Season 9, Episode 9: From Measuring Engagement to Driving Impact: Rethinking Employee Listening

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Experience Perspective. This is an IPSOS podcast which is for anyone interested in improving experiences for your customers and colleagues across all sectors. Across this series, we will bring you insights and inspiration from around the world whilst we have a chat with experts within the field. Now, let's get started.

Speaker B: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Experience Perspective Podcast. Hi, I'm Bhavna and I'm really excited about today's conversation because it's a topic that I find myself discussing with many of my clients, which is around how organizations can elevate their employee listening strategy. And who better to explore this with than James Tarbett, IPSOS Global Head of Employee Experience. James, welcome to the episode.

Speaker A: Thanks, Pavlou. Good to be here.

Speaker B: So, before we jump in, could you share a little bit about yourself with our listeners, what your role is and what drew you to the world of employee experience?

Speaker A: I'm the Global Head of Employee Experience at Ipsos, which is a very fancy title. Um, what does it mean? Ipsos is a, uh, market research company, obviously, and sitting inside that, we have an experience management practice that comprises of customer experience, uh, channel performance, so mystery shopping and then employee experience. And I lead the employee experience practice globally, which is about 200 consultants, analysts, project managers, developers, creatives across 40 markets. And I oversee that business. I share best practice, I own the strategy and facilitate growth. Though obviously all of the individual countries within IPSOS have their own, uh, P and L structure. So my role is more about enabling and advising and connecting people together rather than being too directive. Uh, a lot of our work is done in partnership with third, uh, party technology platforms like Qualtrics or Medallia or Viva Glint or Perceptics. And part of my role relates to overseeing the health of those partnerships and growing those too, in terms of my background. Background. So I've been in various different roles over my career that have involved me trying to make sense of data and trying to tell a business story with data. Ah, whether that was in my early career in business intelligence, whether it was as a board consultant, I was the, uh, head of Employee Insight for hsbc. So creating a measurement structure for how the bank was telling its internal and external audiences how the perception, the behaviors, the thoughts of its employees were changing. Um, I've kind of always believed that organizations make better decisions when they have a, ah, genuinely good, holistic view of their organization and that means their employees, as well as the finance data and the risk data and the marketing data. Uh, we've got lots of research that suggests that Employee experience is important. Uh, when you look at customer experience, when you look at financial performance, that uh, connection between how people feel at work and what organizations can achieve commercially is what makes uh, the space interesting, makes the space compelling. It also is something that's very deeply human. We all spend an awful lot of our time at work. So do I, so do you. So improving that uh, for people as much as possible is, is a good place to be.

Speaker B: Amazing. Thank you, James. Um, so I want to start this conversation by zooming out a little bit and I really want to understand first how organizations are currently listening to employees. So from your global perspective, what are the main types of employee listen seasoning programs that you see organizations running today?

