Employee Activation: Taking Listening to the Next Level

By Julia Bersin, Lead Analyst, & Kathi Enderes, SVP Research & Global Industry Analyst

Listening is an organizational superpower. As each of our studies show, employees have answers to everything in the company, from creating a more inclusive environment to designing organizational structures and to making the company irresistible. And it makes sense, too: employees spend their workdays deeply involved in business processes, interacting with customers, and overseeing unique domains that leaders and HR may not be as tuned in to.

Employees Expect More

At the same time, employees are looking to share their ideas, suggestions, and solutions. According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer special report on trust at work, 50% believe their activism can change the company, 36% are willing to go public if the company doesn’t bend to their desires, and 80% would choose a job based on empowerment. Gone are the days when people put their heads down and worked. Today’s workforce has an opinion and is not afraid to share it.

Organizations Are Stuck in the Industrial Era

But most companies are ill-prepared, using lengthy sporadic surveys focused mainly on HR topics to measure and evaluate “employee engagement.” These methods fail to tap into daily workforce insights. Without a way to capture – and act on – these employee insights, organizations are missing out on important opportunities to innovate and improve the business, create a better customer experience, and empower employees.

Enter Employee Activation

Employee activation is the next frontier in employee listening, creating a two-way dialogue between employees and the company focused on driving innovation and business impact at all levels.

Employee activation is about empowerment on two levels:

1. Empowering employees to share ideas, suggestions, and experiences in the flow of work
2. Empowering stakeholders across the organization (e.g., line managers, operations, employees, etc.), not just HR or leadership, to uncover insights, localize problem-solving, and take action on the areas that will be most influential for the business

Each of these works together to create an employee-centric way of listening and action-taking that facilitates change and innovation, making the organization more dynamic.

Beyond Employee Experience

What this means: employee activation doesn’t just create a better employee experience. It also has the potential to impact business and operational topics. Here are a few examples:

Create better products and services: Walgreens tapped into the insights from their Asian Employee Resource Group (ERG) when Father’s Day card sales were down in San Francisco (where a large percentage of the population is Asian). The ERG redesigned the images and wording of the cards, making them more appealing to the target population, with the result of increased sales.

Improve the customer experience: As a cost saving measure, a large US consumer bank turned off the background music in its branches, making customers hesitant to share confidential information. Employees explained that the music is necessary to retain confidentiality in discussions.

Drive productivity: T-Mobile uses Crowdicity, Medallia’s idea crowdsourcing platform, to power “T-Action,” empowering employees to submit ideas and comment and vote on peer ideas. An employee in Hawaii suggested installing a store sign that reads, “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” to avoid a slip-and-fall hazard.  The idea was upvoted and implemented, immediately supporting better productivity.

Jumpstart sales: As 5G was introduced, sales reps at T-Mobile struggled to explain the benefits to customers. T-Action sourced the best 5G sales pitches, with a prize for the best one – and through the process of submitting pitches, employees honed skills and practiced.

Create better workflows: Nurses in a large US healthcare organization identified that the location of the cabinets in hospital rooms required them to move around them when tending to patients, rather than walking in a straight line, and sometimes they even ran into them when hurrying. Operations moved the cabinets, creating a much improved workflow.

A Shift from Traditional Listening

Could you get these insights from traditional surveys? It’s unlikely, because employee activation is completely different. Here are a few ways:

• From point-in-time to continuous: with many different ways of capturing information from employees, using methods that are available in daily work processes
• From company-centric to people-centric: employees share what’s most important to them, rather than focusing on topics that are most important to the organization
• From benchmarking to action: using employee insights to make improvements across the company
• From top-down to all-around: action taking is no longer confined to HR and leadership but can include everybody in the organization

The Important Role of AI and Technology

The ability to move towards employee activation has improved at organizations over the past few decades with enhancements to technology, including AI capabilities. Employee experience platforms like Medallia have made continuous listening, actionable insights, and instrumented actions much simpler.

Technology can support employee activation on both sides:

• Capture feedback – through a variety of both active and passive listening sources like surveys, town halls, crowdsourcing, performance review data, help tickets, social media discussions, or PTO patterns as examples
• Enable action – by analyzing data, uncovering insights, localizing them, sharing knowledge, action planning, and nudging

A Culture Shift to Become More Dynamic

To create an environment where employees feel comfortable sharing ideas and are engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the company, culture matters. Employees must trust that the organization values their feedback and will take it into account, and they need to feel psychologically safe to voice their opinions. In fact, we found in our employee experience research that trust, empathy, and integrity have the highest impact on business, people, and innovation outcomes.[1]

A focus on continuous improvement, frontline innovation, embracing feedback and new ideas, and empowerment at all levels are important cultural supporting factors. It’s the kind of culture that characterizes dynamic organizations.

Getting Started

It’s time to move to employee activation. This doesn’t have to be a complicated process or a full enterprise change. Here’s how to get started:

1)      Identify a business problem: Rather than picking an HR issue, work with a local business team to determine a problem. This could be a new product or market, a local change to your offering, customer issues, declining sales, or operational inefficiencies.

2)      Listen to the frontline, analyze, and activate: Think beyond surveys to get ideas and input.  Can you do a focus group, use crowd sourcing, or leverage system data to see patterns? Then, identify solutions, determine who should take action, and bring the data to that party.

3)      Iterate and scale: Communicate the success, determine what to change for the next time, and scale the approach to more problems and stakeholders.

Given that HR is increasingly responsible for generating growth, boosting productivity, and driving innovation[2], it’s time to consider how employee listening can be a driver for these outcomes. After all, employees have a direct line-of-sight into what’s working, what isn’t, what customers are asking for, and how to improve processes and products. To tap into the ingenuity and creativity of your workforce, consider moving towards employee activation as your listening strategy.

Want to know more? Contact us today for the complete Employee Activation: The Next Step in Employee Listening report.

Through corporate membership, you’ll have access to the entire report, including how to get started with employee activation and move beyond traditional listening, 5 action steps to create this new approach, and stories from Cencora, Pfizer, and Vanguard on their journeys towards employee activation.

Join 50,000 HR professionals in the Josh Bersin Academy to learn more about employee activation. Get access to our 2024 HR Predictions and dive deep in the Employee Experience Workshop or The Voice of the Employee certificate course.

[1] The Definitive Guide: Employee Experience, Josh Bersin and Kathi Enderes, PhD/The Josh Bersin Company, 2021

[2] The Definitive Guide to Human Resources: Systemic HR™, Josh Bersin and Kathi Enderes, PhD/The Josh Bersin Company, 2023