Why Employee Listening is Crucial During Hard Times

Date: Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Time: 1:00pm Eastern / 10:00 am Pacific

Presenters: Christian Nielson, Chief Revenue Officer; Matthew Wride, President, DecisionWise

Transcript

Christian Nielsen | 00:00

Okay, well, we can, we can get moving here. It’s, uh, 11 o’clock here in, in Mountain time. Uh, we’ll, uh, we’ll launch into our, our conversation today. Uh, my name is Christian Nielsen. I’m part of the leadership team here at Decision Wise. I’m joined by decision wise President Matthew Wride. Uh, Matt and I love to do these, these webinars together and, and look forward to the conversation. Um, a couple housekeeping things that I will forget if I don’t say it right now. Uh, this webinar does qualify for Sherman HRCI credit, so, uh, we’ll just, uh, send an e an email with those details following the, the presentation today. And I will also, if you’re interested in our slides, we’ll, we’ll share those as well. I we usually get a few questions about that. And so, um, I’ll just get that out of the way up front. We will be, uh, making these slides available. Um, our conversation today is employee listening during challenging times. Uh, something that we’ve, uh, experienced, uh, from several different angles in recent years in terms of global pandemic and, uh, social unrest and, and other, uh, you know, economic concerns. And so, a an important conversation is something that we are, uh, excited to get into with the folks here.

Matt Wride | 01:23

Yeah, I was just gonna hop in. You know, a lot of times the knee-jerk reaction is, well, what can we cut? And somebody says, well, we don’t need that employee survey. Yeah. What we’re gonna try to do is arm you with the arguments that you need and maybe the phraseology to tell people why that’s not a great idea. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t trim some areas, and we’ll talk about maybe what you keep and what you can push off for a little bit. But it’s a bad idea just to cut out the survey altogether. And again, we’re gonna try to help you make compelling arguments as to why that’s the case.

Christian Nielsen | 01:54

Yeah, yeah. Uh, and you know, Matt and I, uh, in our last webinar together, we, we had more audience participation. We loved it. It was, it was a format that I think worked better for, for, for those attending and, and also for us. And so we wanna start this off with another, uh, group question. So please, uh, help us all learn and grow together. Uh, enter a response in the chat box, and we’ll keep our eye on that. And also feel free to use that chat function for question comments throughout the conversation. Um, I think last session we had so much great participation. We included those chat notes, uh, with the slides when we, when we sent those out. Yeah. Um, all right. Hello from beautiful Montesol. Yep. Theresa figured out the chat. So let’s, let’s keep that coming. We love, we love some interaction there. So, first question, and it might seem like a a a simple question, but I really want to hear Egypt. Okay. Egypt’s the, the distance to beat anyone further than from, uh, Utah than Egypt. Um, <laugh>, I promise not to comment on every comment, but I, I just, Egypt caught my attention. Um,

Christian Nielsen | 03:02

Why? Here’s the question for the group. Why do we listen to employees? Why is employee listening important? What do we hope to gain from employee listening? Please, um, give us some, some responses in that chat function. Yeah.

Matt Wride | 03:14

You know, why that chat fills up? Um, a lot of things that I hear is, you know, we wanna know how happy our employees are. We hear words like that, or we wanna know how they’re feeling about things. And that’s, that’s all right. I mean, we agree with that. Um, but there’s so much, and, and some of these are, are touching upon my point, retention health of the organization. There, there we can do a better job in this space of getting, of realizing that there’s operational data, significant operational data points that can be found from employee listening. And when you turn the spigot off, it, it just, you’re losing access to some of that stuff. Um, inform your strategy, right? Emily put that in the chat, right? What a great way to use employee listening to, to understand things. Um, so anyway,

Christian Nielsen | 04:06

I love that.

Matt Wride | 04:07

Some good stuff in there.

Christian Nielsen | 04:07

Health of the organization, retention, engagement, certainly conversations we’re very familiar with. And I mean, we run engagement surveys. We’ve mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we’ve written books on employee engagement and the employee experience. It’s certainly a key concern here and, and, and a, a part of our conversation. But I love Matt, we’re also starting to paint the bigger picture of what’s possible to employee listening in terms of, you know, to Emily’s point, informing our strategy. Uh, our employees, um, uh, know, know things that the senior leadership team D doesn’t know, things that HR doesn’t know, they’re closer to our customers in many cases. They’re, they see things on the ground. And, and so, uh, finding effective ways to, to tap into that can, can really help the organization succeed. Um, employer branding, expecta expectations versus reality. Matt, you know a lot about that in terms of Sure. Kind of that employee contract. What are we expecting and what are we actually receiving? How are, what’s that gap in our experience?

Matt Wride | 05:03

Well, you, you were mentioning, and we, it’s, this might be apocryphal and it’s just kind of an anecdotal story, but it was a story about an organization who was completing a major initiative, and they asked all the senior managers, of course, when it’s gonna be done, and everyone’s like, it’s gonna be done right on time. And then they decided to survey, uh, those on the ground, and they’re all like, oh, you know, you’re, you’re gonna be two months late, <laugh>. And sure enough, they were two months late, right? But they sort of filtered out all those people who had a bias to responding a a certain way. And they got down to the people were like, no, we’re, we’re, I really know what’s happening. I know we’re two months out. So <laugh>, you know, expectations versus reality. There’s, there’s a good one right there.

Christian Nielsen | 05:46

It reminds me of, it reminds me of, uh, years ago, I, I heard some, someone say something about ant ant colonies, and I don’t mean to suggest we’re ants or your employees are ants, but there, it was an interesting statement where they said, uh, ants are dumb, but ant colonies are smart. And there’s a concept that all of us are better than any one of us. And so being able to tap into the collective voice and to hear from different levels and different parts of the organization, um, can really expand what’s possible and, and just add to our, our pool of understanding. Uh, just looking at, at some more of these, uh, uh, belonging mention, we’re certainly going to, uh, talk about belonging as we go further here. Right? Um, the, uh, you know, one thing, a lot of this, uh, especially geared around the employee experience, you know, we we’re talking about, yes, there’s this operational data.

Christian Nielsen | 06:37

We want to kind of paint a bigger picture of what’s possible there. But a lot of our work, and a lot of employee listening is directly geared around improving the employee experience. A lot of that we we’re trying to answer two questions, two vital questions. My slide title might even suggest. Um, one is, what experience are we creating for our employees? What experience are we, uh, creating for our employees? And then the second question, is it the right experience? And is it the right experience? Is it really interesting part of this, because it’s, it depends on what we’re trying to create. Are we trying to, you know, we want an experience that invites people to stay with us, improves that retention. We want an experience that invites people to bring more of their best self. So we want that engagement. Um, we want an experience where people feel like they’ve got skin in the game, where they, they want to provide their best ideas, they wanna help us.

