Summary.
To manage the employee experience, leaders must deeply understand employees’ perceptions, feelings, and desires and respond thoughtfully. This is particularly crucial when immense resources are invested in gathering employee feedback through pulse surveys, town halls, and data scraping from internal communications. But leaders are often overwhelmed by the data and struggle to translate it into actionable insights. The authors conducted detailed interviews with executives and HR leaders from more than 20 multinational companies in sectors such as technology, financial services, and consumer goods. Their work reveals that although technology has simplified the collection of data, the real challenge lies in making sense of it and integrating it into a coherent strategy.
Enhancing how a company supports and engages its employees can attract talent, improve retention, spur innovation, and increase customer satisfaction. But managing the employee experience for maximum benefit requires leaders to know what employees are seeing, feeling, and wanting—and then respond judiciously. Driven by a tight labor market, corporate leaders have recently invested enormous amounts of energy and resources in collecting employee feedback through pulse surveys, town halls, listening tours, focus groups, data scraping from message boards, and other methods. The problem for many leaders is that when they ask what employees think, they don’t know what to do with what they hear—they often struggle to translate all this input into meaningful insights and concrete actions. A gap between accumulating the information and taking coherent action to respond can diminish the value of employee feedback over time—and if it persists, employees may stop responding.