Why Employee Insights Matter

What with all the business, economic, and societal changes swirling about – many of them pandemic driven – there may have never been a more important time to gauge the attitudes and perspectives of your employees.

While your workdays may be filled with endless organizational strategy sessions about how to handle this or that, do not neglect to take the pulse of the people the strategies will affect. In fact, the success of your company depends on your understanding of how your people feel.

Here is why employee insights matter.

About Employee Insights

At its essence, gaining employee insight means learning and understanding what drives employee satisfaction. Organizations undertake this to ultimately improve the employee experience and maximize profits.

About the Employee Experience

The employee experience encapsulates what a staffer perceives and observes over the course of their tenure at a company. The employee experience goes to the heart of organizations’ ability to properly recruit, motivate, and retain talent.

Editor’s Note: Partnering with a reputable employee rewards provider can greatly enhance the employee experience, providing meaningful recognition and incentives that drive employee engagement and satisfaction.

Why are Employee Insights Important?

Gaining employee insights allows organizations to make data-driven, people-informed decisions that will, at length, improve the bottom line.

Such insight into how employees are feeling also ends up heightening productivity and engagement. That is, if organizations respond and, where necessary, make modifications. If handled wisely and properly, employee insights can empower HR as well as leaders and managers to drive favorable change.

Another very important benefit to employee insights is that they help you to attract and retain talent. Trust us, word gets around, and in what is right now a very tight job market, gaining insights, then acting upon them, can make the difference between nabbing top talent and losing out to the competition.

And of course, you won’t keep desired employees very long if you don’t take the time to “get” them, then, where appropriate, make moves based on what you discover. After all, employees soon learn whether you’re sincere about improving their experience or whether that year-end survey is, in fact, mostly performative, and won’t result in meaningful change.

Moreover, an “employee listening strategy,” in which employees are surveyed regularly throughout their tenure at an organization, can promote a stronger and more inclusive workplace culture. Indeed, such an approach, which also can include analytics, focus groups, and more, can help improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which employees and other stakeholders are increasingly demanding.

How are Employee Insights Gained?

Such feedback is typically obtained through surveys, of which there are a few kinds. They include:

• Employee engagement. These surveys basically assess the degree to which employees feel valued at your organization.
• Employee experience. This kind of survey gives employers a snapshot of employees’ satisfaction and motivation levels.
• Employee effectiveness. These surveys give employees an opportunity to receive candid feedback from peers.
• Pulse. This kind speaks more to the frequency with which they’re conducted, but pulse surveys are short, quick, and administered periodically rather than annually.

Employee insights matter to employees — and you. The fact is that gaining actionable insights at the right time is a powerful and meaningful way to develop a more formidable workforce, allowing you to craft interventions and continuously improve the employee experience.

The key is “listening” to your people throughout the employee life cycle, not just annually. To get help with this, so that you can focus on your core business, you should consider enlisting the help of the consultant Mercer, which has the experience, expertise, tools, and deep knowledge necessary to help you better understand your employees and drive improved performance outcomes. Don’t get caught flat-footed.