IC Partners | Insights for sore eyes

Why leaders and communicators need to see data in a new light

Maybe it’s not overt. Maybe it’s just a whiff of a whisper of a ripple of a feeling. Maybe you’ve barely noticed it. But do you ever suspect that leaders in your organisation see HR as the ‘softer’ side of the business?

Do you ever feel like you speak a different language, peddling people strategies and intangible initiatives about purpose or wellbeing, while the meaty stuff – the stuff that determines how much budget you get – exists in the charts, stats and spreadsheets presented by your colleagues in sales, marketing and operations?

All this happens for one reason: we’re doing data wrong.

Because while every organisation relies on data as the building blocks for decisions from pricing to positioning, timing, range planning and more, employee data is often little more than an annual engagement survey and some performative exit interviews.

Even then, the results are too often contorted into an apparently glowing success story that bears scant resemblance to colleagues’ real experience. And while your people are still reeling from the resulting cognitive dissonance, you follow swiftly with the all-smiles Christmas party, which acts like a giant rug under which to sweep all that discontent.

When the survey date rolls back round again, all too often, communicators simply cobble together a few hasty ‘you said, we did’ lines and wonder why colleagues increasingly decline to answer the same, slightly irrelevant, questions.

Step forward Barbara Alford - our go-to data specialist with more than 35 years of experience in bringing clarity to people’s decision making, motivations and behavioural drivers.

And she’s on a mission; a mission to rescue employee data from its smoke and mirrors ghetto and make it really work for your people, and by extension, your business.

Employee data should be HR’s voice. When we harness information effectively, it loudly declares the real cost of delivering a substandard employee experience. It bellows out the real impact your employee value promise (EVP) is truly having on your business. And it delivers a blistering speech about the impact of ineffective internal communication.

All in that extremely clear language that boardrooms speak fluently: money.

The information we need is right there. All we have to do is shift the way we view, report and use it. So, how can we harness our data – and improve what we collect in the future – to bolster talent attraction and retention, boost brand reputation and generally contribute financially?

Let’s take a look:

Getting buy-in for data gathering

Getting your head around what’s valued in your organisation, and where any disconnect lies, probably involves a survey. And if you’re pulling a face, you have good reason. The annual Gallup workplace surveys suggest that although, globally, employee engagement has risen slowly but fairly steadily over the past decade, the numbers are still uninspiring. Just 23% of employees are engaged, while 15% are actively disengaged, and this often gets in the way of gathering meaningful feedback.

It’s a stark fact: many employees have grown increasingly cynical about surveys. If participation in research at your organisation is waning, there are ways of bucking the global engagement figures.

“Never invite anyone to a conversation who's not going to get their say,” says Barbara. “The worst thing you can do is invite them to contribute and then not let them speak.

“That's going to make them 20 times more annoyed than they were before. Proving you’re listening is not something you can do six months after you've asked the question.

“You have to treat surveys like a genuine conversation. You have to report back quickly – and authentically. And you have to show you’re listening and thinking about what people have said.”

That means recognising frustrations. Facing them and playing them back. If you can’t easily fix the frustrations, explain why. Too many employers are afraid of transparency, or discussing work in progress, wrongly believing it makes them look weak. Acknowledge good ideas, because co-created solutions are much better received by people, who then feel their input is valued. And do it promptly, without losing momentum by wrapping action up in a suffocating blanket of corporate process and approvals.

“Do this consistently and people will understand the point in doing the survey,” says Barbara. “You'll get more engagement, better answers and more willingness to share their experiences because it makes a difference.

What to measure

“All data is qualitative,” Barbara explains, “And that's because it's in your interpretation and your understanding of it that it gains value. Saying this number is bigger than that number is about as interesting as saying it’s Wednesday. It's just really dull. It comes to life when you use it to illuminate the world it represents.

“Because if you don’t understand your people’s world, you lose them. If you don't understand what it means to be a frontline worker in your organisation; if you don’t look after the moms who need extra support; and if you don’t gather and act on the information that unlocks these insights, what do you have? Without your people you have nothing.”

