Listening@work 2025: Doing Listening Well - Tools & Tactics That Work

All right, everyone. I am pumped for this next session because so far, obviously we heard from a CEO. Now I really want to bring up some practitioners, some people from the field who's been doing this work. They've already scaled programs, they've implemented end-to-end engagement, pulse checks.

They've also sliced and diced data in different ways. They've also unlocked listening in different capacities other than just doing like a survey. So let's learn from them. Let's unpack some of these frameworks.

I'm super excited to welcome up. First up, Tamika Hill, Thomas, awesome advisor, just powerhouse in this space. Tamika actually just led a masterclass on people analytics, a whole hour masterclass with our leadership network yesterday. So she's coming in fresh, ready to go on this.

So let's give a warm welcome to Tamika who has been doing this work at such a high level at scale, and also a global scale. So that being said, Tamika, let me bring you up. Thank you so much for being here with us. You've had a full week of just achieving engagement, so thanks for just serving this, uh, this community, and I'm really excited to learn from you.

So welcome. And the stage is yours. All right, thank you. Thank you.

So I have, um, been working in people analytics for over years. I have been planning, executing, communicating workforce transformations, workforce strategies, so that not only companies are more profitable, but employees are happier and more fulfilled. And that is so important to me. And in my line of work, we have been able to really use information from surveys, engagement, listening tools to better understand what are the needs of the employees and how we can help meet those needs.

We've also been using their surveys in more non-traditional ways as well. So one of the things I would like to discuss is just the survey, the listening surveys that are available in itself and how they are used. I really truly feel that it's important that organizations really take a bold stand in asking the questions that they ask in their pulse surveys, in their engagement surveys, their exit surveys, to really fully understand what their employees are thinking and feeling. You know, imagine how powerful it is knowing that one, your employee is willing to listen to your answers.

And two, the employee feels that there's some level of trust that they could be honest about what they're thinking so that the, uh, organization can make, um, adaptations to what you're saying. So more than once, I've had access to engagement surveys where they really just ask some really tough questions, such as, do you like your boss? Do you actually like working here? Do you think the organization mission is, um, fully thought through?

Does your, um, manager see you fully as who you are? Do you think your gender or your race or your sexual orientation or your religion makes you feel like an outsider in your, on your team? I mean, those are some really, really interesting, tough questions. And one of the things I wanted to do was to kind of capture that information on other projects that we were doing.

So more than once, I, uh, worked on projects where we were looking at, uh, turnover prediction, and we were also looking at, uh, likelihood of being promoted. So we used our usual suspects, we used information from the HRIS, um, dataset where you're looking at, you know, tenure, your age, where you're located, the city you're living in, um, your performance score and other variables like that. And that is somewhat interesting, but it does have an incomplete view of the employees. So we wanted to pull in the survey data to kind of get a sense of what the employees were thinking.

But that's tricky because for starters, not every employee actually answers the survey. Two people answer these surveys with an expectation that their results are anonymous and they cannot be drawn, uh, pulled into to be, uh, identified. No one can identify your results. So how could we possibly use the survey data, uh, to have a more, uh, holistic view of the employee when we're answering these questions about likelihood of leaving and likelihood of getting promoted without revealing the individual scores?

So what we did, we actually decided that we would summarize, um, certain questions. We didn't use every single questions. We chose certain questions, and we took the average score of individuals who were in the same gender, the same rank, the same location, and the same business center. And we provided that score to everybody, um, in that segment.

And by doing that, it really, really opened up our eyes to what people were thinking and when they were looking to determine how likely they were to leave, how likely they were to get promoted, because some of those questions, the results of that were actually some of the biggest drivers in these, um, in the results that we were having, which we thought was very interesting. In particular, when we looked at like new hires, if you think about it, new hires really don't have any information. They don't even have a performance score yet. But we wanted to get a sense of, you know, new hires that were staying less than a year, what could possibly be driving that.

And one of the biggest drivers were the results from the survey. They felt like they didn't really like the work. They felt like they weren't seen, their manager wasn't talking to them enough. And those type of results was probably one of the biggest drivers.

Uh, a couple of organizations that I worked with decided that they, instead of going full remote, that it became mandatory three days a week in the office because they felt like some of the new hires were not getting the attention that they deserve and it was causing people to leave. So this is something I think with very large, um, engagement surveys and using them along with other people, analytics data or you know, employment data, you really get a more full sense of what has been happening with, um, employees and what they're thinking. And it really kind of helps drive what's some of these decisions that are making, um, that issue about new hires. Having a hard time, um, ramping up, particularly if they're straight outta school, has been one of the biggest conversations that I have seen amongst executives.

