Retail companies ‘listen’ to their customers and in so doing it has changed the shopping experience, in particular online shopping. Could the world of work change in the same way? I’m talking about listening to the voice of the employee in the same way that retailers listen to the voice of the shopper. It’s a topic we’ll explore at the upcoming Workforce Analytics Summit in Singapore (24-25 November2016).
I’m sure we’ve all noticed that advertisements start to appear on our computer for things we were searching for earlier. It’s almost as if retailers know us as individuals – they’re picking up on our preferences, past searches and interests. They’re even looking at others who have behaved in a similar way to us and predicting what we might do in the future.
Could we bring the same approach to employment? We may be a few years away from engaging our employees on such an individual level, but the new Smarter Workforce Institute and IBV report (Amplifying Employee Voice) touches on many of the listening techniques that will help us be better employers in the future.
In an employee world it’s not about the shopping experience, it’s about the employee experience. Instead of your purchasing habits, insights will be gathered based on the blogs you’re reading, the topics you’re searching for via the company intranet, your ‘public’ online work conversations, the online training programmes you’ve completed, etc, etc. And that is just the start of the data that could be collected.
If we’re really going to help employees as much as we possibly can, we need to listen at that individual level. We need to gather information about individual needs and concerns. The more information we can attribute to our people, the more we can tailor our HR programmes and policies to individual needs – rather than to the ‘average’ person. After all, none of us are ‘average’ – we are all unique.
We may be some time away from this future world of personalised insights, analytics and action in the workplace, but many of the technologies and techniques already exist. We can and should listen much more than we are because – as this report shows – employees really want to share their voice.
To learn more on employee engagement, please visit: www.ibm.com/smarterworkforce