Christian Nielsen | 07:30

They see the organization’s success is their success. What experience are we creating for our employees? Employee listening is how we, we understand that not only understand it, but how we track it and, and seek to improve it. So we may come back to these questions. So, uh, you know, I created a, a very quick and very, uh, incomplete list of some of the, the benefits of employee listening, uh, greater innovation. We can we tap into more ideas. As we mentioned, there are people in the organization that see things that you do not see that your CEO can’t see. Uh, we, and they also have ideas, background experience, that this is where we also get the benefit of the diversity of our employee population. Uh, everyone brings their own unique lens and, and, uh, can, can contribute in different ways that

Matt Wride | 08:20

Go. Diversity lens is really important. I just want to pause there for a second. When you’re using a robust listening tool that has demographic and higher, and hierarchy layered into it, then when you ask a question, for example, like, okay, we just had a recent product launch, what are you seeing? And you’ve got a nice little pulse, maybe three or four questions, plus some open-ended comments that help you kind of sort things. You are then able to sort by diverse voices you can actually see is, are the perceptions of the new product within the organization, how do they change across area function and, and demographic changes? And so that’s the power of using more than just sending out standard surveys. But to do a, a true employee listening program, you, you need a, you need a, a good piece of software that’s based on those demographics in those hierarchies.

Christian Nielsen | 09:11

Yeah. It’s really this, this balance of how do we, uh, have something that’s, you know, reduces the burden on the organization. It’s easy to use, minimizes the, the time it takes to take the, uh, survey or to provide feedback, but also gives a sense of, or gives confidentiality and safety for people to speak up and to be honest with us all, while giving the organization the, the, the right balance of tools to parse that data, to drill down in the org, not identify who said what, but to really understand kind of trends and patterns. And so I think that the focus on the tool is a, a really great point. Um, better operational performance. Uh, you know, we often, we, we, we see this conversation kind of separated from operational metrics and performance, but, uh, understanding the employee voice and employee listening can improve how the organization is performing.

Christian Nielsen | 10:02

Improved employee experiences is where most of our, our heads go when we’re talking to employee listening. And it’s certainly, uh, a very key primary concern is where we can increase engagement. We we’re listening to understand what they want and, and how to respond to that, understand their needs, um, is probably a nicer way to say than what they want. <laugh>, um, uh, reduce turnover. Um, we, we want people to feel like this is a place they can succeed, that they have a future here. That there’s a path for them to, to, to win and, and to explore their potential as part of our organization. And we listen to understand if we’re on track with that, or if adjustments are made. Trend tracking, we’ll come back to this several times. One of the dangers of stopping your listening is you lose, you start to get gaps in your trend data.

Christian Nielsen | 10:47

And that trend data is so important, um, to be able to, to, to maintain and, and demonstrate improvement or to hold ourselves accountable if we slip. Um, that, that, and there’s accountability right there. Uh, deeper employee trust. Um, people like to be heard. We’ll, we’ll spend some time on that better in individual development. Um, feedback in employee listening, we also apply that to individual development and performance reviews in, in 360. And multi-rater feedback, uh, more accurate performance reviews. And then this, you know, it was mentioned in the chat around belonging, uh, deeper sense of belonging and connection to the organization. This is so connected to engagement. Um, we see when, when employees feel engaged in their work, they’re also feeling connected to the organization they’re working for. They feel a, an alignment of identity, and they want to be there. They feel like they belong.

Christian Nielsen | 11:41

They feel like it’s an a place. They can, as I mentioned, explore their potential and really succeed long term. And we study belonging because that, that item, if, if you’ve attended any of our previous webinars, you know, we’ve got, uh, some amazing data that just suggests how important belonging is. Um, when we belong, we engage, when we feel like this is a place I really belong, this is where I’m s supposed to be, this is a good place for me to be. Then I engage, I, I, I expand what, um, the, the sense of myself I bring to my work and my best efforts and ideas and those things. We go a little further. Well, what helps us feel like we belong? Well, we feel like we belong. If we see a growth path, we feel like we belong if we feel like the organization’s succeeding, but we also feel like we belong if we feel cared for, and we feel cared for when we feel heard.

Christian Nielsen | 12:31

I’ve heard this so many times in different formats and different focus groups and survey data, uh, comments. I feel cared for when someone listens to me. Um, and I think that that probably resonates with a lot of us, just on a personal level. When, when people listen to us, um, we feel cared for. You know, in fact, in our, our 360 feedback certification, we do this, these, uh, monthly certifications on how to debrief and coach 360 feedback. Um, one of the things I asked the participants is, when was the last time someone just sat with you for 60 to 90 minutes and said, Hey, let’s just talk about you. Or I wanna just listen to you. It’s a very meaningful experience. Um, and so we, we don’t wanna minimize how personally important, it’s just to feel heard for ourselves, but for our, our employee population as well.

Christian Nielsen | 13:20

In fact, I think I’ve got a quote to kind of also drive this home listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward when we are listened to. It creates us, makes us unfold and expand. I, I, I came across this quote as I was, uh, prepping for this webinar, and I, I loved it because I’ve never heard engagement described quite like that. It creates us, makes us unfold and expand. But this idea of expanding, um, the sense of myself I bring to the work is a, I think a really nice way of talking about engagement, but listening matters.

Christian Nielsen | 13:59

Um, Matt and I also geek out about, uh, a few of the same, same things we follow. Um, if you, if you don’t follow, highly recommend the Farnam Street blog. Um, there’s a lot of really great tools and, and frameworks and things there. One thing they’ve, they’ve talked about, and we, we’ve come across in, um, physics and, and elsewhere, is this concept of entropy. Uh, essentially what entropy means is all things trend toward disorder. A closed system, if we don’t actively manage it, it things gravitate towards chaos and disorder. Uh, I’ll read the, the thing here more specifically. The second law of thermodynamic states that as one goes forward in time, the net entropy degree of disorder of any isolated or closed system will always increase, or at least stay the same. So basically what this is saying is if we don’t actively manage something, it’s going to tend to trend towards chaos and disorder.

Christian Nielsen | 14:54

And so sometimes we can, you know, just coast along on a strong culture and, and, and things can, uh, just happily, uh, you, you know, work out. But more, more often than not, you need fire tenders. You need, you need to be listening and actively, um, taking a, taking a role in making sure that the shape of the culture and the employee experience is headed into a positive direction, leading to outcomes you’re comfortable with from engagement and, and retention and all those good things. But also for the performance of the, the, the business as well. And so, making sure that employee listening continues is just really important in, in the sense of that we, we’ve got to, um, keep managing the, the field we’re working in.