Speaker A: It's an interesting question. So there's been quite a lot of change. If you look back 5, 10 years, everyone was doing exactly the same thing, which was a once a year engagement survey designed to give you a statistic, maybe fill the CEO scorecard, uh, kind of make everyone feel good about themselves until 365 days further along the line that still remains foundational. I mean we've just done research that we release every couple of years called Voices of Experience. And one of the things we looked at in that it's a facility facilitator, a practitioner survey, we look at uh, kind of talking to people that are running the employee and the customer experience programs in their organization. What it said was that still 82% of organizations are still doing an annual census, their annual deep dive, with good reason because it gets to everyone, it gets to every level of the organization. And it's designed to create action both at a top line level leadership, taking decisions that are strategic, but also at a very micro level. Every leader, every local manager can have the opportunity to understand how their team is feeling and do something with that and act on that and improve the experience at uh, a local level. So there's still space for that annual, that biannual engagement survey. And so often, and you've heard me say this before, we see employee experience learning the lessons that market research and the customer experience have had previously. So just as customer experience went through, uh, from a relationship to a transactional approach to doing listening, every single time you, I don't know, swipe your card in a hotel, every single time you go to a shop, you're going to get some kind of survey at the back of it. So we've seen employee experience learning from that and starting to work out how they can play with continuous with transactional surveys that could be pulse surveys and again the voices of experience data said about half, 49% of organizations now do pulse. It could be life cycle. So helping to understand employees through the various stages of their time and their career, career with an organization. Uh, again 42% of organizations are doing them often topping and tailing. So they'll do an onboarding survey, they do an exit survey and maybe not so much in between. But you've got more mature, more developed organizations that are doing genuinely transactional check ins across mobility, return from parental leave, uh, promotion, performance, reward, all these things. And then the other thing we've seen I think probably more recently as technology has gone in as ah, you need to get the return on investment of that technology because listening technology can be expensive. You started to see always on feedback, continuous listening. Uh, is there a place that you can go to give a thought, to give an idea, to make a complaint whenever you need to. How can you analyze internal social channels like Slack, like Viva, uh, engage whatever it is you might have in your organization? Because passive listening is going to be the next thing and is becoming the next thing which is um, there's this fear that if you keep asking people questions they're eventually going to stop doing it. Again we've seen customer experience go through that customer experience. There's loads of customers that you can target with research but are they listening and are they actually responding to the surveys? So increasingly they've turned to more passive signals data. And again we're seeing employee, uh, experience, employee listing go to the same place which is if you can get enough data behaviorally, operationally about your employees then you don't have to bother them quite so much. Bother is the term that probably clients would use. I wouldn't personally. And so you can just find out what you need to know in that way.

Speaker B: So when you say passive listening of course an example could be that social listening, right? Like how many times does someone collaborate with people from other teams and kind of being able to see, to see that. But what are some other examples of passive listening that an organization does or can do?

Speaker A: I think it depends on the topic. There was this paper, keep pointing people to this paper. I think it was like five years ago the bank of England did a paper called unobtrusive listening. Something, something, something. And it was effectively about as with all banks, they want to understand culture. They uh, don't necessarily care so much about our engagement or experience but they want to understand the culture is healthy. And so they, they posited that you don't need to do surveys to understand the culture of organizations, you can just look at all of these different indicators, all these different passive, unobtrusive measures of culture. Stuff like, uh, glassdoor people talking about your organization when you're not specifically asking them a service. Stuff like operational data. You mentioned yourself around social. If you can look at networks and how people are communicating and who they're communicating with, can you build hierarchies of influence and hierarchies of communication so you can start to understand how the flow of information is going through an organization? There's this tendency to think that organizations work as a perfect cascade. You turn a tap on at the very top and you're executive and then it filters down perfectly to the individual who's, I don't know, digging a ditch or standing in front of a customer at the very bottom of the organization. But it, but it doesn't, it doesn't work like that. And organizations that think that you can communicate in that cascade are generally fine. They're wrong. So how can you understand who's talking to whom? Who are the people that everyone goes to, uh, to understand what the, what the new strategy actually means are the values, uh, that are being kind of promulgated across the organization, Are they new or are they just a new version of what had gone previously? So passive data can be anything. It can also be listening too. I, One of the things that again we're seeing from some of our technology partners now is conversational listening. So it doesn't feel like a survey. It feels like uh, almost like a chatbot, like an agentic conversation where you're having a conversation with someone. How are you doing today? Or I hear you're leaving the organization. Can you tell me why? And over the course of a number of interactions it draws out greater levels of insight. It's primary research, but it doesn't feel like it, it feels like uh, like a more passive, like a more signals, uh, based approach.

Speaker B: That's really interesting because it also feels very in tune with the newer generation that's coming into the workforce. They're getting very used to being able to speak to a chat bot about everything in their life. Right. So kind of being able to have more of that conversational listening even at work could also be a very interesting space to play.