And one of the big reasons why they have moved away from full remote to some sort of hybrid plan in the company and why some companies are going full five days a week in the office. So I just think that looking at these surveys really under answer, asking the right question, I think is, and asking these bold questions that may be uncomfortable when you hear the answer is really imperative. And then using that along with other data can really just open up about what your employee is thinking and seeing and hearing and feeling. And it really just helps you better understand how to manage your employees so that they could be happier and more fulfilled.

Alright, coming back up here, Tamika, I would love, thank you for breaking some of that down. I think one of the things I love that you expanded on was as we're building out these surveys, and for some of you in the room that are one or a zero today already and you need to start building out these type, like that might be the first step. Or for some of you that have already been doing it, I think that's a good reminder. Like, do an audit of some of the questions that you're asking and think about are they clear and purposeful to certain answers that you're, you're trying to uncover.

Like why are we experiencing turnover early into the employee like, experience of a new hire? Um, or is someone set for promotion, you know, where are at risk employees? Um, to me, I'd love to like maybe put you on the spot. Do you have any like, go-to questions where if an organization or if you were gonna start at a new company and help 'em build out some of these questions?

Do you have a few questions that you're like, we need to ask this? This is a bold, clear question, always gives us good insights. Are there certain ones that come to mind to you? Yes, I think one is, you know, do I feel included at the organization?

Um, does my gender, race, ethnicity, um, sexual orientation religion makes me feel like I'm a outsider on this team. I actually am a strong believer in inclusivity. And if someone doesn't feel like they have a voice on a team or will be listened to, I do think that could be detrimental down the road because someone is unable to speak up to their boss when they see something, when there's a problem or anything like that. And then no one addresses it until it's too late.

So I do feel like there should be a environment where everyone has a, the ability to speak and have a voice. The second thing I think is really important is those questions where they ask about the manager. Um, do you think your manager is doing a good job? Do you think your manager is listening?

Do you think your manager has everything under control? A lot of turnover as a result of poor management, right? And being able to identify where, um, poor managers are in the organization, I think is really, really important. And then I think third question is, you know, do you understand your job and the goal of what you're trying to do for this job?

You wanna make sure that everyone is aligned with the mission of the organization and if they just don't get the work, they don't like the work, um, if they don't understand the point or they're just confused as to why we're doing this, I, you know, that's again, that's gonna have some long-term effects actually. I think it's a little bit more immediate effects as to what they're doing, whether you're working in manufacturing, whether you're working in consulting or retail. If they don't understand why they're doing what they're doing, you know, it's gonna just blow back on on them in, you know, a very short period of time. Yeah, I mean, I think about how often it is for organizations to pivot strategic directions to try new initiatives and projects.

I mean, a lot of that, uh, being executed and live depends on your capability to communicate and align the organization. And that's such a powerful just post check question of saying like, do you understand what the main thing is right now like that we're working on? Because if they don't, then they're obviously spending time potentially aligned with the main thing, but probably also on a lot of things that aren't needle movers or actually making an impact to their goals. Yes, they're busy, they're doing a lot of busy work, but is actually productive to what we're trying to do.

And that's such a another powerful question. I love the other one that Pat shared just before this around, if you were CEO, what would you do next? Right? Like, that's another way to maybe just get people, one, are they understood of what we're trying to do as a company, but also start to co-create the strategy with them?

So I love those questions to Mika. I'd love to, oh, go ahead. Do you have something? No, I was gonna say, you know, that's what you see in engagement surveys.

I also think what's important is looking at exit surveys as well. Uh, we've also used that when we're doing, um, turnover expectation because one of the things we do is look at with our turnover prediction models, this is what is driving the results. Is that a lot of what they're actually saying in the exit interviews? Because I think it's a very easy to say, well, I'm leaving 'cause I'm making more money.

Well, you know, of course you're gonna make at least the same. No one's gonna rarely does someone leave because of less money. Um, that says that's probably a very bad situation that they're leaving if they're willing to leave for less money. Um, but I think looking at what did they say versus what they actually did based on the survey results is also very compelling because then it actually helps you understand how truthful the survey is and yeah, is it really giving you the information you need to give and then it helps you ramp up and change the survey itself, the exit survey to kind of get a better understanding of what could possibly be happening.

Yeah, they say they'll leave them for more money, but is this a, uh, job? Is it a promotion? Okay, it is not a promotion, it's a lateral slide. What is this job doing differently that you weren't gonna be doing here at this organization?

Getting into the nitty gritty and understanding what might have motivated them to lead, uh, I think would be really good. And just seeing how that aligns with your turnover predictions, I think would be highly compell. Yeah. Because yeah, I know there's enough research out there that shows that pay and money becomes less influential once you're starting to make a certain amount, right?

So that's often just like an easy way out in those exit interviews. So there's so much underneath it. Disengaged people will easily leave for more money or at least a lateral move in terms of pay. But as we start to look at engaged employees, I know plenty of situations that people have gone offered for more money, but they love their workplace so much, their relationship with their colleagues or their leader or the work that they're doing to the, to the point where money isn't influential anymore.

