The Buyer's Guide - Employee Listening
Are you looking for an employee listening solution to help you collect feedback, discover insights, and ultimately engage your team? Selecting the right employee listening solution can be difficult. Each one is unique and has different features so it’s important to have a good way to compare them and support you in your ultimate decision. We’ve put together the Buyer’s Guide to Employee Listening to help make the buying process easier and assist you in the search to find the solution that best fits your needs.
What is Employee Listening?
There are many ways to define employee listening but at its core, it refers to how you collect, understand, and act on feedback from your workforce. An effective workforce listening solution involves two important pieces. First, it should give your people a place to voice their opinions and share their unique insights with the organization. Most solutions will offer this through surveys or third-party interviews. Second, it should provide a way to help hold leaders accountable to act on the data and insights they identified. A well-rounded employee listening strategy recognizes that taking action is a big part of making your people feel heard.
What are the Benefits to an Employee Listening Platform?
When you have an effective workforce listening solution, the result is a people-centric environment that drives continuous improvement and meaningful change. By listening and responding to what people are experiencing, leaders can correct the areas that lead to turnover and focus on the areas that drive engagement and retention. A healthy organization finds ways to make every employee feel heard and supported and is 2.2x more likely to exceed its financial and business goals. A strong employee listening solution can transform your culture and enable your managers and leaders to be successful at work.
7 Questions You Need to Ask
We understand there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to your organization. We’ve identified seven important questions to ask as you evaluate employee listening platforms to find the right one for your organization.
1) IS THE EMPLOYEE LISTENING SOLUTION ALL-INCLUSIVE?
It’s important to find the right technology for your organizational needs. While
many applications today offer add-on survey tools, many are only surface level features and lack the depth needed to provide a true return on investment. Look for a platform that delivers an all-inclusive employee listening platform that provides all the tools you need in a single solution.
2) WHAT SURVEY-BUILDING CAPABILITIES ARE OFFERED?
Effective survey design is critical to a successful program. You want the survey building process to be intuitive and help you ask the questions that drive actionable insights. Think about the types of surveys you want to launch and make sure your provider has the tools and features to accommodate them.
3) IS THE SYSTEM ACCESSIBLE AND EASY TO USE?
An ideal platform should be intuitive and easy to use so that you don’t have to spend valuable time onboarding and can get started collecting feedback quickly. You want a solution that will simplify your process and make things easier for you. All the heavy lifting should be done by technology and shouldn’t require significant time commitments from you to get it done.
4) DOES THE SOLUTION PROVIDE ACTIONABLE DATA INSIGHTS?
There are a lot of cool charts and diagrams that can be used to display data in different ways but without a tool to translate data into actionable insights, your organization can end up spending hours analyzing charts to find the story in the data. A simplified approach that uses backend analytics to identify key insights saves HR, leaders, and managers valuable time.
5) CAN THE SOLUTION CAPTURE FEEDBACK FROM HARD-TO-REACH POPULATIONS?
An intentionally designed employee listening platform provides extensive communication methods to meet people where they’re at and capture feedback across all levels. With more workforces dispersed, people working different times, with varying availability, look for a partner who is highly skilled at collecting a rich data set and includes multiple communication channels.
6) HOW IS EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE PROVIDED?
Technology alone can’t solve employee engagement and retention issues. You need a partner who can help you execute an effective listening strategy, generate buy-in, help you create a compelling story and link employee experience to business outcomes.
Look for a partner who provides a human approach with experience in organizational psychology, human resources, and change management. Evaluate the level of service offered and check that it meets your needs and expectations.
7) IS PRICING TRANSPARENT?
You shouldn’t feel nickel and dimmed. Everything you need should be clear and transparent in an easy-to-understand price. Here are some questions that can help you be clear about pricing.
Download the Buyer's Guide
Download the Buyer’s Guide Ebook for an in-depth look at key pieces of shopping for an employee listening software platform. Print out our comparison checklist matrix to evaluate competitor features across the board.