Speaker A: LinkedIn at the moment is full of stories, thought pieces, opinion pieces about the SAS apocalypse and the fact that AI is going to make feedback. Uh, technology does disappear and everyone's just going to uh, have agentic conversations and um, we'll talk. I'm sure. We'll talk about AI a little bit later in this session. But one of the ways that we're starting to see AI and we're starting to see uh, agentics and not generative AI come into listening is. Yeah. Through more conversation, through a more discursive way of getting insight.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, for sure. So going back to different listening approaches and different ways of listening, do these approaches vary across countries or across regions from, from that global perspective, what are some countries who have a more evolved approach, um, or what are they doing differently compared to maybe less mature markets or less mature countries?

Speaker A: There is, there are differences by geography. I mean generally speaking, North America, Europe are ah, further ahead on the curve. If I look at the general programs that maybe you get in say Southeast Asia or maybe to get in my region, so I'm based in the uae, certainly in the Middle East. And what you tend to see is maybe there's slightly more adherence to listening as a validation exercise. So great place to work is really big here and continues to be really big. And Asia Pacific as well because it gives you some sense of validation because it's perceived as being useful for an employer branding purpose as well as just a listening purpose. We see that across all regions, but certainly in North America and Europe we see more complexity of listening. We see different kinds of uh, research surveys, uh, data analytics, people analysis. Um, that differs I think as well. You also need to think about the regulatory environment and the legal environment in which these things drop. I mean continental Europe is extremely precious about data privacy, for example, or where you are in Australia, data residency is a real consideration. So it's not that people don't want to do good stuff or want to stretch their listening programs. Just sometimes there are uh, uh, limits around what they can do. Um, but yeah, I tend to see higher adoption of continuous listening, people analytics integration, those kind of things in North America and the uk. And that might just be because a lot of technology companies, a lot of HR technology companies are based in America and that's where it's coming out of first.

Speaker B: Yeah. And also to be able to do any sort of integration on people analytics, you need to have good data structures and good data policies as well to be able to bring all of that data together.

Speaker A: I think it's also, I mean North America is obviously a much more homogeneous place. It's not like Asia Pacific where you uh, have constant cross cultural communication differences that you need to be able to address. In America you can generally get a long way with just kind of one approach that works for one kind of individual.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's, that's very, very valid. So what listening models do you feel deliver the greatest value from a best practice point of view, from an impact point of view, from a commercial perspective? We've spoken about a lot of passive and less passive modes of listening, but which ones? If an organization starting their journey right now, what is the one thing that you would tell them to kind of do now? Because it'll give them the greatest value.

Speaker A: Honestly, the best thing that anyone can do when they're setting up an approach to employee listening is understand the cadence of their organization and how quickly the organization can take decisions. Uh, I fell into this trap in my, in my, one of my previous roles. I created this great continuous listening edifice of insight. It was fun. And there were monthly analyst flash style, uh, reports going to the leadership. And about after three months my boss turned around and said, can you stop doing it please? Because no one knows where to focus. Last year, last month you told us this was important and now you're telling us this is important. Now you're telling us if that's important. They couldn't understand how to integrate that kind of insight rich approach into an organization, how quickly they were ready to take decisions. So you need to get the cadence right. There's no point creating a continuous weekly samples pulse with people analytics, integrations and pulling in slack data. Ah, if your organization is really only ready to act on an annual engagement survey. So get the basics right and understand how your organization works because then you're going to make everyone a lot happier. The employee is going to be happier because you're not constantly asking their opinion. They're not doing anything about it. Which is obviously the key problem for employee listening. The leadership are going to be happy because they don't feel so schizophrenic because you're not constantly looking at things. And then you're going to be happy because you'll actually be performing and you'll actually be doing something that's kind of worthwhile. So uh, that's probably the biggest piece of advice. And then as I say, it's about how mature is the organization not just from a timings point of view, but from an acting point of view. What are they doing with their customer experience data? What are they doing with their financial and their operational data? Do they have quite a good solid approach to analyzing those things? Because then it's more likely they'll respond well if you're using the same kind of analytical techniques on the employee listing data. As well. And I think particularly m, from a commercial perspective, effective. You know, obviously the ROI is going to be much stronger if you move beyond actually measuring something to actually being able to act on it. Um, and so again, going back to the voice and experience research that we've just released, only about, uh, say 33% of the organizations, so a third are, ah, doing analytics that links employee experience to customer experience or links employee experience to operational outcomes. That's when you start to see the biggest return on investment. And that's when you can actually point through to, here is something we're doing in the employee space and here's the actual financial potential, pounds, dollars, pence, whatever you want to call it, um, of the interaction of the intervention that we've made. And so that's the other thing is start your program with the end in mind. And the end should always be how am I tying this to a business or a strategic or a potential priority of the organization?

