What is employee listening?

Employee listening helps you understand how your workforce feels about your company, their jobs and work in general. It often involves using a variety of formal and informal methods, like surveys, focus groups, sentiment analysis and exit interviews, to create an open dialogue between employees and management.

This insight can help you improve the employee experience and make better decisions about growth, company policies and initiatives that impact employees. It can also make it easier to spot and correct issues quickly.

Why is it important to listen to your employees?

Listening to your employees fosters a positive work environment where team members feel valued and heard. When you take the initiative to understand what the team needs and adjust operations accordingly, it builds trust and increases the chances workers will stay with your company for the long term. This helps maintain productivity and cut costs.

With a proactive and consistent employee listening practice, you can monitor workers’ feelings and respond accordingly. The business benefits are significant: understanding and meeting team members’ needs can improve wellbeing and boost satisfaction, retention and productivity.

What are good questions for employee listening?

The questions you ask during an employee listening activity should be oriented around something you want to measure and improve. If you’re hoping to boost job satisfaction, you might ask, “How happy are you with your job?” or “Do you feel fulfilled by your work?” If you want to find out how team members feel about their managers, you can ask, “Do you feel supported and encouraged by your direct supervisor?”

Employee listening strategy ideas

For most businesses, a continuous listening strategy might be the most effective approach. When you regularly collect feedback on employees’ feelings, it becomes easier to spot trends and identify problems in the early stages. A steady stream of information empowers company leadership to respond quickly and develop initiatives and policies. To collect accurate data, you may need to employ multiple employee listening strategies.

Direct data collection

One of the simplest ways to discover how employees are feeling is to ask them directly. Surveys are a common tool since they’re easy to administer online and take a few minutes to complete.

For example, you can share Indeed’s Work Wellbeing Survey with your employees to gain a deeper understanding of your workforce. When enough surveys are completed about your company, your Work Wellbeing Score will automatically appear on your Indeed Company Page. This score is a composite metric that measures the key outcomes of work wellbeing: happiness, purpose, satisfaction and stress.

You can use your company’s score to enhance employee wellbeing by focusing on key drivers identified in your survey results. Maintain strengths, address weaknesses and explore our other work wellbeing resources for actionable tactics.

You can also keep tabs on employee sentiment with surveys that measure employees’ feelings about:

• Job satisfaction
• Training effectiveness
• Managers and supervisors
• Salary and benefits
• Recruiting and hiring
• Onboarding
• Work wellbeing
• Diversity and inclusion
• Company culture

Social listening

Social listening involves monitoring what people are saying about your brand online. Most companies use the practice to track customer sentiment, but it can also be a useful employee listening strategy.

Using a social listening platform, it’s possible to monitor mentions of your company through:

• Social media posts
• Comments on articles and social media posts
• Discussions in forums
• Quotes in news stories
• Employer review platforms

You want to get a general idea of how workers speak about your company in a personal, unfiltered setting. The information can be valuable, particularly when trying to learn what customers and employees really think.

Data analytics

The information you collect from employee listening practices can be overwhelming, particularly if your company has a large workforce. An analytics program can help you make sense of the data and gain useful insights. Over time, the technology may reveal trends and correlations.

Data analytics software can connect to a reporting dashboard. You can customize the dashboard to include important metrics at any given time. If you’re rolling out a diversity initiative, it might be helpful to monitor employee sentiments regarding manager attitudes, team makeup and the extent to which their voices are heard. During a push to reduce turnover, the dashboard could include metrics for job satisfaction, attitudes toward supervisors and opinions about compensation.

A carefully designed dashboard puts employee sentiments front and center, making them available to decision-makers. That information is critical when you’re looking to improve the employee experience, including:

• Measuring wellbeing
• Prioritizing wellbeing
• Making senior leaders aware of employees’ challenges

Translating employee listening into accessible and digestible metrics helps achieve these goals.

Learn more about work wellbeing

While employee listening can give you information to improve wellbeing, understanding and prioritizing what truly influences employee wellbeing yields significant benefits. By focusing on employee wellbeing, companies can improve hiring, retention and boost productivity. Employee wellbeing is also tied to higher company valuation, return on assets, greater profits and is predictive of future performance.

Discover more of our work wellbeing resources.