The dynamics of today’s workplace calls on leaders to make a more genuine connection with their employees. They’re doing this by listening to their employees more often, on more topics, and in more ways than ever before. They’re also closely partnering with HR to integrate both their people and business data to understand what their employees and the business need to thrive. This allows leaders to understand how their employees are experiencing their daily work and how these experiences impact outcomes such as productivity and profitability. The analysis allows them to take the right action to drive desired business outcomes.
As outlined in Perceptyx’s Part 1: The Blueprint of a Continuous Conversation at Scale, HR and business leaders do this by generating ongoing dialogue and action across the organization. First, leaders outline their strategic goals with HR, as well as what success looks like. Then, HR crafts a people strategy to include the right listening channels, topics, and cadence to gain the people insights needed for these leaders to succeed. When HR and business leaders generate a virtuous cycle of feedback and responsive action, and integrate business data to contextualize these actions, they infuse a culture of conversation with action across their organization.
As explained in Part 2: A Guide for Building a Culture of Continuous Conversation, a people strategy draws out feedback on the processes, practices, and environmental factors preventing employees from doing their best work. Then HR and business leaders can work together to remove barriers and accelerate what’s working well. They also integrate operational data with their people data to identify where to take action first and demonstrate measurable results.
The final installment of our guide — Part 3: The Outcomes of a Culture of Continuous Conversation — expands on the quantitative and qualitative benefits organizations gain as they build a culture of conversation. Some benefits are immediate and some are cumulative — but they all reinforce the culture and stakeholder buy-in to continue the journey. Ultimately, they tap into our human need to feel a sense of belonging and purpose. This sense of belonging and purpose expands within and across each organization as they begin to generate a broader culture of conversation to collectively navigate the future of work.
The Essential Elements Needed to Drive These Outcomes
Given the valuable advantages organizations gain from a culture of continuous conversation, what is it about that culture that guides companies towards these outcomes? How does this culture — and the resulting employee experience — generate such a profound business impact?
There are three essential elements needed to create this culture and produce the ideal outcomes:
- Data-driven decisions and development: Principal Financial Group assistant director of talent management Carolyn Petsche refers to this element as “creating credibility through providing objective, data-driven insights that expand employee sentiment beyond limited anecdotes–typically raised by select people with the loudest or most influential voices.” With a culture of conversation, leaders are presented with the full picture of how their people strategy impacts their business strategy — and vice versa. Petsche states, “You can see things that you could never have seen before, and leaders have new insights to achieve their goals and solve challenges. All of a sudden, the data tells a story. It helps drive decision-making by articulating the ideas, concerns, and sentiment of employees closest to the work.”
- Foundational agility and resilience: Agility is now a core value for any successful organization. Rather than bouncing back to the status quo, we need to develop the agility to move forward. To evolve toward a foundational agility and deliver optimal employee experiences, we need to understand what’s working well, what isn’t, and what processes and practices to prioritize. A culture of conversation provides agility by indicating when and where to go, pause, realign, pivot, and continue forward.
- A virtuous cycle of organizational health: In Josh Bersin’s 2021 research into the most important dimensions of employee experience, he found that the HR technology with the greatest impact on business outcomes was “advanced people analytics and actions.” Organizations that deployed advanced analytics and action technology not only engaged and retained their employees far more successfully than those without it, they were also more innovative and likely to exceed their financial targets. Bersin’s research validates that a culture of conversation – complete with continuous listening and action – not only improves the people experience, but can also address many of an organization's most pressing problems.
The Benefits Expand Exponentially
Organizations receive a profound additional benefit when the culture of conversation forms not just within their own organization, but between their organization and others taking this journey. In these cases, HR and business leaders join in a dialogue with fellow leaders across industries to tap into this broader integration of people and business data. They learn how other companies create a culture of conversation and address roadblocks along the way. Just as this conversation helps individual organizations navigate their own best path forward, this broader conversation between organizations can help us navigate and overcome our mutual uncertainty about the future of work together.
Start Your Journey with Perceptyx
While no one can predict the future, we at Perceptyx can help you enlist the best intelligence, expertise, and data to navigate this journey together. To read our detailed guide in its entirety — including all of the valuable case studies and reference material — click here to download a copy. And to learn how Perceptyx can partner with your organization to create a culture of continuous conversation, schedule a meeting with a member of our team.