Matt Wride | 15:39

One of the challenges with employee listening is you’re often looking at lagging indicators, right? Stuff that’s coming well, after, what we’re trying to do is shorten that, that lag time. And what I find is, if you’re gonna wait for exits and, and people leaving as to be your indicator of bad manager or a a scenario that’s not working, you’ve missed the opportunity to shorten that lag period by using survey data, right? Because you can, you can pulse, you could pulse at a quarter, uh, you can do an ENPS co pulse on a quarterly basis, and suddenly you, you’ve taken what makes take someone a year to get fed up and then look and find an apl, uh, a replacement or another place to go and all that, that might take 18 months. But if you’re puling, you can start to see that data within a quarter. Yeah. And so you’ve shortened your lagging indicator dramatically. And if you’re going to manage entropy, if you’re gonna manage this complex system, even if you just have 50 employees, or even if you have 30,000, you’re trying to manage this complex system, you know, it’s going towards entropy. You have to be, have these indicators out there to these, these signposts to help you kind of keep track of where you need to make interventions. So

Christian Nielsen | 16:51

I, I love that. And, and, you know, it’s certainly the direction we’re going with a lot of our methodology and also our products and tools and, and, uh, and, and technology. We wanna facilitate shorter bursts of, of, of surveys and more meaningful simplified metrics. So ENPS, you know, employee net promoter score is a great one that you can do more frequently and kind of measure, measure the level of net entropy, or, you know, are we, are we on track? Are we losing track or, or losing the, the trajectory we, we want? Um, you know, even the net belonging score, we, we’ve, we had some success with that as well. So there’s some really great, uh, case to be made for more frequent listening in addition to. And, um, you know, these traditional anchor service, uh, another group question. So please, uh, again, help us out in the chat. I’m just curious, uh, about this, especially if you’ve got experience from a current organization or, or previous experience. But the question is, why do we often stop listening to employees during challenging times when there’s a crisis, economic or otherwise? Um, you know, why do we often shut off the, the employee listening, uh, very quickly, just awkwardly stare at the chat until we see some engagement from the

Matt Wride | 18:15

We don’t have time. That’s, that’s when I Yeah, that’s great.

Christian Nielsen | 18:19

Overwhelmed. Oh, yeah. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>.

Matt Wride | 18:21

Well, that happens, right? If, if you lose people on your team, and suddenly you’ve got all the normal things you have to do, and there’s, and it’s like, well, where am I gonna find the time to manage an employee listing program?

Christian Nielsen | 18:32

Oh, these are great. Yeah. And, and, you know, just painted a picture there too.

Matt Wride | 18:37

Don’t know what to ask or say. Sorry, I just wanted to catch that before that left.

Christian Nielsen | 18:42

Yeah, well, and, and feeling overwhelmed, and, and it reminds me of when we, when we first saw, you know, when we were all experiencing the, the early days of COVID-19, and most HR teams, suddenly their full-time job was moving people to remote work in a lot of industries, a lot of organizations. And, and some, you know, we, we manage, or we, we measure stress levels of different departments and things. And hr, during those first few months of covid, uh, the stress was, you know, through the roof. They had to scramble. They had to kinda reorganize the way people worked. They had to write new policy, they had to get, uh, you know, equipment out and things like that. And they were so focused on the logistics, but also safety and employee perceptions that yeah, it was, it was difficult to survey there. So I, I think it makes a lot of sense. Um, doesn’t become a focus, um, managing other issues. Yeah, we get busy. Other things happen. Um, yeah, you’re right, Matt, that’s a great point.

Matt Wride | 19:41

We don’t want to hear the answers from Tiffany and Casey, um, right. Of the Pandora’s box of asking questions. You know,

Christian Nielsen | 19:51

And that’s a fair, fair points on some of these. You know, we, we often say, don’t ask a question if you’re not willing or able to respond to it. You know, so the, the classic cases, should we ask compensation questions? I’m like, okay, if it comes back low, are you willing to do anything about it? Um, or the other question is, did you ask a comp question last year? Because if you, if you ask one of those questions, they’ll be looking for that going forward. But it’s a fair point that if we can’t respond, do we ask? Um, the other, the other point on this is, um, you know, from, from healthcare, this concept of do no harm. You know, we, we don’t want to get it wrong, uh, and make things worse. We want, we want things to get better if we’re asking employees questions.

Christian Nielsen | 20:35

And so the Pandora’s Box, um, comment is, is makes a lot of sense to, I think a lot of us, um, these are, these are great things. So let’s, let’s talk a little bit about kind of what we hear. You know, if I, if I’m simplifying it into two categories now, there’s a lot of reasons, but if I’m simplifying into two cli, uh, two categories of what clients told us when they would stop listening is budget. Either we can’t afford to listen if, you know, if we’re worried about keeping the lights on this, to Matt’s point earlier, this is often an easy thing from someone disconnected from employee listening to go in and say, Hey, I know how we can save a little money. Um, but it’s, um, of course, pretty shortsighted to do that. And then the other one is, oh,

Matt Wride | 21:18

Go ahead and budget, I was just gonna say is they brought up his time people money. It’s like, it’s, it’s everything. All the resources needed to sort of keep that going. That’s, you hear you see that as part of budget.

Christian Nielsen | 21:32

Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s not just, it’s not just dollars and, uh, cents, it’s resources, time and people, uh, bad news. Uh, we don’t want to hear it. That’s, you know, a lot of you you called that we don’t want to hear it, or we don’t have an answer for it. That’s a really great point. You know, there’s a, Tiffany just mentioned pressure gets applied to answer questions. We don’t have the answers for how many of us knew exactly what COVID-19 was, when, when our employees were asking about it in the early days, or, or what was gonna be the new normal, you know, we were learning every day. Um, uh, and kind of, we can chat about that as well. Um, so here’s the, the reality kind of in response to those two, if I’m simplifying it, the opportunity costs of, of not listening are huge.