Speaker B: Yeah, the objective of listening. Why are you doing this? What is the point of all of this? Is key.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, and one thing you said that I really liked is about thinking about how quickly you can make a decision. Because what we've seen in research that has been done by EPSource UK in the employee experience team over there is that when you listen and don't, don't act, that has more of a detrimental impact than just listening, um, on its own. So if you're not going to do anything, just don't listen because it has worse, has, ah, a worse impact.

Speaker A: That's right. That was it. Was it. Who cares Wins the paper that the UK did and they found out that listening and not doing anything is worse than not listening at all. Which is, which I can, it sounds, um, like, wow. And then you think about, you think. Actually that's, that's, that's pretty intuitive.

Speaker B: It makes sense.

Speaker A: Sense.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And we will, we will uncover that in a little bit more detail later on. But before we do that, I want to explore a little bit about how you see listening evolving in the future. And we've touched on it very, very briefly, but I want to unpack it a little bit more. So beyond the mechanics of surveys and platforms, what do you think is fundamentally changing in how organizations think about listening to employees?

Speaker A: I think it relates to something I just said, uh, in my previous answer, which is moving from listening as a measurement exercise to listening as a strategic capability for the organization, in essence. So moving from employee experience being done for purely employee experience reasons to employee experience Being done for business reasons. It used to be the case. I said, why did you do an engagement survey? Because you needed to get an engagement score. Why did you need to get an engagement score? Because it was in someone's scorecard or because it was a KPI that the chief people officer or chief HR officer was being measured on. And there is still quite a lot of that in the. Oh, um, you know what, what are you measuring? What are your success factors for your employee experience program? Oh, it's the engagement score and it's attrition or it's this and it's that and it's still sitting within that, uh, people environment, that people ecosystem. Not that that's not important. You can't succeed as a business if you don't have people. If all your people are leaving, then that's a significant problem. But it's almost about thinking about it and looking at it from a different point of view. You. So even if you're just talking about, okay, fine, attrition, okay, well don't let one, don't constantly look at attrition backwards because that's what most people do. Your attrition data is lagging. And then they project forward what might happen with their attrition as a result. So using listening as a predictive kind of capability in terms of attrition and attrition based modeling and okay, these are the things that people feel and people do three months, six months, nine months, a year before they actually leave the organization. Therefore, you've got your early warning system. But then also starting to point out, well, what's the financial impact? What's the operational impact of that? Uh, if your new strategy is X, Y and Z for the next three years, that requires a particular set of capabilities and competencies in the organization. If half of the people are, uh, leaving that have those capabilities and those competencies, you have a big problem. So starting to think about employee experience and listening as a strategic input to strategic workforce planning rather than just getting a score, one good thing, and then breaking out of the people ecosystem altogether. To start to look at what's the knock on impact. Whenever I talk to, uh, clients about EX and CX and putting the two together, for example, um, Ipsos is great. And our customer experience business is great at measuring the financial impact of customer experience. We've got this, this, this measure. It's called Roxy Return on CX Investment. And the idea is that we can assess in a, in a causative way the investment you make in your customer experience program and the Impact that has on share of wallet advocacy, uh, return custom and operational efficiency. Now that's great, but that's sitting there in the marketing, in the customer experience function. And then you've got HR over here doing their employee experience for themselves. If you can start to bring those two things together and not just really basic, oh my goodness, look, the most employee, most engaged employee or the most engaged outlets have higher customer satisfaction action, but actually starting to bring it down and look at the individual aspects of the employee experience and the impact that has on individual aspects of the customer or the patient or the consumer experience. Well then you can start to draw lines behind. Right. If recognition is the most important thing and these are three things that we might want to do in terms of building new recognition programs. And that one costs $10,000 and that one costs a million dollars. And that one costs $10 million. Well what I'd like to do is work out which is going to have the biggest financial impact there. Because that's the way that I go into my CFO and say, you need to give me $10 million, not $10,000 because this is the program that's going to have the biggest impact. And so again, what I'm starting to see is organizations being more alive to that and thinking about a strategic consideration around EX research rather than just a tactical or uh, an ex outcome based one. With that, uh, is also coming, uh, a slight shift in ownership. There's more. No man's land. It always used to be the case that fine, it was with just with HR or maybe sometimes it was just with communications and kind of that was at the point of interception. But now you're starting to see chief operating officers, chief technology officers kind of coming into play as well, particularly the CTOs and CIOs, because what they're asking HR to do now is to make use of the technology that they're developing. Uh, whether it's AI, ah, whether it's agentic, uh, kind of suites and whether it's oh, we've bought everyone copilot, so how are you utilizing that into your program as well? So we're seeing more shared ownership and interest in the program from different places.

