Today's employers face growing challenges to maintaining an engaged, productive workforce. In a continuously shifting labor market with employees demanding more in terms of flexibility and compensation, it is a critical time for employers to build connections with their workforce.
But to retain your best talent, you need to know what they are thinking and feeling. According to ADP Research Institute (ADPRI), weekly connections between leaders and their workers can increase the likelihood of engagement by 3.8x. Interestingly, six out of 10 of workers say they would like feedback on a weekly or even daily basis.
The pandemic shifted the relationship between accountants and small business clients, too. Accountants often took on more of an advisory role, helping clients with everything from financial management to HR compliance issues.
The Right Survey at the Right Time
Employers know they need to keep in touch with their workers and surveys are often the go-to tool; however, not all survey tools are alike. Many provide a blank sheet or generic template and don't enable companies to ask the right questions at the right time in the right way, consistently.
What’s more, we are all experiencing survey fatigue with questionnaires coming at us from all directions (e.g., work, customer service feedback, etc.). To get an employee to answer a survey, it must speak to their needs as well and they must understand what the payback will be for them.
Many survey tools are easy to use but do not get you the data you really need for insight-driven decision-making, and building an effective survey is not as easy as it might seem. Furthermore, when different areas of the company are using different survey tools, the results get siloed.
Tools that allow managers to have the right context around their employees will be the ones able to make macro, more meaningful analysis.
What’s needed is a holistic solution that is seamlessly integrated with the HR system of record (SOR) and that sends validated, statistically proven surveys at the appropriate time in the employee lifecycle to measure engagement, resilience, inclusion and more. The results of these surveys provide insights that can drive informed actions.
Voice of the Employee: A Holistic, Powerful Listening Platform
To help employers stay tuned into their workforce’s changing needs and challenges, ADP recently introduced its Voice of the Employee solution. The platform at its core is an employee feedback tool, offering the foundation for meaningful connection points between employers and employees.
VoE is essentially an employee listening platform that allows companies to easily and consistently use survey instruments that are well designed, scientifically validated, and built for a particular moment of truth for the employee such as onboarding, inclusion, benefits satisfaction and more.
The results of these surveys allow HR practitioners to compare against best practices and put action plans in place based on those results. VoE enables HR to leverage SOR data to build appropriate survey audiences, customize surveys, schedule them at the right time and analyze results within a larger context.
For SMBs, it is an easy, cost-effective way to hear their employees at important moments in the employee lifecycle.
Voice of the Employee Follows the Employee Lifecycle
Consider the employee journey: recruitment and the candidate experience, onboarding, choosing benefits, engagement and resilience, inclusion, career development, promotions, retirement and exit interviews.
What if the HR practitioner could capture employee sentiment and feedback around those moments of truth in real time, not waiting for an annual survey that doesn’t give the depth of information needed to improve these stages of the employee lifecycle? With VoE, results feed into a dashboard where practitioners can see the data as it comes in.
Instead of starting from scratch, at each of these listening posts are research-reviewed survey templates that can be customized to cover a range of topics. Several of the available templates are ADPRI survey instruments, based on research with tens of thousands of employees worldwide.
The pandemic shifted the relationship between accountants and small business clients, too. Accountants often took on more of an advisory role, helping clients with everything from financial management to HR compliance issues.
These surveys are powered ADPRI studies on engagement, resilience, inclusion and the HR experience, for example.
Key to the Voice of the Employee platform is that it is tightly integrated into the HR SOR. It gives HR practitioners immediate access to all the data about employees as well as all the events that are happening inside the HR SOR.
These events can act as a trigger to send a survey automatically so HR does not need to do it manually; they can instead focus their time and energy on actioning against the results and tapping into meaningful moments with their workforce.
Help Your Clients Better Manage Their Workforce
Accountants are in a unique position today. More than just tax advisors, they can provide strategic value by helping their clients capture workforce data in real time and strategically act on it. Small businesses often do not have the in-house resources to develop their own employee listening platforms—they might not even have dedicated HR resources, with many owners managing those functions themselves, on top of operations.
With shifts in the labor market and talent demands, SMBs need every tool they can get to attract, motivate and retain good people. Voice of the Employee can help your clients improve employee engagement and satisfaction, nipping problems in the bud, and making decisions based on accurate, insightful information.
No matter the market dynamics, it is always good practice to listen to your employees, to have a systematic and thoughtful way of doing so, and to take action that will improve the work environment.
David Palmieri is DVP and GM of the Workforce Management solutions business at ADP. In this role, he is responsible for products and services helping over 110,000 clients navigate the increasingly complex landscape of time and attendance, scheduling, and wage and hour compliance needs for more than 13 million employees worldwide. Prior to joining ADP in 2019, David held senior executive positions at Pearson, LexisNexis and Dun & Bradstreet.
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