Christian Nielsen | 22:17

Um, we’ll, we’ll get into that a little bit, but it’s very difficult to, to build the, the momentum of employee listening and the trust from the employee population, and then to shut that off. Employees feel it, and they sense it, and they also connect it to you, stop listening when it mattered. Most, you know, the, these, these times of crisis, they’re often when they, they, we as employees feel the most scared, anxious, and we’re looking, uh, to be understood and also to for more communication. Uh, and so the opportunity costs are, are, are huge. Not just trust in, in that, but the, you know, what you’re missing in terms of information,

Matt Wride | 22:56

We’re taking the family to Disneyland in a month, and that’s gonna be a really good time for me to ask, how do you feel about me as your dad? Right? <laugh>, it’s gonna be a great time, <laugh>, but not, not in the middle of, you know, meltdown mode or school project, or mom and dad are fighting in the bedroom or whatever, like,

Christian Nielsen | 23:16

You know. Yeah. We, we, there’s, there’s value. And, and maybe that leads to this next one. The bad news. We don’t want to hear it. I, I just got back from spring break with my family, and I, I didn’t ask, but may and, and because I maybe took the ostrich approach there, I stuck my head in the sand to, to Scott’s point, but

Matt Wride | 23:33

Well, why you get to that? I just wanna bring up, you know, one of the reasons Covid to 19 engagement levels jumped is authentic leadership and people getting up in front of, you know, all of a sudden the CEO was not in a suit. She was in her house. You could see her dogs. And there’s things like, I don’t know, <laugh>. Suddenly leadership became really relatable. And we, we looked at the, why did those, those engagement scores go up? And what we found was it was that connection, right? It was that sort of authentic leadership was happening. Yeah. And then that went away. ’cause we went back to kind of our modes and our styles, but, um, you just, you can’t, there’s, there’s value in just being authentic and not putting your head in the sand. As someone had mentioned about, uh, yeah. Oh, you gotta get this, sorry. You have to get this chat from Tiffany. We got asked by an employee in December, 2019, should we be concerned about COVID-19 and what was happening in China? I said, no. And then I looked foolish. You know, look at that, look at that early indicator there. Anyway, sorry.

Christian Nielsen | 24:37

No, it’s a good, it is a great one. And, and I think we’ve all been there. We’ve, we’ve, you know, with the information we had, we gave an answer. And, and, and, you know, history proved us wrong. And, you know, I think is, if I look back at the employee surveys that I was involved in, and the listening and presentations I was involved in during kind of the, the depths of COVID-19, um, there was a, a pretty profound sense of appreciation from a lot of employees that, one, from increased communication, they were happy to hear more from their, their leaders. And I noticed very quickly they were happy, even if their leader said, we don’t know. Here’s the best of that. We know right now, and we don’t have all the answers, but here’s what we’re committed to. You know, we’re committed to making sure everyone’s safe. We’re committed to staying on top of this. So, you know, I, I think a lot of us, myself included, feel like we have to have all the answers. Um, but there’s a way to be authentic in saying, we don’t know. What do you think? Um, how can we, you know, what’s the right way for us to, to move forward together? Now, people still need to feel like someone’s in control, and there’s a leader at the helm. But I think there’s an authentic way to, to also introduce Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, when we don’t have all those

Matt Wride | 25:47

Answers. Scott mentioned empathy, and I think what he’s getting at is when we get out there and face hard truths, we’re, we’re demonstrating empathy.

Christian Nielsen | 25:55

Well, and I think he, he might have been em empathizing with a dad on vacation too,

Matt Wride | 26:00

Right? Yes. Now, and you, and there’s a ton of good evidence in Harvard Business Review about how empathetic leadership is absolutely vital and has proven to be the key, especially through COVID-19, prevented an wonderful case study on that issue. And empathy’s now considered a core vital leadership trait. Yeah. You know, so, or if you believe in the trait theory, but anyway.

Christian Nielsen | 26:23

Yeah. Well, I, I think, I think the, you know, empathy and authenticity is pretty, pretty, uh, mm-Hmm. <affirmative> strong currency with the employee population.

Matt Wride | 26:32

Yeah. Strong.

Christian Nielsen | 26:33

You know, they, they don’t need perfection. Um, and they’re, and, and all of us, our radar is up for propaganda and inauthenticity from, from every angle. And so when we see an authentic leader who, who demonstrates they care and they’re listening, um, and also willing to, to engage in those tough, tough, uh, conversations. It, it goes a long way. In fact, kind of, that was our response to the bad news. We don’t want to hear it. We’ve learned the best leaders, the best organizations face hard truths. Um, you know, Matt, I think you had kind of that buffalo, uh, an analogy that kind of, I thought was, was pretty Yeah,

Matt Wride | 27:10

I could share that. I mean, you’ve heard it, and it’s sort of, kind of homespun wisdom, but there’s a difference between how cattle typically respond to, and this, you’ll see it in the, in the, in western Colorado, for example, on these planes. These, these storms come and historically cattle run away from the, the storm, thereby increasing the duration. They’re in it. Buffalo tend to face the storm, turn into it, and start actively going into it, thereby shortening the duration of the storm. So sometimes, uh, a phrase we use here at decision wise is, are we facing the wind? Right? Do we turn into the wind? And there, there can be a, a huge benefit for that. And I, I like that metaphor.

Christian Nielsen | 27:49

I do

Matt Wride | 27:49

Too. I also like buffalo. So that’s, I do

Christian Nielsen | 27:51

Too. I do, uh, you know, there that, that item around the facing hard truths, three things cannot be long hid in the sun, the moon, and the truth. You know, whether, whether or not you’re asking or not, people feel a certain way and you can get it out in the open and address it, or it fester and, and really, uh, undermine kind of the employee experience and, and what’s happening at your organization. And, you know, one time, I, I, Matt, you, you know, we’re both history fans and you talked about George Washington and, and, and I was really struck by one thing you said about him, one of the reasons he was a, an effective leader wasn’t necessarily as military prowess as much as he saw the world the way it is, not the way he wanted it to be. I think there’s something in that for organizations, for all of us in terms of let’s understand the other people’s experience so that we can address it.

Matt Wride | 28:44

Yeah. There was a question from Don about if, and I’m just gonna read it perhaps there. This me, she says, but there’s been a huge shift in the pool of employees. It seems it’s no longer about what you can do for the organization, but what can I do for the employee? I know that sounds crass, but no one seems to want to work anymore. How, how do we even pull that? Yes. So

Christian Nielsen | 29:04

That’s a, that’s a tough one. And, and, and my, my tongue in cheek responses, uh, higher, higher people that grew up on farms,

Matt Wride | 29:12

Uh, well, this is, I’ll, I’ll

Christian Nielsen | 29:14

Say we’re seeing that elsewhere

Matt Wride | 29:15

Yeah. Hire people to grow up on farms. But this is where, um, one of the things we’re, we’re big on is, and what we’re rolling out is performance reviews, more appraisal and less performance management. There has to be some performance appraisal. So we can start to get balance in our employee listening. Yeah. If we’re always taking input of, well, you tell us how we’re doing, you’re telling us how we’re doing, and we’re never saying, well, let’s focus on how you are doing Right. As an employee. And so one of the things we’re trying to, to make sure is that as we offer our tools, particularly in our platform, that we ensure that we’ve got both, we’re bi-directional in the sense of how we’re listening, because, and so, Don, to your question, I would say, we have got to help employees understand that there’s expectations, and we’re gonna measure those as well about how you perform that. This is not just, Hey, come and experience us, and, and we just wanna know about your experience, but you are here to contribute.

