Employee Listening: from Strategy to Value

🌟How do your employees feel about their development and growth opportunities?

▶ That’s where a continuous-listening, from strategy to value, comes to play. comes to play. Powered by people analytics and manager dashboards, it can provide an action-driven approach to inform talent and organizational-related decisions. However, this is not about buying technology only. It requires outlining a clear strategy, aligning on use cases, defining the type of listening capabilities, technology and data integration.

▶Throughout a continuous listening process senior leaders and managers can have real-time people insights, gather feedback and have a sense of how employees feel, interact and how they work across the entire company ecosystem and gain a holistic view of every touch point in the employee lifecycle.

▶The pandemic accelerated the evolution of employee listening, with companies moving to a full-remove environment, CHROS and business leaders wanted to have a sense of how employees feel, measure levels of engagement, burnout/well-being, collaboration and productivity and employee experience overall. Annual employee surveys could not address those topics in a dynamic and intuitive way.

💡The HR technology market ecosystem saw the opportunity to bring continuous listening tools to deliver people insights by analyzing a broad range of signals that reveals trends, patterns, identify themes, create heatmaps, and trendlines across the entire talent lifecycle. At the beginning, technology was only producing the picture of today, fast-forward now technology – powered by Gen AI- is able to make personalized recommendations/actions based on employee signals in terms and track progress.

The Employee Listening Technology vendor ecosystem is constantly evolving and expanding capabilities:

• Medallia recently launched new Gen AI solutions.
• Perceptyx acquired Humu (behavioral science)
• Simplr, acquired Socrated.ai (virtual employee assistant)
• Workleap acquired Pingboard (employee experience)
• Quantum Workplace acquired TalentKeepers (engagement and retention)
• ThoughtExchange raised $13.5M in equity investment

Looking Ahead

1️⃣Gen AI will play a key role to evolve employee listening, in terms of survey creation, recommend actions, and interact with managers (as a personal assistant) to answer questions around the workforce.

2️⃣I see here a great opportunity for M&A between people analytics vendors and employee listening vendors to provide advanced analytics, collect, analyze, interpret and visualize qualitative and quantitative data.

3️⃣For enterprise, start by defining your employee listening strategy, assess technology and data capabilities, run a pilot and expand.

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Note: All views expressed in this article do not represent the opinions of any entity whatsoever with which I have been, am now, or will be affiliated. My opinions are my own.