As we prepare to welcome 2025, we're taking a moment to reflect on the content that resonated most with People leaders throughout 2024. From strategic employee listening to innovative approaches in engagement measurement, these popular blogs showcase the evolving priorities in employee experience and organizational development.
1. 7 Considerations When Choosing an Employee Listening Partner
This comprehensive guide walks organizations through the essential factors they must consider when selecting an employee listening partner. The article explores everything from historical data trending capabilities to benchmarking options, providing detailed guidance on evaluating potential partners. Readers will discover specific questions to ask during the selection process, along with a thorough assessment of key capabilities that can make or break a successful partnership.
Key Quote: "Choosing the right listening partner is critical to helping your organization realize its true potential and deliver an exceptional employee experience."
Key Takeaways:
- Historical trending capabilities are crucial for tracking progress and understanding long-term patterns in employee feedback.
- Robust benchmarking allows organizations to meaningfully interpret results across industry, geography, and employee populations.
- A validated people insights methodology ensures a comprehensive assessment of all elements of employee experience.
- Flexibility to grow and expand listening programs is essential as organizational needs evolve.
- Strong support services and implementation expertise are vital for program success.
Why It Matters: The right listening partner can transform how organizations understand and act on employee feedback, leading to improved engagement, retention, and overall business outcomes. This decision impacts everything from data analysis capabilities to action planning effectiveness and shapes an organization's ability to respond to employee needs effectively.
2. How a Mature Employee Listening Strategy Drives Whole Business Impact
This deep-dive analysis based on our The State of Employee Listening 2024 report reveals the substantial business advantages that organizations with mature listening programs achieve over their peers. The article shows how different levels of listening sophistication correlate with various measures of business success, presenting our clear four-stage maturity model that organizations can use to benchmark their progress and plan for future development.
Key Quote: "Organizations with the most mature listening programs are 6x more likely to reach their financial targets, 9x more likely to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction, and 4x more likely to retain talent."
Key Takeaways:
- Mature programs show measurably better outcomes across financial, customer, and employee metrics.
- Success factors include diversity of listening channels, speed of analysis, and business data integration.
- Organizations in Stage 4 of maturity are seeing unprecedented levels of success in employee retention.
Why It Matters: Understanding where your organization stands in the maturity model provides clear direction for improvement and demonstrates the concrete business value of investing in listening strategies. The documented correlation between mature listening programs and business success makes a compelling case for continued investment in this area.
3. Employee Survey Questions About Management & Leadership
This article provides a comprehensive framework for designing effective survey questions that measure leadership and management effectiveness. Through careful examination of best practices and research findings, it shows how well-crafted questions can uncover strategic insights about manager-employee relationships and leadership impact.
Key Quote: "Perceptyx research shows that employees who evaluate their manager as ineffective are more than 6x as likely to report that they will leave the organization within a year as compared to those who evaluate their managers as effective."
Key Takeaways:
- Survey questions should focus on observable behaviors rather than abstract concepts.
- Effective manager assessment requires measuring both relationship quality and performance management.
- Young workers have distinct expectations regarding manager relationships and support.
- Leadership effectiveness questions should focus on competency, communication, consistency, and care
Why It Matters: The quality of management and leadership has a direct impact on employee retention, engagement, and organizational success. Understanding how to properly measure these factors through surveys enables organizations to identify areas for improvement and take targeted action to enhance leadership effectiveness.
4. Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): Your Complete Guide
This guide takes readers through the comprehensive understanding and application of Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) as a key metric for measuring employee advocacy. eNPS has evolved from its customer-focused origins to become a crucial tool in understanding employee sentiment. Via this detailed analysis of benchmark data, readers will see how eNPS varies across industries and gain context for interpreting scores effectively.
Key Quote: "Research shows that employee advocacy and related measures of employee engagement are linked to organizational outcomes such as employee attrition, productivity, and shareholder return."
Key Takeaways:
- eNPS provides a robust 201-point scale for measuring employee advocacy.
- eNPS Benchmark data shows significant variation across industries and regions.
- A score between 10 and 30 is generally considered good, while above 50 is excellent.
- eNPS should be part of a comprehensive listening strategy, not used in isolation.
Why It Matters: Understanding employee advocacy levels through eNPS provides organizations with a quick pulse check on employee satisfaction and engagement. This metric serves as an early indicator of potential retention issues and helps organizations gauge the effectiveness of their employee experience initiatives.
5. Beyond Employee Engagement: Redefining Key Factors in Employee Experience
This article from Perceptyx’s Center for Workforce Transformation introduces our People Insights Model for understanding employee experience. Based on extensive research covering more than 20 million survey respondents, this approach provides organizations with a far more nuanced and actionable understanding of what drives employee satisfaction and success.
Key Quote: "The most engaged employees are those who find their work interesting and derive a sense of personal accomplishment from it, rather than those who are motivated primarily by external factors."
Key Takeaways:
- Employee experience encompasses ten distinct factors, ranging from DEIB, to Change and Innovation, to Manager Relationship. Our model uses these measures to link employee feedback to the leading practices for actions that result in behavior change.
- When creating an effective listening and action strategy for your organization, it’s important to begin with the end in mind.
- Success requires attention to multiple experience factors simultaneously.
Why It Matters: As workplace dynamics continue to evolve, organizations need a more sophisticated understanding of what drives employee experience. Perceptyx’s new framework provides a roadmap for creating more effective strategies to improve employee satisfaction and organizational performance.
