As Thanksgiving approaches, it’s an opportune time to count our blessings — especially after years of ceaseless change, workforce challenges, and economic disruption.
In my case, as a Principal Workforce Transformation Consultant with Perceptyx, I want to give thanks for something near and dear to my heart: how my customers have made me part of their listening strategy, allowing me to help elevate the voices of all the people in their organizations.
I also want to give thanks and a word of appreciation to everyone working in the listening and people space. Everyone who is a steward or caretaker of the employee experience. Everyone whose job is to keep the workplace people-centered as well as productive and profitable. This is a lot of people: our 2024 State of Employee Listening report found that 98% of all organizations surveyed were doing some amount of formal listening to their employees.
Listening to Everyone
The work we do is important. It’s important because it affects everyone. Like it or not, most of our lives are spent at work — and we can’t afford to spend those years dreading or regretting our time there. Our own research has shown that mature listening programs can help overcome specific challenges facing an organization, such as talent recruitment and attrition. When fully implemented, they can also help deliver world-class outcomes related to financial performance, innovation, workforce retention, customer satisfaction and retention, and change management.
Remember, every organization is just a collection of people. While there, we are each other’s keeper. When I think about this responsibility, the word “ubuntu” comes to mind. This is a Nguni Bantu term meaning “humanity,” which can sometimes also be translated as, “I am because you are” or “humanity towards others.” In a philosophical sense, it refers to the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. Ubuntu expands on the truth of a concept like “it takes a village to raise a child” and expands it to the even more universal truth that helping each other makes the world a better place.
Making the Workplace a Better Place
We have seen customers on their own, struggling with a lack of support or resources but still trying to improve the employee experience. All they might have is the unshakable core belief that it’s important to elevate the voices of their people, knowing that even incremental improvements will make life better for someone in the workplace. Our latest benchmark data highlighted the key global drivers of engagement — effective change management that helps people adapt to transformation, strong confidence in senior management to navigate uncertainty, meaningful career opportunities, and a genuine sense of belonging — that can be assessed and understood through employee listening.
Employee listening plays an important role in influencing workplace policies and well-being initiatives. Through listening and other feedback channels, organizations have gained valuable insights into employees' needs and concerns. At Organon, listening data helped shape their office attendance policy after the pandemic ended and in-person collaboration resumed. After noticing regional disparities in office attendance between Asia, Europe, and the United States, leadership investigated through their annual Founder Experience Survey.
The data revealed interesting patterns: men who frequented the office showed higher engagement and well-being, while women experienced decreased engagement with more office time. Based on these insights, Organon implemented a flexible once-a-week attendance policy that accommodated different work styles and adjusted productivity expectations for in-office days to emphasize collaboration over individual work.
Grateful for Customer Stories
As a consultant, I hear powerful stories from our customers on the frontlines of employee experience. These dedicated individuals are uniquely positioned to amplify employee voices when it matters most.
That sort of amplification might consist of being brought into an executive-level meeting to share or center underrepresented experiences where groups may not have had a clear voice in the organization or a platform in front of leadership. These situations, backed by the power of listening data and research, can lead to radical changes in processes and policies, hiring practices, culture transformations, and more.
Lifting the Voices of Our Customers
A sampling from our extensive library of case studies shows how our most strategic and mature customers have used listening data to empower their people, demonstrate ROI on their programs, and accelerate desired business outcomes:
- DuPont leveraged three distinct 360 feedback assessments to drive leadership development, resulting in significant improvements in manager effectiveness: career conversations (+7 points), performance feedback (+5 points), and work-life balance support (+5 points). This comprehensive approach helped maintain strong organizational health with 80% engagement and only 5% voluntary attrition.
- Comcast achieved consistently high participation rates (90% for annual engagement surveys, 80%+ for eNPS) across their 170,000-person workforce, using insights to develop targeted learning programs and improve retention through detailed analytics of employee feedback.
- MetroHealth revolutionized its safety culture assessment by implementing a streamlined survey that increased response rates from 25% to 55%, while simultaneously reducing completion time from 15 to 2.5 minutes. The crowdsourcing component of the assessment generated over 11,000 votes on employee-suggested improvements.
- Mohegan successfully linked employee experience to customer satisfaction, achieving a 3-point increase in enterprise CX scores (5 points above industry benchmarks) and reaching 90% survey response rates at key properties for two consecutive years.
- New York Life Insurance leveraged employee listening to craft an effective hybrid work policy, resulting in a 3% reduction in voluntary attrition (from 10% to 7%), while maintaining an 87% response rate on engagement surveys. Their listening-first approach led to a +4 point increase in employee engagement versus pre-pandemic levels.
Partnering to Lift the Voices of Others
Stories like these highlight the power of listening with speed and at scale. I’m so thankful that my role with Perceptyx has enabled me to partner with my “superhero” counterparts at our customers’ organizations. I use superhero here because, by working together, we can apply superhuman strength to the heaviest lift of all: elevating the voices of our people.
To learn how Perceptyx can help you lift all voices, schedule a meeting with a member of our team.