??Memra NOW: Listening, Codeswitching, and Employee Experience
NOW | Listening-at-Scale | 10.16. 2024
What is “listening” in the workplace? As Memra has grown into the People Analytics space over the last year, I’ve heard many professionals talking about “organizational listening” and “employee listening,” but what these individuals mean when they use the term “listening” isn’t always clear. Here are some definitions I’ve collected over time:
If “true listening” is some sort of hybrid of all of these definitions, we might say that organizational listening should be: (1) conscious, (2) regular, and always seeking to understand the (3) complete message of the speaker by (4) interpreting their organically produced sentences with the intention of (5) addressing their needs.
This is an awesome definition (if I do say so myself). But it’s also an extremely tall order: Is it even possible to “truly listen” to 60+ employees at any given time?
Organizations certainly try. When an organization says they have an “employee listening strategy,” most of the time they mean that they send out surveys. Lots of surveys.
But surveys aren’t (1) conscious. They may be (2) regular but are more often random — or worse — annual. They cannot possibly understand the (3) complete message of the speaker, because they don’t allow the “speaker” to talk about what they want to say. There is never any (4) interpreting of organically produced sentences within a survey. And — though the goal of surveys is often to address the (5) needs and concerns of employees…for some reason, employees never feel like their needs are being met after submitting survey results.
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that surveys are a pretty terrible approximation of listening.
This is because while surveys are excellent tools for capturing INFORMATION (When can you meet? Did you attend the event? Were you able to find the right information?), they are bad tools for capturing EXPERIENCE (How do you feel? What was being on that team like? What is the culture in your workplace? What is your manager’s leadership style?)
So how can an organization “truly listen” to capture employee experience? By leveraging language analytics.
Here’s the thing: you already have all the data you could ever need to measure how your employees are experiencing work. It’s there in every zoom call, in every slack post, in every support ticket. They are telling you how they feel, what they think, and what they need every day. Your job is to listen.
Capturing and analyzing real-time, organic employee language meets the definition of “true listening,” while also meeting the need for scale.
BLOG | Language Does More: Codeswitching
Did you know that Memra has a Blog? It’s called Language Does More, and it is the space where Memra’s linguists explore all the different subjects that intersect with language. Why? Because language really does do a lot more than you think!
This month
FEATURED RESOURCE | Can't We Just Ask Them? Why Employees Hesitate to Share Feelings About Company Culture and Wellbeing by Receptiviti
“Why do employees hesitate to share their true feelings, even in surveys designed to elicit feedback that would improve their work environment, and what can be done to gain more insights into employees’ actual lived reality at work? “