By Joey Spivey, Senior Learning and Development Specialist, Wellabe
Employee listening isn’t a new phenomenon. You’ve probably rolled your eyes at dozens of annual engagement survey invitations. And while there are plenty of ways of doing employee listening incorrectly, Wellabe has made a commitment to doing it right.
We’ve totally overhauled our employee listening strategy by uniting previously disconnected tactics and building around a cornerstone bi-annual engagement survey. We’re focused on creating the shortest possible path between our employees’ insights and meaningful action.
Our work revolves around four tactical pillars:
- Onboarding
- Exit
- Bi-annual engagement
- Always-on suggestions
While your organization’s specific employee listening priorities and challenges may vary, it could benefit from this approach, which offers something for leadership and employees.
- Onboarding
We’re proud of how we welcome new Wellabe team members. It’s an experience intentionally designed and constantly improved with care.
Throughout an employee’s first 90 days, they receive four quick “pulse surveys.”
The surveys are short and broaden in scope over time. The first survey mostly focuses on ensuring that their laptop works and that they’re as excited now as they were on day one. By their final pulse on day 90, they’re asked to share their goals for their first year, what they’re most excited about, and how they’ve grown into the Wellabe community.
As we receive feedback, we either affirm or adjust aspects of the experience to ensure the next time we welcome a new team member, their onboarding is incrementally improved, thanks to the people before them.
- Exit
Like most organizations, our exit interviews have been a staple of our employee listening tactics for years. But we’ve shifted to a survey-first, interview-optional approach. All employees receive an invitation to complete an exit survey about one week before their scheduled last day. We ask them to reflect on their experience, their connections, and their departure. At the end of the survey, each respondent can opt for a formal exit interview. This more flexible approach has significantly increased our exit response rates, ensuring we’re not missing crucial feedback from departing employees.
- Bi-annual engagement
Our bi-annual engagement survey, which we call Employee Voice, has been our biggest re-design effort. By transitioning into an internally managed engagement survey, we exceeded our previous participation rates at over 90%.
An expansive toolkit and side-by-side consultations with senior leaders helped us put action planning in the hands of the people closest to the results. Managers received customized dashboards for the first time. Individual contributors took meaningful ownership of their own work environment. Change happened at the ground level; at a scale we could never manufacture from the human resources corner of the building.
The full Employee Voice survey is sent each fall, and a smaller pulse survey follows in the spring, providing us an alignment check on any action plans that were created or improvements that were implemented in response to the full survey’s results.
- Always-on suggestion box
We’ve placed a simple form on our intranet homepage that allows employees to submit their suggestions anytime, about anything. Employees can choose to submit anonymously, and each suggestion is researched. Those who submit their suggestions with their names attached receive responses.
Since turning on the suggestion box, we’ve made employee-suggested changes to our annual incentive program, recruitment processes, benefits, and customer accessibility services.
Keeping it all together
To communicate cohesively and hold us accountable to the employees we ask to share so openly, we report quarterly on what we’ve learned and implemented from these tactics. Trends and changes to onboarding, implemented suggestion box submissions, success stories from teams who action planned around their Employee Voice results. Our goal is to ensure that Wellabe’s employee listening strategy does what we intended it to do — create the shortest path between our employees’ expert insights and meaningful action. So far, it’s working — and it can for you too.
To learn more about Wellabe and its vision to be the most trusted provider of health and wealth solutions in an increasingly connected world, visit wellabe.com or subscribe to its newsletter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube.