When designed strategically, employee listening programs can demonstrate ROI by shaping key business decisions, improving retention, boosting performance, and strengthening organizational culture. Unfortunately, many employee listening programs are synonymous with routine surveys rather than being viewed as a way to drive business impact. Survey teams often operate in silos – disconnected from broader business priorities. In this article, we present six steps for elevating employee listening in your organization.
1. Approach employee listening as a program, not a project
Too often we see organizations run a single engagement survey that is disconnected from all other surveys, sources of data, and business objectives. This is a loss! We encourage our clients to think more holistically about their employee listening program. It should be an ongoing, collaborative effort with an integrated strategy. When organizations treat listening as a one-time project, they miss opportunities to connect the dots between different data sources, track trends over time, and align insights with broader business goals.
2. Understand what your stakeholders need
To be taken seriously, survey teams must act as true partners to the business. Identify your stakeholders and key decision makers within the business and learn their biggest challenges. You might even consider holding “voice of the customer” interviews. Build relationships with these stakeholders and engage them early (before survey design) to ensure your program aligns with strategic priorities that matter. These efforts will help you to move from reactive reporting to proactive problem-solving.
Any robust employee listening program should include foundational questions you ask consistently across time. These topics allow you to track critical metrics to monitor the employee experience. In addition to these foundational questions, you also need to uncover business issues and questions that might not already be included in your measurement plan. Once you understand what questions your stakeholders want answers to, frame your research questions and determine if these data are already available somewhere in the organization or if you need to collect the data.
For example, you might hear that business leaders want to understand what’s driving turnover with frontline, early tenure employees. You might already have what you need, or you might need to adapt your measurement plan accordingly.
Onboarding Survey Data
Engagement Survey Data
Exit Survey and Exit Interview Data
3. Break Down Data Silos
To generate insights that are truly relevant to different areas of the business, work needs to be done to connect survey results with the data that matters most to varying stakeholders. The barrier here is often siloed data across the organization. Once you have learned what metrics and KPIs matter most to your stakeholders, the next step is to get access and make it useable. Here are three ways to get started:
Try to integrate relevant data sources into a single system so you can use it, access it, analyze it, learn from it (connect to business objectives)
Integrate XM platforms with other operational systems (e.g., HRIS, CRM)
Standardize data architecture (creating common data formats) and establish data governance and quality standards to ensure data from different systems can be integrated
4. Deliver Insights, Not Just Dashboards
Giving leaders access to a dashboard isn’t enough, they need guidance in interpreting the data and determining actionable takeaways. Whether they are being taught and empowered to do this on their own or have a partner from HR helping them along the way, there should be enablement to help them with data literacy and to understand the story.
5. Measure Success by Action, Not Just Scores
Too often, success is measured by scores instead of action. Don’t get too tied up in the metrics and inadvertently create a “report card” culture. The most successful organizations know that employee listening should drive true change through real conversations and behaviors, not by inflating vanity metrics. For more, read here. The most effective survey teams don’t just report data — they influence decisions and drive action. Start by identifying one business challenge your listening program can directly support and take the first step toward making an impact.
6. Communicate to Close the Loop
The final step for elevating your listening strategy is communicating actions taken and their impact. This step is critical for building trust and credibility with both employees and executives. According to one recent study about using listening to enhance productivity, 31% of respondents said their top desire is regular updates on what their employer has done in response to their feedback. Executives and other stakeholders also need to see and be reminded of how listening data is being used to improve organizational effectiveness and business outcomes.
Building a listening program that answers important business questions often requires linking listening data to other metrics. Some data, such as turnover, might be simple to find within HR. Performance and productivity data such as sales productivity and customer satisfaction metrics might need to be tracked down outside of HR with the respective departments. To lead a truly impactful employee listening program, start building relationships today that will enable you to partner with other areas of business to answer critical questions and solve real business problems.
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