Speaker B: And now based on the different expectations that the organization has on the people teams, what would your advice be to the people team themselves in terms of what are the skills that they need to be skilling up on to be able to adapt to this new age of listening?

Speaker A: It's interesting. So my answer to that would have been very different a year ago, I think. So if we think about technology, because technology is probably kind of the biggest thing, um, there's maybe a skills based one and there's a behavior based one. So on the skills based one, I guess it's all around technology. And a year ago I kind of saw two separate conversations happening. So there was the HR tech conversation, generally happening at HR tech conferences by HR tech providers who were all kind of talking to one another about this is the future. And Josh Burson would stand on stage and say, oh, you won't have colleagues in the, you'll have agents and there'll be agent to agent and you'll have all of your HR technology stack. And then you have this agentic layer on the top. And then there was all of the HR practitioners from organizations kind of going to these conferences looking like deers in the headlights. And I mean, I was the same. It looked, it looked like it was impossible to be able to do all of these things. That seems to have changed markedly in the last 12 months. And I see HR experimenting a lot more, becoming a lot more comfortable with what they can do with technology and how they can build that layer on top of whatever listeners, whatever inputs, systems, they have to be able to kind of build greater insight. And so I think experimentation and being comfortable to try out things will go particularly well. I did, I had one. There was one organization who I think turned off one of their platforms because they decided that they didn't need it anymore. They could just get it all from just signals, data and then kind of analyze it themselves. Um, and so I think coming up, that is the behavioral thing, which is about experimentation and feeling comfortable with proof of concept and testing. One of the things that really, really stands up to scrutiny in the employee experience space is if you do a proof of concept, if you do an a B test, if you do an experiment, and you use that as an evidence basis to want to kind of build an initiative more broadly. What tends to happen though is that people either have the time or don't feel comfortable or just don't want to. So they're there, they're making buying decisions, they're making decisions on initiatives that go through the organization kind of based on intuition or a sales pitch from someone or what they've read in, uh, Forbes that month. And so I think getting comfortable with trying small things, little micro things, whether it's around AI, whether it's around just initiatives in the organization, ah, is a behavior that HR people could stand to get. There's an awful lot. And you know this, there's an awful lot of zeitgeist in the HR space. People can go, I've read this book by this person and now, um, we're going to build a whole new skills taxonomy rather than actually thinking well what works. And one of the other problems is that there's a very wide gap between the academic space who are ah, doing all of the literature and the experiments and testing things about what works from an employee or a manager or a leader point of view and then actual practitioners doing those things. In organizations, there seems to be a discomfort or distinction connect.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, that was the biggest shock I got when I started my career when I realized that everything that I learned academically won't always work the same way practically. Um, and that you need, you need that flex, but also you need that curiosity to be able to test different things and different methodologies that might or might not work. So one thing that we spoke about previously was that many organizations are still relying on an annual or quarterly survey. Um, so from your experience, what does, does a realistic transition to a more continuous or always on listening model look like?