Christian Nielsen | 30:13

And I love that. And a really great Don, I think a lot of us have, have seen and felt that that same thing, you know, one, one thought on that is the way we talk about employee engagement. We also talk about this concept of the 50 50 proposition. There’s a portion of it owned by the employee, a portion of it owned by the organization. And we’re, and I do agree that right now it feels like the, the larger, larger cultural trend is to say, Hey, no, it’s all the organization. That’s just not true. People get to choose if they’re going to engage, but that language is very helpful. And I, we found a lot of success introducing that to organizations to say, you can’t build employee engagement. You can build an invitation to engage. And that’s really where the edge of our, our organizational influence is. We we’re building an employee experience. That is, we’re doing our best to tune that experience, to invite people to bring their best selves. But we have to recognize that, um, those employees get to choose if they’re, they’re going to engage. In fact, our CEO, Tracy Maillet wrote a book on that subject too, about why employees do or do not choose to, to engage or, or they pass on, um, some of the opportunities around them. That’s called swipe.

Matt Wride | 31:22

Yeah. We’ll include a link to swipe if, for those that are interested in the materials when they go out, it’s, uh, swipe and it’s, and, and it’s available on Amazon. So, pardon the shameless plug, but there you go. There

Christian Nielsen | 31:32

You go. It’s a good question. Um, well, let’s go to another question for the group. So knowing that it’s, it’s one of the things that, that often gets minimized, uh, during tough times. How do we ensure employee listening remains a priority? How do you convince leaders, Hey, we’ve gotta keep the faucet on, we’ve gotta keep the lines of communication open in these channels for listening to our, our, um, employee population.

Matt Wride | 31:58

So I, you know, that, I have a strong perspective on this, and I think the best way to do that is that to evaluate is your, are your employee listening campaigns providing data, the right operational data, data that’s really helpful. You know, frequent ENPS scores, um, more than just happy employees, thumbs up, thumbs down. But really, you, you’ve got a robust campaign. You’re getting exit data. You’re, you’re understanding how people who are recently onboarded in, and you’ve got this all stitched together, you know what’s going to, then, then people become reliant on that. They realize that it’s useful, and that’s going to keep this as a, as a priority. But you have to have, you have to have a robust plan. Number two, you can’t hoard the data. And we’re, and I sometimes get the sense that HR loves to sort of hoard the data. And I, and I’m not, I just gonna, I’m just gonna say it as in the sense of it’s your job to get the data in and out to operational leaders as quickly as possible. Um, and, and so that they can use it if you’re, if you’re getting exit data in, get it to them quickly so that they can see and start to rely on that. So anyway,

Christian Nielsen | 33:05

Yeah. Well, I, I almost joke, when, uh, we deliver results to an organization, we should almost give them an expiration date because it’s, it’s a, it’s a real tragedy when, you know, we, we help them collect the data, get it in, and then they don’t do anything with it for six months. Uh, because the stuff needs to be acted on when it’s, when it’s fresh and distributed. And to your point, not hoarded, which I think we’ve got a couple more slides on it, um, get, uh, let’s say get all level, all levels of management involved. I love that. Theresa, we’re we, in fact, we’re gonna, we’re gonna jump right on that here. Um, one, one little quote that it’s not the worst one to have in your back pocket. It usually people like this one, but listen to the whispers, or soon you’ll be listening to the screams.

Christian Nielsen | 33:51

Um, that’s often what I’ve, I’ve told teams that have thought, well, maybe we’ll pause for a year. I’m like, yes, you can pause for a year. Uh, but there’s gonna be a cost to that in terms of the employee experience and also losing some ground and potentially some of these things where you get some early indicators from your employee listing, you can avoid some, some significant organizational personal pain, uh, in the future. And so listen to the, the whispers, or soon you’ll be listening to the Screams. I love that. And, but kind of going to Theresa’s point, and Matt, to your point as well, we don’t want to hoard the data. Um, uh, we don’t want it to, to, to be at one place. In fact, there’s two things that I, I, I pitch. When I would talk to executive teams about their, in, in their res, excuse me, their employee engagement results.

Christian Nielsen | 34:39

One, I’d say, okay, we’ve gotta figure out how we’re gonna respond to this feedback. We’ve gotta take some action. But as important, we also need to move up the continuum in this maturity model, which means we need to expand the ownership of the employee experience. So the way this progresses, I I, you know, if we look at the, this chart, it starts at the bottom. If we’re not measuring or doing anything actively, we have this passive employee experience. Might be good, might be bad, might be in the middle, um, a little bit of both. Um, but as we start to take an active role in shaping it, we usually see baseline employee experience, where here we’re measuring it, we’re taking some action, and we’re communicating the results. And in this place, this is great. A lot of companies come to us at this level. Um, it’s our first survey, or they, they’ve done a few. Um, the, the limitation here is it’s seen as HR survey, KHR, you can have your survey, what are you gonna do with it? And, and there’s, it’s an unfair, uh, effort to put all on, on the HR to be responsible for the action. Now, HR should be the keeper of the flame. They should be the internal experts, but they, uh, they can’t be the solely responsible for all the actions. And so there, and that

Matt Wride | 35:53

Just jump in. That’s what I’m trying to say is the more we, the more we let others define this as HR data, the more we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Yeah. Because this is data about leadership and about operational things. So you are a key cog in, you’re the expert in knowing how to gather and helping and facilitate. But do not let others define this as this is just HR data. No. This is core operational data that relates likely to the most significant expense item on your income statement, which is labor. Yeah. Okay. So we, we tweak and spend all sorts of money on all of these cost setting ideas on other I line items on the, on the p and l, but we don’t wanna do that for the most expensive item.

Christian Nielsen | 36:38

Very good point.

Matt Wride | 36:39

Very good point. Right? So don’t define this as HR data. Define this as, this is me as HR helping you have operational data for one of your most, for the most likely, most significant line item on your, on your, uh, expense side.

Christian Nielsen | 36:54

I love that. Well, well, well put, and as you move up in this, so if I’m in HR and I’m, I’m in that baseline ex level, first thing I’m thinking is, okay, how do I get commitment and buy-in from the, the senior leadership team? And from there, we start to expand to all levels of leadership. To, to theres’s point there, how do we get managers to understand they sh help shape the employee experience, the way they talk about the overall organization influences their employees experience and, and their engagement. And, and so how do we get the entire organization ultimately, we’re trying to get to a point where every employee realizes that every day we co-create what it feels like to work here. And I play a role in that. What’s my role? How do I, how do I shape this? And how do I shape it in positive, meaningful ways? And employee listening makes those things possible. And to your point, Matt, um, this needs to be positioned as strategic. You know, a lot of times we, we, we use the phrase just sometimes executives kind of discount this as HR trust falls in, you know, uh, group hugs. And, and it’s not, it, this is strategic data for your most valuable assets in the, in the organization.

