Are you listening to your employees? While you might be taking in employee feedback through surveys and regular check-ins, it’s more important than ever to understand employee sentiments and experiences in real-time. Active listening is great, and shows your employees that you care (as long as you’re implementing some of their feedback). But active listening doesn’t always help you understand employee struggles day-to-day.
That’s where passive listening can make a difference. Passive listening involves collecting data that shows employee engagement and satisfaction in real-time. But active listening shouldn’t be left behind. Having both in place enables a key strategy called continuous listening, so you always have a data-driven perspective on your employees' workflow and pain points.
But where do you start if you want to implement a data-driven listening strategy? In today’s guide, we’ll do a deep dive into different listening methods, the pros and cons, and how Worklytics can help. Let’s get started.
The traditional methods of gathering employee feedback still work, so don’t leave them out of your data-driven listening strategy. Unlike passive listening, active listening involves talking to the employees directly. Without these check-ins, employees might feel like their opinions aren’t valued or being considered. Of course, these methods also have their limitations.
Let’s take a look at some of the top traditional methods of gathering employee feedback to better understand the role they can play in your employee listening strategy.
Surveys are one of the most common and straightforward methods for gathering employee feedback. You can also cover a lot of ground, asking numerous questions about different topics. It’s also easy to include open-ended questions where employees can give their in-depth thoughts about the workplace.
It’s a good idea to have surveys on a semi-regular basis. Too many is overwhelming for employees and leads to low response rates. Instead, quarterly, bi-annual, or even annual surveys can give you the data you need to look at trends and areas for improvement.
Keep in mind, surveys won’t always paint a complete picture. The aforementioned low response rates means you might not get everyone’s sentiments. Also, some employees just say what they think is expected or don’t take the survey seriously. You can help mitigate these issues by anonymizing the survey, but these limitations are still present. It can also take time to analyze your survey, meaning sentiment may have changed since the survey was administered.
Focus groups are a good way to open up conversation with employees and get them talking about specific topics in depth. These can be rich, qualitative insights that help improve current processes and discover underlying issues that a survey otherwise might not reveal. Open dialogue and communication can be productive if the focus group is led in an efficient and effective manner.
There are downsides to focus groups. One downside is that not every employee can be involved. You can try and make your focus group as diverse as possible, incorporating employees from various teams and roles, but it won’t always tell a holistic story. Focus groups can also sometimes be dominated by bigger personalities which can affect the opinions of other focus group members.
One-on-one meetings between employees and managers is also useful for gathering feedback. This is a good place for employees to share thoughts and concerns that management can address directly. It also helps to build trust between employees and their managers.
One-on-one meetings can offer valuable insights, but they are limited in scope. It takes time to get feedback from every employee, and their thoughts and concerns may vary greatly making it difficult to pick out patterns and trends. The feedback can also be affected by the relationship and level of trust between employee and manager..
So, traditional methods of gathering employee feedback have their merits, but the limitations should also be considered. We covered some of the limitations of each method before, but let’s dive a bit deeper into some of the biggest limitations of these methods. Understanding these limitations can help you account for them in your feedback methods and guide your data-driven approach to employee listening.
In all of these methods, you’re not getting real-time data from your employees. Surveys and focus groups are typically conducted on a periodic basis, and it takes time to analyze the results from each. This means your feedback may not reflect the current mindsets and concerns of employees. This can also lead to missed opportunities when it comes to addressing urgent issues that might be time-sensitive.
Real-time feedback allows you to address concerns as they crop up. Keeping your finger on the pulse ensures you’re making timely and relevant decisions with complete information, which can improve employee engagement, productivity, and satisfaction overall.
Traditional feedback methods can be limited in scope. Surveys, focus groups, and meetings can be guided by a set of questions and open communication, but they may not always reveal real patterns and trends that are happening in your organization at a large scale. Also, it’s possible that you’re not asking the right questions, which leads to missed opportunities.
These traditional methods may not always capture the full range of employee perspectives across departments either. For instance, there might be employees who don’t participate, which can affect results.
Bias is another significant limitation in traditional feedback methods. Surveys and focus groups can be influenced by bias, affecting responses and discussions. Employees may feel pressured to provide positive feedback in surveys. Meanwhile, focus groups can sometimes be affected by the opinions of a few more vocal employees, leading to agreement from employees that aren’t as vocal, even if they disagree or have more to add.
Bias can skew your data, making it seem like there aren’t problems when problems are present. Organizations never want to make decisions based on incomplete or missing information, and the same should hold true for employee engagement and satisfaction.
At the top of the guide, we talked about how active listening isn’t enough anymore. Active listening methods, while useful, don’t give you a comprehensive and accurate picture of your workforce. Instead, it’s best to employ a dual strategy of both direct employee input and indirect data sources. The combination of active listening and passive listening is known as continuous listening.
Active listening, as we’ve discussed, involves engaging employees directly through methods such as surveys, focus groups, and meetings. Passive listening, on the other hand, involves analyzing data from various data collection sources, such as platforms like Worklytics. Collecting data on a continuous basis with passive listening gives you real-time insights on certain employee metrics that you would otherwise miss out on with active listening alone.
Some examples of passive listening include:
These metrics paint a picture of trends and patterns in your organization that can be directly addressed. For instance, if you notice that 30% of your employees are working 10-hour days on a regular basis, you can find out why that is and offer support and solutions to fix the situation.
Overall, combining traditional surveys with advanced workplace analytics can provide a more holistic view of the employee experience, leading to deeper insights, more informed decision-making, and timely information. Here are some key benefits of this integrated approach:
Workplace analytics gives you a holistic view of your employee experience, capturing data and giving you actionable insights into trends and patterns. This gives you measurable information about employee engagement, so you can make the workplace better for everyone.
Workplace analytics have a much broader scope compared to traditional employee feedback. Analyzing data from various sources gives you insight into employee experience that can’t be communicated through direct feedback alone. You can also get a better picture of sentiment and engagement across the organization, rather than only employees who choose to give honest feedback. This leads to deeper insights and more actionable strategies for optimization.
Analytics tools can help reduce response bias by giving you indirect information about employee sentiment and behavior. For instance, seeing the patterns of email communications can give you a picture of collaboration trends that you might not otherwise get from self-reported data.
Real-time data and dashboards enable organizations to monitor employee sentiment and engagement continuously. Advanced analytics platforms can aggregate and clean data from multiple sources and present it in intuitive, interactive dashboards. This real-time visibility allows leaders to identify emerging trends, track the impact of interventions, and make data-driven decisions promptly.
Integrating workplace analytics allows you to enhance the decision making process. Combining it with traditional methods gives you quantitative and qualitative data to give you a more rounded understanding of the workplace, leading to more smart data-driven decisions that lead to better outcomes for the employees and the organization as a whole.
If you want to enable continuous listening in your company, Worklytics can help. Worklytics is a powerful workplace analytics tool that makes it easy to combine active listening and passive listening to improve the work environment. Worklytics leverages data from over 25 commonly used tools, anonymizes and processes it, and then surfaces actionable insights about employee engagement, experience, workflow, productivity, and more.
Worklytics gives you the data analysis on over 200 workplace experience metrics. Analyze employee lifecycle, management, collaboration, inclusion, compensation, work-life balance, and other factors in one convenient and intuitive platform. You can even benchmark your metrics against competitors in your industry to see if you’re on the right track. With this actionable data, you’ll have all the information you need to make the workplace better for everyone.
Ready to enable continuous listening in your workplace? Book a demo and find out how Worklytics can help today.