Speaker A: First thing I'd say is don't do it if you don't need to. So the thing I said earlier, if you have an organization where that is genuinely the level of comfort that they have and the level of interest that they will put into it, um, don't just do continuous listening or life cycle or all of these things for the sake of it. Now I'm not saying, you know, I'm not saying you shouldn't do it because these things are good and they're helpful and no one wants the bad thing to happen that after the census has closed for the year and then you just don't have a clue what's going on or any, what the impact of anything that's hitting the organization are. But, but do make sure that you, you are thinking about the goal isn't frequency for its own sake. The goal is getting the right insight in the right way to the right people at the right time to make the right decision. And, but you know, if you're ready to evolve, if you're ready, if you're, if you're ready to push forward again, think about a roadmap, think about phased approach. Don't just kind of go, oh, we've bought Qualtrics, so now we must do this and this and this and this and this and this because otherwise we're not getting the, the roi. Other technology platforms are available. Um, but uh, you know, think about strengthening the foundation. Thinking about trying some different things, piloting them with one particular part of the organization. And if you are an HR buyer of technology, you are going to come under pressure from the technology company to use it all straight away. But genuinely think about what's right for you at the time and then critically be, don't just up the supply without having help taken care of the demand. Because you need to invest in manager capability and in leader capability and in change management for this stuff. Again, you can't just assume that you're going to shove more insight, uh, down someone's throat and they're going to be happy and they're going to understand what to do with it. You really, really must build manager capability so they understand what's coming, so they understand what to do with it and so that they can again be happy rather than just feel threatened.

Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I always tell my clients as well. Right. Like they come to me with, oh, we've got this technology, we haven't used it to its full potential. Now we're being asked why we've not used it to its full potential. Because we're just chucking out surveys with no objective or anything. And the first thing I always tell them is, okay, let's assess your maturity as, as right now. Where are you at now? How do you currently use it? What is your listening maturity? Like, where do you want to get to in two, in 12 months, in three years, where do you want to get to? And then let's talk about what things of the technology you can unlock as your maturity increases. Don't unlock everything in one go because that's just going to overwhelm the system. Let's do it slowly, in pieces as you mature as well and listening and you're taking everything, you're taking everyone along the journey with you rather than, as you said, just dumping loads of insight on people who will not know what to do with what.

Speaker A: Yeah, and the good thing is none of this ever happens in a vacuum. There's always someone else that's done the thing before you're doing it, generally speaking. And again, companies like ours or kind of people like us, we can connect people. One of the best things that we do is helping people to understand and to learn from the best practice that others have done previously. Uh, the business in the uk they doing these spark innovation sessions where every quarter they're just bringing people together to talk about their issues, to kind of co create and crowdsource new ideas and new ways of doing employee experience in a meaningful way. So there's lots out there, there. And again, one of the benefits is generally when you're buying technology, it's modular. It's not, okay, fine, you must have everything all in one go. You know, you can build up your technology use with your maturity to your point.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. A common challenge that I hear a lot is that our action planning takes time, our decision making takes time. How do we add more listening without overwhelming our employees and getting survey or listening fatigue? How do you advise organizations to navigate this tension between oh, an annual survey is too much just because it takes so long to do action planning, or it takes so much so long to do a decision. We haven't done anything since the last survey. Why would I listen? Again, how would you advise organizations?