Matt Wride | 38:05

Yeah.

Christian Nielsen | 38:06

And, and to kind of drive that point home, you need to get the right data to the right people at the right time. I mean, this is, this is something we’re gonna be using going forward. It’s, it’s our design principle. Um, you know, and I, in other presentations, you’ve heard me talk about three key groups to consider senior leaders, HR and, uh, frontline managers or manager, any manager, uh, because there’s a lot that happens with the manager team. Dynamic HR controls a lot of the, the, the people systems and the connections between senior leaders and, and the individual teams. And then senior leaders have, uh, some things that, that they control that only they can control and, and influence in terms of, uh, the culture of the organization, strategy and communication, those types of things is as well. All of this information, anything you capture in employee listening, one of the ways, best ways to keep it adding value and to make sure that it, it always has a place in your organization, is making sure you’re getting the right data to the right people at the right time. Alright?

Matt Wride | 39:08

Right. In fact, we often start with, let’s talk about a survey, right? The, the gut reaction when people wanna sit and talk about listening campaigns. Let’s start, let’s start defining what we’re gonna ask, but you need to go to this set of questions first. Yeah. Before you even start thinking about your question, you’ve gotta think of how you’re gonna collect it. What are you gonna, and how you’re gonna route the data to the right people. Yeah. So

Christian Nielsen | 39:33

I wanted to talk through a few different channels of, uh, of employee listening, because I think it, it helps us kind of talk about, well, do we change our strategy when times are tough? We know employee listening is important. We know we need to keep, uh, keep it going, but how might it shift a bit? And so I’m gonna use some, some slides that we have created for our, our platform, um, our latest release of our platform, which we’re all very excited about, to talk a little bit about how we think of the different categories and deploy listening. And, and this can kind of help paint a picture of where we’re, where we’re going, why we where’re going these different directions, or where we, where we can keep the lights on for, um, employee listening during tough times. Um, so in our platform, we kind of break it into two big categories. Organizational listening, feedback from your employees about their experience working for your organization, and multi-rater three or 360 feedback. And that’s feedback from employees about a single individual.

Matt Wride | 40:30

Yeah. But this is, this goes my point. This is that other direction where we wanna send feedback. We don’t want just always, Hey, how do you feel about us? Now we’re going to let others observe and talk about behaviors about you.

Christian Nielsen | 40:43

Yeah.

Matt Wride | 40:44

So,

Christian Nielsen | 40:45

Well, and it goes back to those two vital questions and that, and we use that as a, and, and by the way, it’s a really great self-coaching question. You know, not only what, or what are we, what experience are we creating for our employees as an organization, but as an individual, what experience am I creating for those around me? And we can use employee, uh, you know, those around them to help, um, look in the mirror that way. Um, so let’s, let’s look at each of these categories. If I’m gonna focus on employee, or excuse me, organizational listening, we have some other sub subcategories. Um, and these not a exhaustive list of actual examples here at the bottom, but these categories help, help kind of think through different ways to listen to our employees point in time listening. This is kind of the most traditional and, and a, a really key component of a, of a listening strategy. But that, that would include what we call anchor surveys or your big annual employee service. Anything that has a start and a stop administration window saying, Hey, we’re gonna turn on a survey and ask about your experience working here, and that it’s gonna run for two weeks. We close it, we compile the results. That type of thing. That’s point in time listening. And it’s important, uh, pulse surveys are also point in time, uh, usually a little bit smaller. Sometimes it’s, um, follow up for an engagement

Matt Wride | 42:01

Survey. Yeah. They’re periodic, but they’re point in time. They reflect a, you know, our ENPS comes out and it’s measuring what’s happening at that point in time. Now it’s scheduled Yep. But it’s, it’s still point in time.

Christian Nielsen | 42:13

Yeah. And it could also be those, the ad hoc listening things. So, you know, we were suddenly run, you know, running return to work surveys and things that we’re, we’re trying to understand, you know, okay, the, the landscape shift and we need to listen to our employees. Let’s run a pulse about a particular topic, or it’s this continuous point in time, uh, listening that we, we schedule the other side of this chart, ongoing listening, this would be event triggered. That’s kinda what we talk about, where it’s something in the employee lifecycle or something triggers a, a listening, uh, survey. And so onboarding surveys, exit surveys, anniversary surveys, promotional role change surveys, birthday or recognition training follow up. There’s an event happened, it triggered, uh, uh, a listening instrument for one or more people. You know, you can think for exit surveys, it’s usually one at a time, hopefully, uh, one at a time type of triggering, uh, triggered event. But then, uh, you know, training might be that cohort that experienced that training. We want to, to run that.

Matt Wride | 43:13

This is where we’re, we’re changing from what used to be called traditional climate surveys or employee engagement surveys, where it was just sort of this event and we just, it was like the census, right? We’re just gonna send out this survey. And what, what we’re trying to do is understand successful principles from customer experience and use that. And CX uses a lot of event triggered surveys. Hey, we noticed you just rented from us. Tell us about your experience. So this is how you, you can adopt some of those best practices from CX into the employee experiences. You don’t want to just always send out, you know, these, these, these one year, once year surveys, you know? Yeah. The census. You want to have these event triggered and then, and then, and then this stitches together, um, um, a a better, more holistic view of kind of what it’s like. And it helps us combat recency bias and some of the other challenges we face with large scale point in time surveys. Yeah.

Christian Nielsen | 44:15

I think a, a really great point. Um, the, then the last category all is on. Sometimes you, we want to leave the, the, the phone <laugh> at the ready there. And so it’s suggestion box or whistleblower, uh, these channels that the employees can initiate when they give feedback. It’s not triggered by an event. It’s not the

Matt Wride | 44:34

Scheduled admin just to share one. We have an always on suggestion box. It’s anonymous, and we learned that we needed two, a bigger garbage can in a production room. Yeah. Just dumb. But it was just, oh, okay. We didn’t know. Yeah. You know, it was helpful

Christian Nielsen | 44:49

And, and a garbage, you know, for $15, we can, we can respond to that. But also, you know, more important than the garbage is that, oh, someone heard me.

