We live in a hyper connected world, a world that is always on and never sleeps. A world of interaction, instant communication and social validation.
Anyone with a smart phone can create videos and share them with the world, everyone has an opinion and can share that via social media or forums. It’s easier now to provide feedback on brands, products, services and experiences than ever before.
We make buying decisions based on customer feedback (like amazon reviews) and make decisions about where we go on holiday or where we eat based on Google reviews or Trip Advisor. Getting access to this information, good or bad is so easy – in fact we now expect it and it is certainly changing how we as consumers are being influenced and can influence others.
Getting access to real time and valuable feedback is easy in our personal lives, but what about in our professional worlds? There have been more and more organisations moving away from traditional forms of employee surveys like the annual survey – done as the name suggests once a year.
This survey is often a behemoth of a questionnaire, can often take 30 mins+ to complete and then the answers get fed in to whatever solution you are using. To be fed out, in an easy to use and understood dashboard of graphs and pretty pictures. This process from experience, can take 6-9 months to gather, interpret and communicate before any actual action can be taken around what the results are telling you.
Hardly aligned to our day to day reality of how we share & gather information we need to make decisions. We can understand why then, that organisations are focused on improving the feedback loop, creating ‘experience’ departments whether it is customer or employee focused and trying to get their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in their businesses. It’s a competitive job market, more so than ever before, tools like Glassdoor are shining fascinating insights in to what it’s ACTUALLY like to work for an organisation.
Yes, you can get the odd disgruntled employee leave a bad review but on the whole Glassdoor, the ‘Trip Advisor’ of the working world does a fair job in giving a rating of what it’s like to work for your brand. What this means for the brand is that the ‘experience’ that they talk about in their recruitment and attraction content and campaigns has to live up to reality.
Their Employee Value Proposition (EVP) better not be more sizzle than sausage as very quickly the employee will find this out and if they decide to stay will no doubt provide that feedback to their line manager, but they will have to wait to feedback it back in the annual survey. Potentially, if the sausage is so different, they will leave and likely take their frustrations to Glassdoor or LinkedIn.
Therefore, there is a shift in thinking about better connecting with our colleagues and opening up two-way communication that is in real time and can be acting on quickly. Becoming more flexible and pro-active, as well as working in agile ways (the methodology not remote working ‘agile’) means real change can happen quickly – but not through annual surveys.
The rise of the pulse survey is really upon us. There are two tools which I’ve seen that are worth looking at as a way to improve employee feedback, engagement and experience
Hive HR – DPG have worked with Hive HR in the past and still support a preferential referral scheme – you can check out some previous posts here and here.
However, this isn’t about us promoting Hive HR it’s as always about providing insight in to the ‘art of the possible’ and introduce enough information for you to research and make decisions based on what is right for your organisation or even just to spark a conversation.
The other tool that is worth looking at is Glint, Glint was acquired by LinkedIn which of course is owned by Microsoft. So, it’s got some fairly significant backing and access to lots of data already. It bills itself as an ‘employee experience’ platform and provides a number of ways to get closer to your employees.
It’s all part of an interesting HR technology market, which is responding to customer demand. The need to create and maintain better workspaces and workplaces, to create positive cultures where people can thrive not hide. Opening up different dialogue and conversations away from traditional means. This may only be 4 surveys instead of 1 or it could be monthly. The point is that it speeds up the feedback loop, in most cases the analytics dashboards show real time feedback and decisions can be made much quicker when addressing concerns or questions or validating any decisions and actions that have been made.
It’s a complete flip of top down communications and threatens hierarchical organisations. It’s shifting the power to the employee. This can be scary and some HR or People depts will be weary of this and what change it may bring, could it even threaten their very existence or challenge what role they play in the organisation itself?
As ever I’d love to hear about where these conversations are in your organisation right now.
Are you using a different approach to employee engagement and annual surveys?
Are you focusing on employee experience?
What tools are you using to make this happen?
Or……
Have you or your organisation got your head buried in the sand with this stuff?
Have you got YOUR finger on the pulse?
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