Speaker A: Well, the first thing I'd say is I don't believe in survey fatigue. So, uh, we get this a lot. I know you get that this is a question I get asked an awful lot. But I genuinely fundamentally think there is something different to employee experience than there is for consumer research or customer experience. We are part of the organization that is asking us these questions. Questions. We are ah, here because we want to be most of the time. Um, and so we feel some kind of investment in improving things. So I don't think there is survey fatigue in the employee experience space. What there is, and you just pointed at it, is inaction fatigue. There's no point you telling me my, asking me my ideas, asking my opinions, asking my ways to improve the organization over and over and over again if nothing ever gets, um, done because then I will, will stop uh, doing it. And, but it's not because I'm fatigued. It's because uh, I am ambivalent. It's because I, uh, I'm apathetic to the organization. So I don't think it's about frequency, I don't think it's about length. I think it's about i1 do you meet my expectations? So have you signposts to me what's coming, why it's coming and what's going to be done with it. That's fine. Don't invite me to take a five minute survey and then hit me with like 200 good questions. Because that's just going to annoy me, but then also what's going to happen with it? Um, and again it goes to the point I made in the bit we were talking previously, which was as you start to invest in a program, think about the capability of people to be able to act, um, and it doesn't have to be, I mean action planning, taking time. Sure. Um, it doesn't have to be big, big ticket things all the time. I mean generally one of the things that lots of, lots of um, providers in our space talk about is the benefit of micro and the benefit of doing kind of one thing. One thing that you do two or three times over the course of a three, six month period can become habitual and therefore it's in, it's kind of constant improvement. So it doesn't have to be this edifice of action planning and oh, we're going to fill it all in and we're going to track it and you need to have this, that and the other. But there does need to be that muscle developed of. I've heard something. Okay. Even home's going to come back and say, sorry, we can't do that. And here's the reason why. We're not children. We understand that we can't have everything that we want in an organization. It's just about uh, realizing that employee experience and employee listening is actually a two way conversation. Just as you listen, you must then say something back. It's a conversation, not a feedback gathering exercise.

Speaker B: It's about being honest about it.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It's like what you said, if you're not able to do something, just say it and explain why you're not able to do it. And it's a simple as that. Right. But it's just sometimes people have that fear of not being able to share good news. Um, but sometimes I think people understand it. People get it.

Speaker A: Yeah, agreed.

Speaker B: Looking ahead, how do you see employee listening evolving over the next few years and how do you think people, teams should start preparing for what's coming.

Speaker A: I think that lifecycle listening is going to be the norm. I think that people will be assessing us as employees over the course of our life cycle and being able to use that in the moment. Oh, this is a problem. This is a point of friction to able to improve the journey again. It's something that customer experience talks about all the time. Customer journey mapping, service design. So you find points of micro attention, points of uh, problem and you fix them kind of, if not in the moment, fairly soon. So I think more of those good, the good bits of customer experience will come into the employee experience space as well. Obviously AI is going to transform everything, whether it's a collection, whether it's analysis, whether it's being able to use dialogue. We develop Persona bots, for example, for our clients where we can help them to build synthetic Personas of their employees, of their customers to be able to have a conversation again that creates a low stakes test environment. So if you're trying to put out difficult messaging, if you need to restructure, if you need to uh, lay some people off for whatever reason, it's really useful to be able to understand how that's going to impact, impact without actually having to do it to the employees themselves. So I think there's a use for uh, synthetic data and synthetic AI and employee space. Not, not the broader one though. I think how everyone else is using synthetic data is effectively to say you don't need to do a survey anymore because the synthetic data will tell you what they want and that that will not cross into employee experience. You're never going to go to your CEO and say do the engagement survey this, this year. We've already got the result from our synthetic panel that, that's, that's, that's not going to happen. I think there's going to be, I hope there's going to be a gradual move back towards a focus on dei. I think that that's gone down uh, in the past couple of years because of certain regulatory environments into which organizations have to do their things. Uh, I actually think though that it will be broader. I think that it won't so much look at um, characteristics of individual employees, but I think, think there's a growing understanding that aspects like class or socioeconomic background are a very important consideration and um, can cut across actually quite a lot of different diversity characteristics. But I do think that we'll go back to a place where our clients for example, are comfortable reporting insights that are differential by gender rather than saying no, we can't have that in our report because uh, the government might find it.