Matt Wride | 44:59

Oh, that’s responds. Yeah. That was the real value of that whole thing is I said something and all of a sudden a garbage can appeared. Mm-Hmm. <laugh>, someone

Christian Nielsen | 45:06

Listened, someone listened. Um, so if we’re thinking through organizational listening, these are some categories that kind of help think through the lens of, okay, what do we have? What do we need? Where, where do we have an opportunity to, to expand our listening? If we’re going the other side of this, it’s that multi-rater feedback. Um, if we’re simplifying this, it’s into two categories, individual development. So 360 feedback for development. And, um, usually best when it’s accompanied by a, a facilitated debrief, uh, which is why we do those certifications and then individual performance. Um, the world hasn’t realized the full potential of multi-rater feedback for performance reviews. It really, and Matt, you’re really passionate about this. You can speak more eloquently about it than I can, but it, it adds a level of fairness. It adds a level of clarity around, oh, this is what, how other people see me. This is how other people’s, you know, are experiencing my performance at work. And it’s, it’s not just, here’s how my manager felt when they were forced to sit down and do this one once a year review. It’s coming from a, a few different directions. Yeah. And creates a more holistic, uh, view.

Matt Wride | 46:17

You’re right, I am passionate about it. I mean, about four or five years ago set, I kept hearing, uh, the one thing we can’t get right are performance reuse. Like it’s universal. They’re hated. Everybody’s like, what do we do? And there’s sort of like this collective throw up your arms and like, I don’t know. And so I looked, I, I, I went on a, a mission and I studied almost every single I I bought a, I bought a textbook and I studied almost every single form of performance review out there. And what I can tell you is what’s perceived as most equitable and procedurally fair are multi-rater. And then we folded in other elements, uh, uh, in our system, for example. So we’re not just saying, but I, but if you want employees to, to have greater confidence, you need to start asking from those around them, those they work with, and, and let them even choose a couple of advocates on their side, and it begins to balance out the picture. Um, and so just as you said, I don’t think the world quite appreciates, there is one basic strategy we can use to, to make a lot of headway in performance review and, and particularly for its appraisal. And that is multi-rater feedback. Yeah.

Christian Nielsen | 47:24

So well, well said. So, um, these categories kinda help paint a, a picture in terms of, you know, what are we talking about when we’re talking about employee listing? You know, other, other directions of employee listing might be some things that we don’t necessarily recommend, but are out there in terms of, um, you know, passive listening in terms of like monitoring email channels and things. And there’s some, some value in that, but in our experience that feels like big brothers watching and it’s, it doesn’t necessarily do great things for trust and, and things like that. So we, we prefer the active, uh, feedback collection and listening through, um, survey instruments and assessments. Um, okay. So I, I wanted to kind of take all that and simplify it into a view. So if we’re talking about a very common and robust, um, annual listening campaign, you’d have usually your anchor surveys, your annual engagement survey.

Christian Nielsen | 48:18

If we, we think those a a year apart here on this little chart. Uh, we fill in some of the gaps with some pulsing, uh, one or more just to follow up midyear, uh, on some of the trends that we learned or themes that we learned in the annual survey. We would also potentially round that out with some targeted pulsing. If there’s some current events or things we need information on, um, maybe operational metrics or ideas that we, or, um, uh, you know, shifting, uh, uh, organizational needs that kind of, you know, I, I sometimes m and a activity facilitates a pulse or something in your organization. Uh, we’d also like to see some of those event triggered surveys. Uh, onboarding and exit as a, at a minimum anniversary are great. We, we use anniversary surveys as kind of a stratified pulse because you can, it, it’s a really wonderful time to collect feedback.

Christian Nielsen | 49:08

Hey, thanks for another wonderful year with our organization. Uh, please, uh, you know, respond to a two question survey, and it’s usually net promoter and then an open comment question, but event triggered. Um, and then that kind of ex monitoring just to see how we’re doing. And then of course, we’d, we’d recommend, uh, some of that individual development and performance, uh, appraisal through multi-rater feedback. If at all possible, this would be a very good, uh, kind of approach to listening. Now, let’s say we have to cut back because times are tough or there’s some challenges, or we’re so, uh, we’re stretched thin and we have a very lean team. Um, what would we keep as, as kind of a minimum viable listening campaign? Well, at a minimum, I’d keep that annual survey going. Uh, it, it’s, it’s a pretty big miss in your data. If you’ve, if you miss a year on that and you, you, you lose that trend.

Christian Nielsen | 50:01

You also, um, you also lose, uh, some trust people notice, especially as we’ve mentioned, Hey, you quit listening when things got hard, uh, why aren’t we investing in that? So you wanna keep your annual survey going and at a minimum, I’d, I’d keep your onboarding and exit exit data. They, they leave and they’re gone. Um, and, and that, that information there, there’s a different level of trust that you don’t have as much to lose. They’ll, they’ll be very brutally honest in exit data if you, if you capture it correctly, and you don’t wanna miss out, out on that. Uh, because once they, they leave, it’s gone. And so, um, if we’re, if we’re cutting back, because we absolutely have to, this is a, a decent level, and I would, I should have also put, uh, 360 in red because you like to have some of that going to normalize feedback in the organization and to help people.

Christian Nielsen | 50:50

And not only that, I would recommend that you, you keep it not in a punitive place, or it’s not just for under performers or a remedial, because then it gets a stigma that, oh, oh, I’m getting 360 feedback. I must be underperforming. And it, and it’s great for those underperforming situations, but we don’t want it to carry only that brand. It should be something you’re investing in your high potentials with. It should be something as part of leadership development and, and other places as well. So, um, Matt, I don’t know if you’d add anything to Yeah,

Matt Wride | 51:22

I, I, I think that there’s, if you have been able to effectively set up an ENPS pulse that’s on a regular cadence, I would not scrap that either. I would keep that, there’s a lot of work to getting those set up. And when they’re set up, they can give you really good consistent data at an appropriate level for inter interval. For hr, HR data is not real time data. And this is what I mean by that is you don’t need to know what your current inventory count is by bar scan. You know, you sell something and immediately at debits or, or reduces the inventory count or credit inventory. What, what you need to do is you need to go every month, two months, you know, in that quarterly range is pretty frequent. And if you’ve set up the time and the effort, the work to get that back is pretty hard. So that’s my only other comment is if you have that, um, it’s a very effective pulse that I would not get rid of.

Christian Nielsen | 52:15

Yeah, I think, I think that’s a good point. And, and, and maybe the, the higher rule for this would be anywhere you’ve got a meaningful trend, you wanna protect that. And ENPS is is such a valuable trend to, to monitor and keep going, that it would be a shame to, to discontinue that, but protect, protect, just the trendable data. Um, all right. A few more reasons to listen and we’ll, we’ll wrap up here and, and open it up for any, any questions. Again, not a, a complete list here, but I, I kind of like just simplifying it to this. We listen to understand our trend. Where are we headed? If we, if we’re keep going this direction, are we gonna like, where we end up, we’re getting the results we’re looking for, we listen so we don’t lose ground. We see a lot of organizations make incredible progress and then stop listening for a year or two.

