Contents
What does this mean for staff engagement?
How to resume your employee listening
Starting a “conversation”
Flexible listening
Book a demo
In 2025, the US AID stoppage affected many of our clients from NGOs and multi-laterals in the humanitarian and global development sector, as funding cuts hit their organisations and programmes. Change is ongoing in many organisations and as so many people and roles have been affected, it can be hard to resume activity that used to be a regular part of organisational processes but has been set aside while managing unexpected change. People are very stretched and so taking on an exercise that demands involvement and approval from the senior team can be daunting.
What does this mean for staff engagement?
At a discussion with a group of People and Culture professionals in the sector at a Humentum webinar at the end of April, we heard what they felt had been the most important leadership responses to help staff to cope and maintain focus and engagement. We heard that the “people first attitude of leaders” was important, helping them to pull together and work through the implications of the cuts. The leaders in these organisation showed strong leadership and listened to the People and Culture team to guide their actions and communications.
“Communication is key” was a mantra for leaders in affected organisations, with strong leadership groups making sure they communicated with staff a lot during the period. As was a strong commitment to “living your values” - acting as human-centered organisations who care about the wellbeing of staff.
We also heard from affected organisations that people leaving due to lay-offs leads to an impact on engagement and burn out for those who still work at the organisation as they try to fill the gaps. To help counter this, people highlighted the importance of identifying and discussing this issue, and then working through the consequences to decide what the key commitments are and focus where resources go so that the people still in the organisation are not overwhelmed.
We know that good two way communications between leaders and staff is essential for high engagement People who work in purpose-led organisations are highly likely to feel invested in the outcomes of their organisation’s work and their part in delivering that. If they feel unable to express their thoughts on matters that affect them and their role, this can have a profound impact on their engagement and effectiveness.
How to resume your employee listening
To make it easier and less time consuming to get back into structured employee listening, we suggest starting small and restricting the questions you ask to the most important KPIs you used to measure regularly on engagement. It is better to get started and understand top-line sentiment than to have an extended pause in listening, so give yourself permission to do something simple and avoid go into depth on too many topics.
Starting a “conversation”
As there is so much change on an ongoing basis, results may be very different from how they were in the past, and there may be surprises to digest. It helps a lot if leaders see surprises or negativity in feedback as information to help understanding rather than a judgement on what has happened or how issues were handled. Being a leader in turbulent times is tough - people experiencing negative impacts of change will sometimes hold leaders responsible for what is happening, even when it is not in their control. To help maintain engagement with staff, leaders need to have a focus on dialogue and communication so that staff understand better the challenges the organisation is facing and how leaders are working through the decisions they must take.
Feedback may open up a need to ask more questions to understand what is behind the feedback. Having this sort of open “conversation” can be an end in itself, as staff appreciate that they are being listened to, even if a lot of questions cannot be answered.
Flexible listening
Starting small at first and then assessing what are the most pressing issues to work on and continue to measure requires a flexible approach to listening. Having a rhythm of regular surveys can help with structure and accountability, but it can also be helpful to have flexibility to respond and do listening in a more ad-hoc way. The WorkBuzz platform allows you to be flexible about when and how many surveys you run, and vary length from just a very small number of questions to a more comprehensive set, covering any topic or combination of topics you want. There is also flexibility to select specific groups of staff for surveys, so you can pick up on location or team specific issues to follow up. Having easy to understand dashboard views for managers allows people leaders to review and act on team responses quickly.
If you would like a demo of the WorkBuzz platform please request it here.