Employee listening has changed
The move from a single-event survey to more “always on” continuous employee listening, aided by recent developments in software, has revolutionized the way organizations understand their employee experience. In this article, we showcase how HR and people analytics teams are transitioning to continuous employee listening programs across industries and realizing the power of more frequent, agile, continuous listening.
Case study 1: A global financial services organization undergoing a major transformation needed to track employee experience on regular basis
Challenge: This global financial services organization traditionally ran a biannual classic employee census survey, which provided a wealth of rich insight to drive improvements in engagement. However, with a major transformation program underway, working on 90-day cycles of change, the senior team needed more frequent and timelier insights into the employee experience of the change.
Approach: Members of the global analytics team used WTW’s Engage to launch pulse surveys on demand. They used key engagement measures from their census survey as well as benchmarked questions about transformation effectiveness to track trends over time.
Results: Every 90 days the leadership team met in their ‘war room’ to review real-time insights on employees’ experience of the transformation – what was working and what needed course correcting. Such immediate feedback significantly improved the effectiveness of the change program.
Case study 2: A medium-sized retailer wanted to adopt an agile listening approach without an annual census survey
Challenge: This retailer had a modest budget and wanted a solution that provided continuous and agile listening in a cost-effective way. It also wanted to understand why people were joining and leaving their organization.
Approach: The HR team chose WTW’s Engage because it allowed them to design surveys in minutes and launch them whenever needed. They selected Engage for its speed, simplicity and its built-in library of 38 ready to go survey templates (on all topics from diversity, equity and inclusion and environment, social and governance to talent retention and wellbeing), 400 benchmarked items and 400 external norms (items unmatched by any other self-service survey provider). A bonus was its out-of-the-box entry/exit solution. They also added Advanced Analytics for Engage and integrated with their HRIS to identify the predictors of actual turnover.
Results: The retailer tracked engagement trends as well as why people were leaving the organization. These insights informed the company’s efforts to become a great place to work.
Case study 3: An Internet retail giant wanted to improve its communications effectiveness
Challenge: One of the world’s largest Internet retailers wanted to improve the effectiveness of its internal communications and ensure it was communicating at least as well, if not better, than its peers.
Approach: The retailer implemented WTW’s Engage to survey its employees and benchmark against 20 peer organizations using a mix of bespoke and benchmarked questions on the topic of communications effectiveness.
Results: In just a few days, the survey results provided key intel on how well the Internet giant was performing and identified key gaps relative to similar organizations’ benchmarks. The internal communications function pulled together workstreams to make changes based on the results with a goal of outperforming its peers in the future.
Case study 4: An iconic global fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company introduces decentralized, agile employee listening to supplement its annual census survey
Challenge: This global FMCG company wanted to ensure the successful introduction of its vision and core values. It also wanted to give local business unit leaders the flexibility to survey their unit employees at a time of their choosing.
Approach: All business units were given access to WTW’s Engage to run their own surveys at a time that made sense given the demands of the local business. At any point during the year, business unit leaders were required to ask seven global questions related to the company’s vision and core values. They could also ask their own questions. Once a year, at a global level, the seven core questions were analyzed to understand the progress the organization was making towards living its values across the company.
Results: The company found a perfect balance between group-wide structured listening and empowered, agile, local listening, while also being able to track the rollout of its vision and values.
Again and again, organizations are finding they can deploy a combination of the classic census, agile pulse, and lifecycle surveys to provide their leadership teams with more timely and impactful employee insights to drive change
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Used by thousands of the world's leading organizations, Engage, WTW’s game-changing employee survey software, brings together a brain trust of the world's foremost organizational psychologists with cutting-edge technology and the world's largest normative benchmark database to drive action, change and impact for your organization.
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