Christian Nielsen | 53:03

Maybe they get a new leader, they, it just falls off their radar and then when they, they pick it back up, they’re unpleasantly surprised in many cases because they’re like, oh, we lost ground. We were, we were on our way to somewhere, something pretty great. And we, we’ve kind of slid backwards on that. We listen to expand ownership of the employee experience. That means it’s not just hrs job. We want everyone to understand that they’re responsible for, for culture, for employee experience, and that we’re shaping this, this organizational experience together. And we listen to improve. We’ve certainly listened to improved employee experience, but also the organization as a whole. Customer experience. Ex equals cx, as we often say, and we listen to, we show, to show we care. Employees know when they’re being heard or when they’re, they’re being ignored. Um, and one of the thing best ways to show that we care is even when times are tough, we still made it a priority to listen. That goes a long ways. The information we get is valuable, but even more so is the experience for our employees to, to understand that they’re valued, that they’re heard, that they’re part of a conversation that affects them.

Matt Wride | 54:10

I just wanted to jump into is as you are building your case for why these things are important, why you need more resources to run employee listening, or why the budget should not be reduced or whatever scenario you’re dealing with. Your job as the HR leader is to make sure that you have defined the successes that happen through listening. One of the biggest problems we have is we do not track our own successes. Lemme give you an example here at decision wise, probably six years ago we had a problem with, uh, we couldn’t keep people very long, and that’s because our survey data told us they didn’t feel that they had any growth. Um, pathways and Christian and I, and, and our other partner, Dave, worked really hard on changing that. And now we, our retention has gone up because we have and created and celebrate growth pathways. Well, if no, we know that, ’cause we worked on it, but, but if we were buried in a larger organization, no one else would know that and see the value of what that did for us, because no one’s tracking that. So your job is to track the successes and that becomes your best evidence and argument for why this stuff matters. Yeah,

Christian Nielsen | 55:23

Well said, well said. I think I’ve just got, uh, one more slide before questions here, but, uh, a garden takes work. You know, going back to this idea of entropy, if you don’t manage it, it things will overgrow, it won’t be, uh, something we’ve designed or, or is, is just, it’s gonna happen the way it’s gonna happen. Um, but if we want something to be productive, something we can manage and steer and shape together, it does take work. It takes active involvement, and that’s really what we’re talking about here. Uh, we want the information so that we can respond, so that we can build trust and, and so that we can build something we’re all proud of together. And so it’s so important to keep that those channels open even when times get tough even more so when times get tough to, to listen, to demonstrate, and to learn and, and to work to improve the organization together.

Christian Nielsen | 56:13

Um, with that, uh, uh, you know, I’ll, I’ll flash this up here. If we, if we’ve got any questions, please feel free to enter in the, in the, in the chat a little bit of a different conversation topic for us, but certainly something we feel very passionate for. I, I don’t think we’ve seen, you know, beginning of the, this year we saw, we heard a lot of economic concerns. I don’t think those have been as realized and for very fortunately, we’re not seeing, uh, as much pain as we we were expecting. And so people are still listening, but we, we wanna make sure that it’s a priority that’s on people’s top of mind.

Matt Wride | 56:50

There’s a good question from Theresa, and she’s referencing the golden mean from Greek, uh, yeah, uh, from geometry, but the golden timeframe she calls it for following up on a employee survey, how long is too long for them to expect feedback? Do you have a sense

Christian Nielsen | 57:04

How long is too long for them to expect feedback?

Matt Wride | 57:07

Yeah, like how long do we have to really sort of get in, you know? And one of the things you can do is you buy time when you, when you, when you say, this is what we heard and this is what we’re gonna go do. So if you don’t, if you miss that step, you don’t have as much time, but if you can say, this is what we heard and these are the things we’re doing, and then you report on progress, you can buy yourself a lot, uh, more time.

Christian Nielsen | 57:28

Yeah. And, and here’s some rough, rough numbers that I, I’ve used in the past, and this is again, grain of salt. Different, different times and different organizations, different needs, but you know, with surveys is usually open for two weeks. Uh, when within it being closed, usually within 24 hours we’re getting the word out to the, or at least preliminary look to the HR team. Uh, within two weeks after that, we want the executives to have a, a, a, a debrief of the results and then immediately following that, that to be cascaded throughout the organization. Um, in terms of following and, and, sorry. And also as soon as they’ve had their, the executives have had their debrief, they need to get that note out to the population. And that does buy time and goodwill in terms of, we heard you, here’s what we learned. Uh, you’re gonna hear more about actions and then as soon as you can mobilize and get people involved and uh, uh, structured on those action plans, the better.

Christian Nielsen | 58:22

Um, in terms of following up for a pulse or something, there’s some strategy there too. Uh, one school of thought is don’t ask, uh, follow up for an engagement survey unless you’ve had enough time to take some action and demonstrate some wins. The other strategy is if you’re trying to build urgency and you don’t think anything’s happened, then go ahead and run a pulse and demonstrate, hey, people don’t see action happening and it’s a problem and you can use it, you can use it that way. But, uh, usually we recommend a six month pulse following an engagement survey just to keep the organization honest and moving forward.

Matt Wride | 58:56

Yeah, and I would add that one of the reasons we recommend an annual surveys isn’t just because the survey itself, you, you, as you, as you do your communications campaign surrounding the survey, you know, this is, it’s, it’s time to survey. Again, that’s when you talk about prior years, um, what you heard from the, you remind them what you heard from the prior year and you talk about what was successful. So you can always book in things by making sure that every annual survey not only includes a forward looking PO aspect, yes, but a little bit of a past looking aspect in your communication campaign. And even occasionally in a question or two that you ask about things. Um, but there’s that always that element and just, and that’s why we want to keep the cadence and cycle goal.

Christian Nielsen | 59:38

I love that. And, and that’s, we often call that get credit for doing the homework. You know, when you’re announcing your next survey, get credit for all the work you did following the last survey. Hey, did you know that this program was a direct response to your feedback? Another chance for feedback on the 12th of May. You know, that type of thing. But that we’re always trying to connect the.to show we’re listening and also responding and, and that the, the culture of feedback works. Good. Good question. Any, any other questions? I, I think we’re right at time. Okay. If you, if there are any other questions for, please feel free to reach out to us. Info decision-wise, we’ll get to us, uh, uh, but uh, feel free to reach out directly through our website or, or, uh, to us directly. But I love these conversations, really appreciate the, the, the interactivity and the comments. Um, we love, uh, this new format where we get to hear more from you. So with anything else to add, Matt, before we close,

Matt Wride | 01:00:34

No, thanks for, I learned a lot. Appreciate the, the feedback again.

Christian Nielsen | 01:00:39

Thanks everyone. Bye-Bye.