Employee listening encourages regular communications between an employee and their organisation to monitor satisfaction levels. But what exactly is the employee listening? Why is it important? And what are the benefits of good employee listening?
What is employee listening?
Employee listening means exactly that: listening to your employees. And it goes hand-in-hand with creating a positive employee experience.
Listening well to staff – via regular pulse surveys – provides a means to better understand what’s happening within your workforce, and to better understand the people in your organisation. This allows for more data-driven people decisions to be made, and creates a culture that great talent wants to join and remain part of.
Why is employee listening important?
Employee listening helps your organisation efficiently learn, adapt, evolve, and change. It inspires positive transformation in the workplace, and has an equally positive impact on business performance.
By actively listening to the employee voice and consistently taking the data received onboard, your organisation will be able to boost employee engagement, satisfaction and wellbeing. This is key to future-proofing your business, and it’s therefore critical that your organisation ensures the employee voice is always heard – and acted upon.
What are the benefits of employee listening?
Regular employee listening will help your organisation get to know its staff better, which leads to many other benefits. For example, challenges and tensions are easier to understand and deal if you catch them early on, before they get out of control. This will aid idea sharing and will put a spotlight on the areas where your business can make improvements – as well as where you’re already performing well.
Embedding an employee listening tool into your organisation will also make staff feel more valued. This will encourage employee retention, stronger teams, and most importantly, a stronger work culture.
What are the outcomes of poor employee listening?
Failure to listen to your employees correctly, or even at all, will inevitably lead to a high turnover of employees. You will also struggle to attract their replacements if you don’t adapt your approach and more regularly listen to your staff.
If you’re not actively listening to your employees, nor engaging them in an ongoing dialogue about their experiences and opinions of the workplace, you could be caught off guard when the next big problem occurs. That’s where WorkBuzz comes in – and it’s why we advise all our clients to continuously place our survey tools at the heart of their employee listening programme.
How can you implement employee listening?
At WorkBuzz, we believe that the best way to listen to your employees is to take a multi-method approach. During both one-to-one conversations and team meetings, leadership should be asking employees questions around their work concerns. Online focus groups and digital discussions can then be used for a broader reach across locations, regions and business units.
The WorkBuzz platform allows you to regularly survey your employees, identify their concerns, and work to address them.
Related content:
[RESEARCH] The State of Employee Engagement 2023/24
[eBook]Â Four steps to create a more inclusive culture
[ARTICLE] Nimble, adaptable, empathetic and responsive – The future of employee listening
[ARTICLE] Improve workplace culture with regular employee listening
How can we help?
”WorkBuzz has been incredibly helpful throughout the transformation of our employee listening strategy.
Catriona Mackay Miller, HR Business PartnerArbuthnot Latham
”We have been very pleased with WorkBuzz. The past 12 months have been massively challenging and the insights we have gained have helped to inform key business and people decisions.
David Wilkinson, Human Resources DirectorPremier Foods
”Lots of HR tech companies talk a good game, but turn out to be much less flexible in practice. WorkBuzz are an exception in the employee experience space.
Neil Hayward, Former HR DirectorHS2