6. Tracking Global Trends in Employee Engagement: A Benchmark Spotlight
This analysis of global engagement trends reveals significant regional variations and cultural nuances in how employees connect with their organizations. Drawing from Perceptyx's extensive benchmark database of more than 20 million responses, the article provides detailed insights into engagement patterns across six major global regions.
Key Quote: "Motivation: 'My work gives me a sense of personal accomplishment' is our only engagement item showing a favorability increase across all regions, suggesting that amid ongoing uncertainty, employees are seeking fulfillment in their work."
Key Takeaways:
- South America maintains the highest engagement levels globally despite recent declines.
- Europe shows the most variable engagement patterns among major economies.
- Asia demonstrates steady year-over-year increases in engagement metrics.
- Change management has emerged as a universal driver of engagement across regions.
Why It Matters: Understanding regional variations in engagement helps global organizations develop more effective, culturally sensitive strategies for employee experience. This knowledge is crucial for organizations operating across multiple regions to optimize their approaches to employee engagement.
7. The Ultimate Leader Checklist
This checklist for leaders outlines a host of research-backed strategies for success in today's complex workplace environment. The article addresses everything from managing hybrid teams to fostering inclusive leadership practices, providing practical advice for leaders at all levels.
Key Quote: "Bad management significantly impacts employee satisfaction and retention — and nearly a quarter (24%) of individual contributors are currently under the leadership of the worst boss they've ever had."
Key Takeaways:
- Leaders must adapt their skills to respond to changing workplace dynamics (e.g., hybrid and remote work) as well as changing employee behaviors.
- Emotional labor and self-care are important components of sustainable leadership.
- Clear communication remains fundamental to leadership success.
- Inclusive leadership practices are needed for workplace success.
Why It Matters: Effective leadership has never been more challenging or more crucial for organizational success. This checklist provides leaders with practical tools and strategies to navigate the complexities of modern workplace dynamics.
8. Connect the Dots: Driving Impact with EX and Business Data Integration
This article explores the near-unlimited potential of connecting employee experience data with broader business metrics to drive organizational success. Through case studies and research findings, it shows how organizations can leverage integrated data to create meaningful insights and drive targeted improvements. Via real-world examples from various industries, readers learn how different types of data integration can lead to improved outcomes.
Key Quote: "Creating impact requires more than insight alone. Organizations must enable people to take action on what's learned and maintain the ability to reassess and adjust approaches over time."
Key Takeaways:
- Integration of EX data with business metrics like CX, turnover, and store performance provides more comprehensive insights.
- The Perceptyx platform can connect and analyze not only CX and EX data, but virtually any other business data set — patient experience, safety, or store performance metrics, for example — into one flexible system.
- Real-world examples from the healthcare, hospitality, and telecom markets demonstrate clear ROI from data integration efforts.
- Technology must support ongoing, continuous action based on integrated insights
Why It Matters: Organizations that successfully integrate EX and business data can make more informed decisions and drive better outcomes across both employee experience and business performance metrics.
9. ABCs and 1-2-3s: Why Everything You Need to Know About Effective Employee Surveys You Learned in Kindergarten
This fundamentals-focused approach to survey design and implementation draws parallels between basic learning principles and effective employee listening strategies. Using practical examples and data-driven insights, the article lays out a clear framework for creating actionable surveys that drive meaningful organizational change.
Key Quote: "The first step to driving action from employee listening events is to start by asking employees positive, declarative statements that follow the ABCs: Actionable, Behaviorally Observable, and Clearly Written.”
Key Takeaways:
- Effective surveys must be Actionable, Behaviorally Observable, and Clear.
- The 1-2-3 action planning approach (select 1 issue, do 2 things about it, and communicate/seek feedback 3 times) simplifies implementation.
- Survey design should focus on observable behaviors rather than abstract concepts.
- Clear communication about survey actions builds trust and participation.
- Simple frameworks often yield the most effective results.
Why It Matters: A well-designed survey strategy is fundamental to understanding the employee experience. Perceptyx’s approach to listening and acting helps organizations create effective listening programs that drive real change.
10. Using AI to Decode Open-Ended Survey Comments
This forward-looking article explores how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the analysis of employee survey comments. Through detailed examination of AI methodologies and practical applications, it demonstrates how organizations can derive deeper insights from qualitative feedback while avoiding traditional biases and limitations. Modern AI tools can transform overwhelming amounts of employee feedback into actionable intelligence.
Key Quote: "Comments can help to guide meaningful plans for action. One of the greatest challenges with comment analysis is the ability to keep our own biases from having an unintended influence on our interpretation of the data."
Key Takeaways:
- AI enables structured, unbiased analysis of large volumes of comments, converting qualitative feedback into quantitative insights.
- Our Informed Approach Model combines sentiment, theme, and intent detection.
- Comment analysis should complement, not override, quantitative survey data.
- Advanced filtering enables deeper exploration of specific themes and demographics.
Why It Matters: As organizations gather more open-ended feedback from employees, the ability to efficiently analyze and act on this data becomes crucial. AI-powered analysis tools enable organizations to unlock the full value of employee comments while maintaining objectivity and efficiency.
Get Even More Listening Insights from Perceptyx in 2025
When your organization is ready to take the next step toward becoming a world-class listening organization, Perceptyx is prepared to help. Our consultants work with your team to ensure you’re asking the right questions via the best listening methods, then quickly converting those data-driven insights from our People Insights Platform into meaningful action.
To learn more, schedule a meeting with a member of our team. And to stay connected to future posts and our latest thought leadership, subscribe to our blog.