One approach is to develop an EVP index – a set of measurements that reflect the entire employee experience, including rewards and benefits, the day-to-day working experience, how people are managed and appreciated, and how they understand their contribution to the wider organisational purpose (more on this in a future article).

“You need to cover that whole spectrum and find ways that you can ask the questions,” says Barbara. “Check out Great Places to Work for examples you can use as inspiration.”

Surfacing those invisible expectations and assumptions that people have in their heads and making them tangible brings clarity. Your next trick is to find eye-catching and inspiring ways of talking about them.

How to measure

Get them right and there’s a lot of value in engagement surveys, exit interviews, onboarding chats and the like. But if you have the capacity to add to your data gathering, one of Barbara’s favourite survey models is to persuade a broad spectrum of employees to agree that you can text them a set of short questions at random times over a couple of weeks.

The result? Real-time responses from a range of roles – a more reliable source of feedback than simply gathering what’s on people’s minds at the time of the annual survey.

It’s a similar approach to that used by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who used pagers (remember them?) in the early 1970s, to measure that state of effortless concentration we might call being ‘in the zone’ but which he famously dubbed ‘flow’.

Asked to recall when they had been in flow, people struggled to remember, but real-time nudges revealed the perfect circumstances, frequency and building blocks of flow. As a result, employers were able to help to recreate those ideal conditions for concentration. The same is true for engagement, revealing the small and large barriers and enablers to a good day at work, across different teams.

“It gives you an insight where you can say, ‘With this group of people, there’s a real problem with topic A, so we need to talk about it and get it right. Whereas over here, there's a real issue with topic B, so we need to address that’,” says Barbara

Change your attitude towards the results

Engagement surveys can put HR teams in a position that’s a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas.

If scores for wellbeing and engagement (seen as HR’s remit) dip, it’s a tough ask for that same team to compile a starkly honest presentation and parade it before the c-suite and the entire company.

Leaders want to hear positive results. HR wants to believe they’re doing a great job, and everyone wants to be happy. Highlighting negativity may result in some deeply uncomfortable finger-pointing – and even head-rolling.

So, results are carefully puffed, pampered and gussied up into something as attractive as possible and trotted out into the world for town halls and employer ratings lists. The business looks great in the lists, managers polish their egos – while employees clearly see that the organisation is continuing to haemorrhage people.

The withering vine of engagement dies a little more.

“Leaders and HR teams need to understand that this is a real opportunity to teach them how to be an even more attractive and better employer,” says Barbara.

Instead of dressing up authentic insights in a wig and lipstick, this is your secret weapon to realise your vision of a better workplace.

“Data can take a lot of the emotional, personal vulnerability and stress out of these kinds of things,” she adds.

“And that's why it empowers us to make a stand and say, ‘We have issues; this is what they are, and here's the data to prove it.’ Our job is to create the most brilliant pool of people we can afford, and, in order to attract and keep them, these are the things we have to do. This isn’t just my opinion – here are the numbers.

“It makes companies stronger, because they can see, understand, and track and change as they need to.

“The mindset shift comes down to asking how we can become better and better and better, simply because our commercial success crucially depends on us being good enough to attract and retain the right people.”

In other words, it’s a win/win.

“On one hand, these are purely self-serving actions, to improve commerciality,” says Barbara. “But on the other, it's very ethical and that's why I love acting on insights: it gives respect to people where it's due and builds a better workplace.

“It's a bit like green issues. Today, if you don't manage to be sustainable and hit certain ESG ratings, you won’t be included in many leading investment funds. Which means your access to capital is greatly diminished.”

Your requests for a better benefits package, improved internal communication channels, a more consistent onboarding experience and the like can easily hit the skids when budget comes into question.

But if you can provide cool-headed facts and trackable metrics, drawing a clear line to creative solutions and people initiatives, you’ll lift your strategies out of the fluffy, ‘nice-to-have’ arena. And sales and marketing won’t be the only ones with delicious data that’s good enough to melt your FD’s heart.