Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of the Work Force: How to Successfully Gain Insight Into Employee Views and Opinions

"I feel my professional development has been stunted since my start here."  "Last night, I was here until 11 p.m. working to complete a project without as much as a thank you. " "My company was recently acquired by another, I don´t know if should start looking for a new job." "I feel as if I´m just seen as a working cog, as opposed to a living person."  "I wish we´d evaluate our benefit program more frequently."

A human resources executive or consultant has probably heard these suggestions and concerns from employees at one point or another in his career - or has he?  Issues surrounding employee satisfaction, "intent to leave", work/life balance, benefits packages, morale, and training can all have a significant effect on a business´s ability to attract, retain and develop its human capital. But, until HR executives know that these issues exist, how do they proactively address them?  How do HR executives successfully keep their finger on the pulse of what employees think and feel about the company, their job and their work life? How do they convince employees to share their opinions and overcome the natural fear of repercussions for providing honest and sometimes brutal feedback?

A few traditional employee research solutions may immediately come to mind: surveys, performance reviews, suggestion boxes, employee advocacy panels, focus groups, etc.  While each method has a degree of value, they all have shortcomings that lead to just a partial insight... and do not facilitate speedy corrective action.

For example, surveys can cover large groups of employees and provide effective feedback, but they only offer a quantitative snapshot of a situation whose roots may run deeper than the asynchronous feedback that is generated from a survey. And the survey process is time consuming - getting the statistical results and analysis can take weeks - maybe months - possibly rendering the data and statistics obsolete. 

Performance reviews open a dialog with employees, but may not be viewed as a "safe" forum for an employee to offer honest feedback and insight; suggestion boxes are effective and anonymous, but the lack of a feedback loop prevents further exploration if an opinion or suggestion is not completely understood.

Focus groups and advocacy panels also can generate effective insight and deliver the detail and interactive, qualitative feedback that traditional surveys can´t. But they lack anonymity and only reach a small group of the larger workforce. Focus groups also are susceptible to "group think" where one or two people influence the attitudes of others.

Examining those traditional options, it seems as if HR managers and consultants would have to engage multiple methods to really gain reliable insights into employee views and opinions - a costly prospect which still doesn´t successfully address the issue of timeliness. Today, more and more human resources executives are moving toward a next generation of real-time Web-based researching geared to help them gain instant insights from a large group of employees through live Internet sessions.

Using this technology, HR managers can quickly obtain confidential feedback from a large number of geographically dispersed employees while other key stakeholders and subject matter experts remotely observe and react to results in real time. Through such a tool, rich, unbiased feedback can be captured and synthesized quickly and emerging issues researched further on the spot.  The advantage of live web-based sessions is that sophisticated analytics and reports are immediately available allowing fast action and more informed decision making.

One Fortune 500 company leveraged the real-time researching platform from Invoke Solutions to dialog anonymously with over 150 employees to explore a retention problem.  Using the next generation platform, the client was able to immediately diagnose three key causes of low employee morale which it had not been able to identify using traditional surveys and focus groups.  Company executives and human resources experts remotely observed the session and were able to interject questions to drill down on responses that sparked follow-on questions, allowing instant analysis and diagnosis of the causes of low employee retention rates. Because of the immediate results and the large number of decision makers  who observed the session, the company was able to quickly outline a plan of action to address the root causes of this important issue. 

Using a next generation, real-time researching technology, provides several advantages and benefits for HR executives and consultants including:

• Depth of insight - When employees know they are answering anonymously, they typically provide more candid feedback, revealing underlying thoughts and views.
• Ability to adapt - The ability for the observing stakeholders to add or modify questions and drill deeper into areas that surface based on responses.
• Geographic range - Provides a means to reach employees dispersed worldwide without having to engage in multiple focus groups and survey sessions.
• Presence of all decision makers and stakeholders - Allows for key stakeholders and decision makers to observe the session and responses in real time. The ability to see feedback first hand and analyze it collaboratively with the rest of the team significantly improves the decision-making process.
• Time to answer - By getting instant live feedback directly from the employee base, action can be taken immediately and much time saved. The quicker action is taken, the more confident employees are that they work for a company that cares. 

Just as working environments are continuingly evolving and changing, so should the methods that companies use to capture feedback from employees.  Using the power of the Internet to conduct live real-time researching sessions, offers organizations a powerful and effective new way to keep a finger on of the pulse of the workforce.

Peter Mackey is the VP Client Services at Invoke Solutions.  For more information about Invoke Solutions and to view a demo, please visit www.invoke.com.