Q&A: Everything you need to know for an easy, agile employee voice strategy

Moving from annual employee surveys to an agile employee voice strategy makes sense. No more heavy processes or endless data reporting. However challenging the status quo can also seem like a lot of work.

Lisa Hughes, Senior Consultant at People Insight, knows this first-hand having been responsible for leading the University of Surrey to an agile colleague voice approach. At our recent webinar ’From annual to agile employee feedback’, Lisa shared her experience and answered questions from our HR audience.

Below is a round-up of the Q&A. From how to convince your Board, to what agile action planning looks like, to which employee feedback methods are best, we’ve got you covered.

Missed the live discussion? Watch the replay or get the slides: ‘From Annual to Agile employee feedback’

Employee voice feedback methods

Q) What listening strategies can we use that aren’t surveys? 

You are probably listening to employees in a variety of ways already! Using existing channels in a more planful, joined up way creates at efficient listening strategy so it’s worth mapping out what you currently do, what’s available and where the gaps are.

Formal channels like your employee survey give you concrete evidence to base decisions on. To keep survey admin manageable, use one consistent platform for all your pulse, census, joiner, leaver and specific interest surveys. You can streamline data, really integrate the platform into business as usual and both respondents and data users will become familiar with using one tool.

Informal channels like Slack or Workplace offer an opportunity to ask quick questions, launch polls and get ratings in a more ad hoc fashion. Take questions to existing colleague interest groups, or groups that represent the broader employee population. These groups (face to face, or online) can provide input to solve a challenge, come up with a solution to an issue (that’s been raised in a survey, for example) or give a reaction to a company event.

Q) “What experience do you have of ‘always on’ listening and where have you seen this work well?”

At People Insight, we don’t think ‘always on’ – i.e. constantly asking for input, makes for a successful listening strategy. Our mantra for agile listening is that it should be about ‘moving quickly and with ease.’ The thing is, listening is part of a cycle that includes acting and communicating – you must listen, then act, then show people you’ve acted to keep the feedback coming. As a rule, the more frequently you ask for feedback, the ‘lighter’ it is. ‘Always on’ works in consumer where you have one simple customer satisfaction rating with no demographic splits, free text and an endless supply of consumers, but that’s not the case in organisations. Of course, carry out your employee surveys with the frequency you need, but be realistic about why you are collecting data, what you are going to use it for and what will change as a result.

Q) How do you prevent survey fatigue? 

The question is, who has the fatigue? Is it your colleagues who are being asked to respond, is it managers who are being asked to do something with the data? Respondent fatigue happens when surveys are too long, complicated, or respondents don’t see the point because nothing happens as a result. Manager fatigue occurs when they are given unwieldy reports to decipher and little guidance on what to do, how to make the taking action stage lean, and integrated into their normal working processes. At The University of Surrey, the employee survey platform has become a team management tool – with line managers using the data to aid discussion, identify team issues, action plan, and revisit action with their team.

Q) With agile listening, if you change questions each time you survey how do you measure trends to see where progress has been made?

Agile listening should be about a joined-up programme, not a series of one-off events. When planning out your listening activities, make sure you can track core themes such as engagement throughout the programme. Additionally, ensure that you can adapt to emerging topics that maybe you can’t predict at the start of the year!

For example, we recommend tracking engagement via the 5 employee engagement indicator questions that make up the PEARL engagement score over time. This might not be in every survey, but at appropriate points in the year.  Each survey may have different themes – e.g. D&I, wellbeing, experience of joining or leaving, so you have a mix of consistency and change in your programme.

Employee voice action planning

Q) How do we keep up with employee expectations for continuous improvement when it comes to engagement efforts? 

Action at company level often means operational or strategic actions which can take time to implement. However, enabling action in teams can be more immediate. Managers and leaders are often formulating people and team plans. Aligning employee surveys with these creates efficiencies, measures and a ‘pain free’ approach to management planning. For example, managers at Surrey now use their action planning platform as a team management tool; it’s a record of priorities, concerns, and actions to direct team planning. This helps create agility so you are balancing the scorecard at various levels or within groups, dependent on your organisational design.

Getting people on-board with your employee voice strategy

Q) How do you best reach and engage frontline workforce without IT access?

We faced the same challenge at Surrey. We chose to move to 100% digital surveys in line with our sustainability and digitalisation strategies, however several groups such as our Estates team didn’t have daily access to IT. We ensured these teams could take part by using QR codes on our survey comms to take people straight to the survey on their phone/device, placing kiosks and tablets for colleagues to use, and training ‘Ambassadors’ or colleague representatives to support participation. This extra investment paid off and we had an 11% increase in response rates from the Estates team.

If you are unsure how to reach non-desk based staff, People Insight have tons of experience of surveying this population. Have a look at the way we help clients here: Maximise survey responses from hard-to-reach teams

Q) How do you reassure senior colleagues that we don’t need to ask about everything in every survey?

The best way to avoid this pressure is to take a whole programme approach to employee listening over a period of time. There will be a lot of things that you need feedback about! Get stakeholder input into the themes that you need feedback from employees about, for example colleagues’ reaction to something specific. You might want to understand more about diversity and inclusion, why people leave or wellbeing, or to track engagement over the employee lifecycle.

Map out your listening activities – each feedback requirement should have an appropriate tool – whether it’s an annual survey, pulses, focus groups, polls, joiners or leavers surveys or 360 feedback. Make sure you have the right tool for the job and be clear about the scope for each activity.

At People Insight we work closely with a lot of our clients to map out their employee listening strategy, ensuring stakeholders are involved, and that the programme is well communicated – so if you are stuck – we can help!

Q) What strategies do you have to change attitudes of senior leaders regarding their desire to listen to the survey outputs?

It’s crucial to get leaders involved from the start of your listening programme if you want them to engage in the outputs. As mentioned above, make sure you’ve got stakeholder input into feedback themes and the listening process early on. What do they personally need to get out of it?

Reporting survey results by executive leader and aligning engagement to department scorecards can help show relevant results to individual leaders. Give your employee engagement score (or other relevant metric) the same status as the customer, or in Surrey’s case, student satisfaction goal in your communications. Of course, reminding leaders of the benefits of having your employee feedback data doesn’t hurt! Relate the listening process to broader organisational or people concerns. For example listening tools give you the ability to measure, track and predict your talent at a time when employee turnover is high and costly, and talent recruitment is increasingly competitive.

Finally, when it comes to discussing employee survey results, putting an external face (i.e. an expert consultant from your survey partner organisation), in front of the senior leaders makes a big difference. The external, objective opinion makes it easier to be direct, and urge change where it’s needed!

Design and implement an agile employee voice strategy

People Insight are experts at employee listening, and we’d love to help you move towards a more agile feedback approach.

Contact us today to discuss your unique needs and how we can help.