Speaker B: I think that's really good. And the two things that really have excited me based on your response is the Personas and being able to have a conversation with a Persona where you're testing a message before you're able to share it with your, with the entire organization. I think is a great way to be able to understand what are the things that are missing, what are the things that implo, that you might not have thought that an employee will want to know. So it just, it's able to kind of get you, it's able to get a leader more confidently go to the entire organization and they've thought about it critically, which I think think is, is such a good idea. And then the lifecycle, listening and having kind of it mapped out, it just, it just puts something really complex in A very simple way, which is sometimes all it takes is the one simple thing that annoys everyone that will make their experience so much better. So it doesn't have to be these big things, but just one small thing like being able to collaborate with a team that sits in another office a lot more, more, a lot easier could be the thing that fixes it. So it doesn't have to be these big things.

Speaker A: No, agree. And I, um, if I was an internal communicator or if I'm an HR person, what I should be investing in is, is Persona development. That is the best use of synthetic data, uh, that I think in the people space you could have it. It, it's, there are challenges around it. You can't just use engagement survey data, uh, because they're so, so, so small.

Speaker B: Step back.

Speaker A: In order to get Persona bots, you need to create Personas. In order to create Personas, you need to have segmented psychographic data about your employees. And you can't segment on positivity. It has to be psychographic. It has to differentiate and have some kind of needs and preferences and kind of data in there. Because if you just segment your engagement survey data, you will have a madly positive group, you'll have a madly negative group, and you'll have some kind of shades of gray in between. But it's not very interesting. You can't, you can't use that to segment. You need to have more data about the way people tend to behave, about their preferences, their likes, their wants, their dislikes. You probably need to have some qualitative data in there too. But once you have it, you can build these incredibly rich interactive, um, Personas that really allow you to test anything you want to do. And to your point about a leader, fine. If you've got a leader who's wary about communicating and putting out communication with the organization, give them, ah, an opportunity to test those things in a completely, completely risk free environment. I think it's really, and particularly for communications. I mean it will really unlock a whole, uh, very, very interesting kind of flow of work.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, no, that's very accurate. That's great. So I want to end the episode asking you a question that I ask all of my guests. So what is one piece of advice that you give someone in this space who is looking to, to elevate their employee experience program, whether just starting or they're just trying to take it up a level.

Speaker A: Listening is not the goal. Action is the goal. Improving something is the goal. So whether they are starting out, whether they are just in a new role and they're looking at what the program is and they want to improve it. My rights exactly the same. Which is before you do anything, ask whether you can credibly act on the, the output. And if you can, then great. And go and do all of the exciting stuff that technology is, is putting into our space. But if you can't, then you need to sort the demand before you start, sort the supply. You need to invest in the capability of your organization, its leaders, its managers, its employees, whatever it is, to actually be able to take the insight you produce and do something with it. And I guess the other thing I'd say which is kind of cor from that, but it is experiment and test, use a b testing it. It's such a valuable tool and such a valuable technique to be able to just take a small group of people and do one thing to one and not one thing or one thing different to the other. To look at the outcomes and be able to extrapolate that up. Extrapolate that up. HR&EX in particular has uh, a an evidence based practice problem. It doesn't do enough about it. Uh, it relies on, I think I said the zeitgeist. So, uh, the more that you can get testing and learning into your toolkit, the better.

Speaker B: That's amazing. Thank you so much, James. And thank you so much for sharing all of your advice and all of your insights today.

Speaker A: No, my pleasure. Thanks very much. Thank you for listening to the Experience, Perspective and Ipsos podcast. Make sure to subscribe subscribe to us on all your favorite podcast apps to have new episodes sent straight to you as soon as they're published. We're also available on Spotify. If you'd like to reach out to us, please send an email to experienceperspective@ipsos.