Power Practices to Understand Employee Needs Actively and Equitably

BY Stephanie Reed | September 10, 2024

Investing in the employee experience is a sustainable business strategy to boost retention, engagement, and productivity. Authentic feedback from employees is essential to address their needs and ambitions. “People don't just want to be heard, they want impact,” said Shawn Overcast, the chief insights officer at Explorance during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s August virtual conference. “And through transparent action planning and follow through, employees learn that they can speak their minds freely without repercussions,” she said.

Evolving technologies and AI are tools that can help amplify the employee voice. They provide engaging methods of gathering personal and organizational feedback from workers without bias or breaching data privacy. The shift from workers just taking surveys to having opportunities to discuss their experiences in survey comments, feedback channels, and social websites generates valuable insight into organizational transformation.

Overcast spoke about People Insight solutions, showing how Explorance’s AI voice of employee solution, called MLY, helps their clients compile and organize diverse and unstructured employee feedback.

With the summarization and alerting of frequent and in-depth feedback and perspectives, MLY is a tool for managers and employers to reassess their HR strategies, identify the role of leadership, pinpoint retention risks, and create action plans.

Shawn Overcast of Explorance led the thought leadership spotlight (company photo)

Explorance helps organizations measure employee needs and expectations through scalable automation tools and a continuous feedback-gathering process, revving the insight-to-action cycle. By supporting the employee journey, organizations improve recruitment, engagement, and overall performance.

To actively understand employee needs and drive action, Overcast suggests defining a clear strategy and purpose for employee listening, initiating a focused and structured action-planning process, and empowering employees. Actively understanding employee needs involves deliberate engagement and effort to take action.

With more opportunities to provide qualitative feedback through discussion forums, survey comments, and social websites, employees can become empowered knowing that their feedback drives organizational change.

To fairly understand employees, ensure objectivity using clear and predetermined criteria to make decisions, leverage several listening tools and channels, leverage AI solutions to remove bias, and become more aware of cognitive bias in your listening strategy.

“Cognitive biases can lead to unintentional decision-making, and biases can be really tricky,” Overcast said. “They often sit beneath the surface. They’re beyond our conscious thought, and this can impact our ability to analyze data fairly and to take fair and equitable action.”

For example, a people analyst in the retail hospitality industry used MLY to go through 10,000 comments sorted into different departments by sending automated relevant insights to managers. Included in the comments were employees’ recommendations to solve specific issues. The people analyst forwarded these to managers.

“So often we task the analyst with identifying best practices for responding to the feedback, but the people who know best how to improve employee engagement in your organization are your employees since they’re the ones experiencing it,” Overcast said.

Engagement and exit surveys are beneficial for benchmarking, tracking trends over time, and identifying areas of opportunity, Overcast says. However, multiple qualitative insight channels highlight distinct perspectives: respondents express themselves more frequently and constructively across multi-channel listening tools and platforms.

The incorporation of AI is a quick solution to the often time-consuming process of HR personnel reading through thousands of comments on any online channel. AI quickly organizes and contextualizes unstructured online feedback into sources of specific and relevant employee experience data without bias. The feedback can guide action to close skill gaps, support upward mobility, and develop managers and people leaders.

Using technology and an empathetic approach to surveying employee well-being, Explorance utilizes the employee voice to help clients create solutions that authentically address concerns, says Overcast. The opportunity to influence change is the underlying role of the employee voice: “It’s about the belief that if I have something to share, it will be listened to and it will result in change.”

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Explorance, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. 

Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses.

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