The employee listening strategy enables you to improve the work environment by understanding employee expectations, wants, and concerns. In this blog, we'll explore the employee listening strategy and cover everything you need to know about creating one.

Employee Listening Strategy Overview

An employee listening strategy is a proactive way to gain insight into your organization's workforce, to improve the overall employee experience. It involves a well-planned effort to gather feedback and suggestions from employees at every stage of their journey with the company.

By doing so, the strategy helps to identify the most important concerns and desires of employees, which can then be addressed to improve their satisfaction. According to Qualtrics Employee Experience Trends 2023 report, employees whose expectations are met by their employees are 26% more likely to work towards exceeding expectations. This not only benefits the employees but also contributes to the organization's success in achieving its objectives.

Employee Listening Strategy Impacts 

In addition to obtaining regular feedback about the employee experience, an employee listening strategy offers several other compelling reasons to consider:

• Employee-centric workplace – Encouraging employee feedback and two-way communication assures psychological safety for employees. Employees are more likely to share their ideas if they feel that the leaders will listen to them. It will contribute to improved employee productivity and engagement, reducing employee turnover costs. 
• Responsive culture – Comprehensive and continuous employee feedback instead of annual surveys will help managers, HR, and leaders understand employee needs. It will lead to a responsive culture, opening up opportunities for employers to implement best practices listening to the most wanted needs of the employees. 

Employee Listening Plan: 8 Actionable Tips For Success

Here are a few essential factors to keep in mind while developing an employee listening plan:

1. Align Business And Team Strategy

The employee listening strategy should be compatible with existing business and HR strategies. Only 28% of employees feel that HR includes employees when identifying and scoping business needs. Identifying and aligning employee values with business goals will lead to success. This can be done if the employers ask the right questions before gathering feedback. For example, do you want to empower managers with valuable team insights to improve team productivity? Or do you want to assess the effectiveness of critical milestones if the goal is to achieve a radical workforce transition? Aligning business goals with feedback will help leaders and employees achieve business objectives.

2. Uphold Privacy And Confidentiality

Employees will give honest feedback only if there is assured privacy. The employee listening campaign should ensure a private and safe environment for the employees to share their feedback without worrying about the negative impact of sharing their opinions. This is how employers can cultivate trust and encourage employees to give honest feedback. This privacy and data security assurance also protects companies against legal implications. 

3. Use the Right Technology

Companies must upgrade their HR tech stack as an essential part of employee listening strategy. The technology must seamlessly support feedback sharing using various channels such as surveys, chats, meetings, etc. The tool to improve employee engagement should allow the customization of surveys and the visualization of dashboards. It should also include essential DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging) parameters to enhance employee well-being. Before choosing a tool, HR leaders must compare multiple features and determine what they want to collect employee expectations data. 

4. Enlist Larger Workforce

Organizations must include full-time employees, temporary workers, independent contractors, freelancers, and temporary workers while crafting employee listening plans. The project-based workers are also crucial for businesses, especially in a hybrid work environment. Getting feedback from permanent and long-term employees alone is not sufficient. Engaging seasonal employees and making them feel valued will result in an overall improvement in employee experience. 

5. Address Survey Fatigue

Employee surveys are the most common method of getting employee feedback. More than 79% of organizations use formal large-scale surveys and collect employee opinions. Even though continuous feedback is critical to the employee listening campaign, sending out too many surveys can result in exhaustion and employee disengagement. Leaders should pay attention to the survey format and ensure employees don't spend too much time on long and tedious surveys.

6. Emphasise Openness and Transparency

One of the most important aspects of a successful employee listening strategy is sharing the insights gained from the initiative. Transparency is key when it comes to sharing these results with your employees. It's essential to be open and honest about any insights and action plans you have in place. If you're still exploring options, it's crucial to ask for your employees' input and let them know that you're working on a plan.

It's important to maintain consistency when sharing updates with your employees. Regular communication will help employees understand what to expect and create a culture of transparency and trust. By doing so, you can demonstrate to your employees that their opinions and voices are valuable and that you're committed to meeting their needs.

7. Establish Communication Framework

An integral part of an employee listening plan is setting up a communication framework that promotes two-way communication between managers and employees. This will help leaders to address survey fatigue, privacy issues, and any other concerns that workers may have. It will also enable sharing of survey results and success stories. While establishing this communication framework, the needs of remote and hybrid workers must also be incorporated. One of the vital actionable tips is personalizing this framework and ensuring that every employee is given all information about the employee listening strategy.

8. Execute The Plan Of Action

The employee listening plan is useful only when the plan is executed correctly. Upgrading listening strategies will expedite the development of employee listening strategies. About 60% of organizations can create an action plan within 4 weeks of gathering listening data. The survey will provide detailed insight into workflows that employees are struggling with. Organizing training sessions to increase workflow adoption or upgrading the workflow based on employee feedback will improve the employee experience. 

Conclusion

Annual employee feedback survey is often considered a mandatory job for HR. Automating these surveys is the first step to enhancing the employee experience. Moreover, leaders must consider employee listening plans as an integral business objective and invest in employee experience. Getting continuous feedback, taking creative action based on feedback, communicating the action plan, and sharing success stories will show the employee-centric culture of the organization. When the company shows a positive change based on employee surveys,  85% of employees report higher engagement levels. 

About Batik

Batik empowers employers to improve the employee experience by customizing health, benefits, perks, and rewards programs. Batik aligns employee benefits and perks with the needs of today’s employees with a platform that is incredibly user-friendly and keeps you informed about your benefit offerings at the click of a button.