us to break down walls and create a stronger and more united workplace - Patrick Coolen

Tertia Wiedenhof shared a similar perspective. "Many of our teams have adopted an agile way of working. Being able to work successfully together in multidisciplinary teams greatly relies on continuous reflection and feedback. Hence, we do not just want to understand employee needs but also empower teams with listening tools which allow them to monitor their own progress. Employee listening is – by its very nature – a democratic endeavor. Everyone gets the chance to voice their opinion. It therefore illustrates the kind of organization you are. It’s a sign of inclusion. Most importantly, both managers and employees are being held accountable and are approached as active agents in the change journey."

Employee listening is – by its very nature – a democratic endeavor. Everyone gets the chance to voice their opinion. It therefore illustrates the kind of organization you are. It’s a sign of inclusion - Tertia Wiedenhof

Stefan Hierl adds an additional point of view when highlighting the power of feedback in enabling change: its ability to trigger emotional connections. "We encourage leaders to actually read all the open text comments they get. The emotional connection that is created by reading through the comments – whether they represent good or bad stories from people, has a substantial impact on our leaders. Their eagerness to act based upon that feedback is in my point of view many times greater than when they get a slide from an external agency with some graphs and numbers."

We encourage leaders to actually read all the open text comments they get. The emotional connection that is created by reading through the comments – whether they represent good or bad stories from people, has a substantial impact on them - Stefan Hierl

As Continuous Listening approaches mature, one of the main paradigm shifts I expect to see is the empowerment of individual employees. I’m referring to a situation in which individual employees (and not only senior leaders, HR, line managers and/or teams) will become one of the key end consumers of their own data in the form continuous feedback and personalized recommendations around their wellbeing, health, productivity and habits.

This employee-directed approach is a radical departure from the traditional paternalistic assumption that management needs to fix everything and should be the one and only ‘end consumer’ of listening insights. It democratizes data by allowing employees themselves to consider and prioritize the changes they think will work best for them, their teams or even customers. It positions the employee as an active change agent and takes into account the abundant evidence that continuous feedback loops are the basic mechanic for how we learn and grow as human beings. Moreover, blending continuous feedback into employees’ everyday workflow is an effective way to increase self-awareness and can help facilitate behavioral change in a more tacit and subtle manner.

Blending continuous feedback into employees’ everyday workflow is an effective way to increase self-awareness and can help facilitate behavioral change in a more tacit and subtle manner - Laura Stevens

5. Technological integration matters

The more ‘mature’ organizations in the employee listening space are increasingly stepping away from a substantial and often organically-developed reliance on multiple external tool and survey providers. They are now managing listening initiatives mostly internally and/or through a single listening platform. Flexibility and integration are key if companies want to get most out of their listening programs.

"We want to have the flexibility to experiment and start small and so we try to do many things in house", says Teria Wiedenhof. "Think of it as an ‘MVP approach’ from where we build further. The available technology today allows us to do a lot ourselves. Microsoft Teams has Forms for instance, which is Microsoft’s tool for creating surveys and sharing them. If its ‘bulk work’, working together with an external provider is sometimes required, but we try to have the data as much as possible in-house."

For AB InBev, the listening technology needs to be fully integrated with Workday. "One of our key objectives is to enable automated, event-driven measurement, which requires us to connect our transactional systems with our listening platform, so that it knows when to trigger a request for feedback. In addition, the integrated nature will help us take into account and fully leverage the operational data we have in Workday. If we think about recruitment for instance, we want to have information about the number of interviews candidates are having and the time they are spending in the process in the same dashboard than our listening data. If it’s not automated and if it’s not in the same place, you start to lose a lot of the power behind it. One single, fully integrated platform to collect and analyze data is the only way we can fully leverage the data while maintaining employee confidentiality", says Valérie DuBois.

If it’s not automated and if it’s not in the same place, you start to lose a lot of the power behind it - Valérie DuBois.

What your organization needs to consider before launching or expanding its Continuous Listening program

Now that we’ve gone over the state of Continuous Listening programs at organizations that are higher up on the Continuous Listening maturity scale, I’d like to provide a few tips for companies that are looking to start or expand their listening programs.

1. Define the end consumer of your Continuous Listening initiatives. For each listening initiative, make sure to define upfront who the different end consumers are. What keeps these people awake at night and which potential actions fall within their span of control? Actionability is a design principle, not something which automatically flows out of your listening efforts. And action is most likely to occur when there is a designated end consumer of your listening initiatives.

I also urge to think carefully upfront how the insights you gather will fuel action and which role your listening team will play in driving actions forward (e.g., prescriptive, supportive, or controlling). Some People Analytics, Employee Experience and/or Continuous Listening teams see their role as being restricted to the provision of insights to different stakeholders, while others fuel their internal clients with personalized recommendations and keep track of what is being done to put these into practice. Remember there is no such thing as automatic action and that its indispensable to put in place a mechanism that will translate insights into actions that can drive change.

2. Treat Continuous Listening programs as a two-way street. Yes, your employees are an end consumer of Continuous Listening insights too. Step away from the paradigm that management needs to fix everything. The employee is an active change agent too and baking continuous feedback into daily workflows is a great way to help people develop awareness and trigger behavioral change. When opportunities for two-way dialogues are baked into people’s daily habits, companies can become more nimble in responding while employees can simultaneously play their role.

3. In setting up your program, focus relentlessly on prioritization. Define who and what to prioritize, and how to do it. You may have highly ambitious ideas that would deploy Continuous Listening programs on a massive scale with hundreds of data points and thousands of participants. While this could be something to aim towards, the build-up towards it has to be extremely cautious and taken one step at a time. It is better to focus on a couple of key impactful listening initiatives than do everything that’s potentially 'interesting'. Unfolding Continuous Listening programs without prioritization will soon prove to be a burden for the entire company. Move the conversation from 'interesting' to 'hyper-relevant'.

4. Ensure your listening program mirrors the way your company is organized and what it intends to achieve. Breaking through your internal structures when implementing a Continuous Listening program can be counter-productive. Instead, it may be wise to design a program that can organically nurture or integrate into your (aspired) company’s structure and culture. For example, if your operating model or way of working is highly decentralized with a focus on local empowerment, your Continuous Listening program can be deployed similarly.

In the same line, if your corporate culture prioritizes inclusiveness, make sure everyone gets a chance to speak up and work towards an open feedback culture via your Continuous Listening program. If, on the other hand, your transformation is focused around building in agility, design a Continuous Listening program that produces insights which you can fuel team reflections and retrospectives, continuously monitor team performance, etc. Practice what you preach.

Conclusion

Continuous Listening has been gaining traction over the past few years and the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed it even further into the mainstream. As organizations gain deeper understanding of Continuous Listening and its power to actively contribute to the bottom line, listening initiatives increasingly cross the boundaries of employee engagement to include everything from strategy, leadership, culture, safety and diversity.

Despite much progress, certain challenges remain. Most importantly, many companies continue to struggle with translating insights into prompt actions and effectively close feedback loops. I find this quite intriguing. Why are so many companies still facing this significant monetization challenge? The opportunities provided by technology and automation today are endless and enable us to deliver the right insights, actionable and personalized recommendations at the right time to the right users in a heartbeat.

However, even (more so) in a world where technology makes just about anything possible, the most critical challenge lies in a deliberate, human-centric and responsive design. That’s why I highly recommend organizations to spent some time on the thorough design of their listening strategy. In particular on cracking the code of how to evolve Continuous Listening to systematically close the feedback loop and drive continuous change.