How to Use Continuous Listening to Enhance Employee Engagement

1. Know What Your Employees Care About

Tip 2: Support and Encourage Healthy, Open Discussion

Any remaining line between personal and professional lives went out the window with the sudden quarantine and unexpected switch to remote work. Parents struggle to balance working from home alongside remote learning, while others face their own isolation and anxieties. Employees need a space to talk about their experiences, their struggles and even their thoughts on current social issues that so often permeate their lives. By creating a space that is psychologically safe—that is, a space where individuals feel comfortable speaking up—organizations can further establish trust with employees.

Leverage existing communications platforms to designate channels or groups for employees to share and discuss the issues they care about. Many organizations create Slack channels or Yammer communities specifically to discuss topics that might not relate directly to work, such as a Working Parents channel or a BIPOC community.

Protect your culture of diversity and inclusion when you establish guidelines regarding professionalism, respect, and appropriate versus inappropriate discourse. This ensures all employees feel comfortable sharing without fear of attack or retribution. If employee actions don’t align with these guidelines, make sure to hold these individuals accountable.

Designate culture champions to tackle issues in specific areas of the communications platform with high-touch community moderation and support managers in appropriately coaching employees who stray from keeping conversations healthy—whether intentional or not.

Encouraging candor and acceptance of differing opinions helps employees feel heard and acknowledged, which deepens engagement. Set a precedent for honest, raw conversations by urging leaders to openly share and communicate in these safe spaces—starting at the executive level.

• Create a safe place for discussion
• Establish and enforce guidelines
• Designate culture champions
• Encourage and model candor and respect

Tip 3: Understand When, Where and Why Employee Engagement Shifts

A well-executed continuous listening strategy surfaces shifts in employee engagement as they happen. This allows leaders to issue a timely response. However, leaders need to also fully understand the root cause of behavior change in order to choose the most effective action.

Sometimes internal or external events align with decreased employee sentiment and leaders attempt to infer causation. This puts the organization in the position of relying on gut or intuition, which may or may not prove accurate. Before jumping to conclusions, leverage the same social listening strategies you would use externally to listen to customers, but apply them internally to better understand employees.

By analyzing employee conversations on existing communication channels, identify common themes or validate intuition—without relying on employees to accurately articulate feelings in a focus group or pulse survey.

To take the analysis even further look at where the common themes are most often discussed. Do these conversations occur in a particular Slack channel? Is one department more vocal about a concern? Are conversations around a specific issue isolated or more widespread?

Lastly, look deeply at these conversations and associated comments. Do employees maintain a level of integrity and respect? Or do comments contain toxicity or language inappropriate for the workplace?

Negative conversations don’t necessarily indicate declining employee engagement or reputation risks. However, employees who use disparaging language to disagree, or those who choose not to participate in discussions at all, could indicate active disengagement.

Tip 4: Help Executives Understand Deeper Issues

Research shows that a toxic employee has a 30% impact on the productivity of the 20 employees closest to them. Organizations can’t afford to ignore toxic behaviors, yet so often these situations go unreported or unnoticed. Take Tip #3 and flip it on its head by listening for digital conversations that might indicate a shift in employee engagement is forthcoming.

Look for microaggressions or passive aggressive comments that could lead to greater conflict. Track trends in conversation behavior in order to identify if and when behaviors change. Create a process for escalating potential toxic behaviors to HR and macro trends to the executive level. These measures ensure toxic behaviors are addressed swiftly and appropriately.

Track trends in conversation behavior to identify notable changes.

Don’t just share negative events with your leadership team, build a process to communicate organizational insights. Shifts in sentiment and trends across your company or in specific pockets (departments, teams) can provide valuable insights into which employee initiatives to prioritize.

Tip 5: Adjust Internal Communications Based on Employee Response

Use Artificial Intelligence and Automation to Support Listening Efforts

Insights about employee engagement and wellbeing don’t always come from annual surveys, focus groups and polls. This information already lives within employee conversations happening every day and, for organizations who leverage a digital communication platform, the data is easily accessible.

Save time by using a rules-based platform to automatically identify conversations of interest, such as discussions on a specific topic or one that violates acceptable use policies. This helps eliminate human error and oversight in finding important conversations.

Manually reviewing conversations and comments to understand themes and trends is cumbersome and resource intensive. Look for tools, like Aware, that automatically track trends in conversation behavior and highlight anomalies in order to inform strategic decisions and actions. These tools should use enterprise-grade Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to glean meaningful insights from employee communications.

A few examples of people insights available from these platforms include conversation sentiment, conversation health and trending topics.

Trending Topics

Trending topics show how and where employees speak about subjects they care about in the digital workplace.

For example, the naming of a new CEO often requires extensive, organization-wide change management in order to protect employee morale and organization productivity. Topical insights can expose employee sentiment pertaining to the change, how employees are speaking about the issue and even surfaces areas of concern for change management leaders.

These metrics, and others, allow enterprise leaders to pull real-time, people insights from collaboration platforms. Use the data already living within your platform to support and back your most critical workforce and organization decisions.

Conversation Sentiment

Conversation sentiment measures the emotion that lies behind the messages living in your platform.

A negative sentiment score can reveal surface level employee frustrations before they escalate further. This insight shows your leadership team how your people feel about everything from one unique topic to an entire campaign in real-time.   

Conversation Health

Gauge the appropriateness of both one-on-one and group conversations with conversation health metrics.

Conversation health metrics expose how behaviors trend over time so organization leaders can identify the root cause of individual issues. Topics that fall under this category include all verbiage your enterprise considers unsuitable for the workplace. This qualitative metric is a great performance indicator for a leader who wants to understand organization pockets that is trending in an unhealthy direction and needs extra attention.

They should also show trends at the macro level across your community, as well as the group or channel level. Get next-level insights by layering Aware’s AI-infused technology on top of your organization’s digital communication platform.

Use Continuous Listening to Measure the Voice of the Employee

What if you could automatically measure the Voice of the Employee (VoE) and get an authentic reflection of how your workforce feels?

Use Aware to strengthen organizational insights with topics and themes your employees aren't sharing on surveys, get a day-to-day pulse on the engagement of your entire organization and understand areas of discontent, unrest or toxicity in your organization. Request a demo today.