Effective Strategies and Examples for Employee Listening ????

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Employee listening is more than just a practice; it's an art that involves regularly collecting feedback from your workforce to comprehend their desires, needs, and promptly address concerns. Discover the significance of this practice and learn how to execute it successfully, all while fostering a workplace culture that's truly remarkable.

Employee listening is a crucial component of the overall employee experience, vital for an organization's success. From attracting top talent to fostering engagement throughout the employee lifecycle, creating an exceptional workplace culture is a shared goal. Surprisingly, 77% of employees express a desire to provide feedback more frequently than once a year.

Why is employee listening essential for business?

Employee listening significantly enhances employee engagement, impacting profitability, productivity, absenteeism, retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, and adaptability to change. When employees feel heard and see action taken on their feedback, a sense of belonging emerges as the primary driver of engagement.

Enlightening statistics from The Workforce Institute at UKG reveal:

- Highly engaged employees (92%) feel heard, while highly disengaged ones (30%) lag behind.

- A high sense of belonging (95%) correlates with feeling heard, compared to a low sense of belonging (25%).

- 86% of employees believe their voices are not heard fairly, with 47% emphasizing the undervaluation of underrepresented voices.

Employee listening boosts productivity

Listening builds trust, enhancing teamwork, confidence, and productivity. A whopping 74% of employees are more effective when they feel heard, with 71% confident in sharing future feedback and ideas.

Employee listening aids talent retention

34% of employees prefer seeking positions elsewhere rather than sharing concerns with management. Addressing employee feedback can be the difference between retaining top performers and costly recruitment efforts.

What is an employee listening strategy?

Establishing an employee listening strategy is crucial for understanding your workforce, enhancing their experience, and fostering continuous improvement. This involves real-time feedback collection through various channels like multichannel listening, employee surveys, engagement surveys, focus groups, and performance reviews.

Why do I need an employee listening strategy?

1. Understand employees' needs: In a changing work landscape with a distributed workforce, gauging employee sentiment is essential to ensure a positive experience globally.

2. Strengthen the employer-employee relationship: Active listening and valuing employees strengthen relationships, leading to increased engagement and a healthier turnover rate.

3. Evaluate the effectiveness of feedback actions: A continuous listening strategy helps assess the success of actions taken based on feedback in real-time.

### How to build a successful employee listening strategy

1. Identify an issue to be solved: Focus on a specific issue, understanding the 'what' and delving into the 'why.'

2. Communicate, explain, be transparent: Clearly communicate the purpose of surveys, ensuring employee participation and trust through transparency.

3. Decide how you will gather information: Utilize online surveys, employee listening tools like EmployeeXM?, pulse surveys, 360 feedback, or performance review surveys.

4. Collect and analyze the data: Beware of survey fatigue and design surveys effectively to gather valuable insights without overwhelming employees.

5. Act on the feedback: Act promptly on feedback to demonstrate active listening, providing explanations when certain feedback cannot be implemented.

6. Keep measuring the results: Continuously monitor the impact of implemented actions on employee experience.

3 examples of innovative employee listening

1. Giving every employee a voice – in a scalable way: Empowering employees to share ideas through a dedicated portal fosters a customer-centric culture, democratizing data and prioritizing actionable insights.

2. Using the company Intranet/Employee Experience App to meet employees in the moment: Utilizing site intercepts on the intranet helps measure the effectiveness of investments, providing relevant content based on employee responses.

3. Gathering feedback at a time of upheaval and change: Real-time alerts based on employee feedback during mergers and acquisitions enable proactive issue management, ensuring a better experience for integration teams.

Implementing a comprehensive employee listening strategy with diverse tools allows organizations to transition from occasional feedback requests to continuous listening across all channels. This approach identifies experience gaps and provides automated recommendations for necessary actions. ?????

By actively engaging with your workforce through effective listening strategies, you not only foster a culture of openness and collaboration but also create an environment where every employee feels valued and heard. ???

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