So can you get kind of some of those core insights? And I also like that you laid out specific listening strategies for different stages of the employee lifecycle. So for some of you that are zero or a one in like where you are in your listening strategy, that might be your first step is look at the critical moments of the employee lifecycle. You know, hiring, onboarding, current employee offboarding, right?

And someone leaving. Those are four easy checkpoints that you could have listening kind of engagements that are gonna give you some insights to work with. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. And I did think it's interesting, people always say, well, they're not willing to leave for more money all the time.

It depends, I think if they'll definitely leave the salaries twice as much as that they were making before, which may be an, um, a realization that maybe your team itself aren't making enough money. Um, I do think every job you have to look at it from a full, like complete viewpoint, not just salary, not just what the boss is in, but everything like career pathing is also very important. And I think in the exit interview, those are questions that you can probably work in. Do you see that you have a better career path there than you do here?

Um, all these things put together I think is very insightful and it could really help the organization better understand what is motivating the worker to come work for you and what can we do to just make it even a better environment for them to thrive. Yeah. Okay. I got one more closing question.

This is a bit of a poll from yesterday's session that you led with the leadership network, which I think often our gut when we think employee listening goes to, oh, we gotta do another survey, right? And I think we all fear survey fatigue and just doing surveys for survey's sake. And if you do too many of 'em and you're not acting upon them effectively, they become more, less effective over time. And something that you really shared and dug into yesterday was how there's so much like data and information you already have access to that you could start leveraging that give you insights to be more effective.

It's just a different form of listening, right? Mm-hmm. Could you share what some of those key data sets are? Like what are some of the first places, if you were starting to build an initiative or reflect on how to be more strategic, what are some of the key insights and data sets you would just go to first?

I know HRIS was something that you mentioned, so I'll, I'll take the easy one off the bat, but what are some of the other like kind of informative data sets you would go to? You know, I personally, if I was at a company and I was told, Hey, we really want to have a broader view of our employees in one data set, how would you start doing it? Well, I'll always start with the HRIS and probably first thing would put in the, uh, performance review. It's pretty simple, pretty straightforward.

You integrate based on, you know, employee id. Very simple. I would then probably actual salary. I would actually say like, oh, this person is in the top quarter, or this person is in the bottom quarter, or this person is in the mid, you know, to kind of give a sense relative to his peers what, um, how they're being paid.

And then the next thing over what I is then the, uh, survey information and put it, integrate it in a way so that you're looking at averages so that you can kind of get a sense. So like, for instance, on a scale of one to five, um, how do you, like, do you like what you're doing every day? If the average score for all women managers in the, um, I don't know, operations sector of the Americas, that average score was .. That is the score that applied to everybody there.

Yeah, I love that. And I think you'd be surprised just how not only do you have this more data to run this analysis and everything, but when you look at what's driving some of the analysis that you're doing, it is really eye-opening. Um, and when you start, 'cause you would never think like, wow, I did not realize that was one of the biggest drivers. And so when you're going back to the leaders and you're telling them, Hey, this is what we're doing, and hey, this is actionable.

We got something that you guys can work on and we can fix this today. You know, it is one of those conversations that is just totally enlightening with all leaders and the employees are just grateful for it. They know that you're using that data to help them be better employees and be happier doing their job. And what I love about that too is for a lot of you are trying to get buy-in and budget to do expanded listening initiatives and access to new tools or, or just projects that you're trying to get buy-in for leveraging what you already have and showcasing the value that that can provide.

And then reinforcing how if we made an additional investment to uncover even more blind spots can add x amount of, you know, accelerated value will really help to kind of build momentum, right? Like, now you're showing the C-suite, I'm already doing this. What I'm looking for is a way to multiply the impact that we're we're already getting from this strategy. Mm-hmm.

Right? So, uh, Tamika, thank you so much. Two days in a row. This has been a pleasure.

Uh, for those of you for just a quick plug on the Leadership Network, if you wanna listen to our masterclass from yesterday and get the resources. I mean, we dived into people analytics, maturity models, dataset strategies. How do you start to kind of segment these different things? That's all in the leadership network now.

Uh, you can do it for free, even through a day trial if you want to just check that out alone. So, Tamika, thanks for leading that. Thanks for joining today. This was incredible.

All right. Thank you for having me. I greatly enjoyed the conversation. All right, everyone give it up for Tamika.

Uh, round applause. Yes, hit hit the Emojis. Show some love for that. Uh, she's a powerhouse, so make sure you follow her and connect with her on LinkedIn.

And, uh, I'll share that in the chat in a second, but we're gonna keep it rolling. Really excited for this next section. Brian Breckenridge, co-founder and partner at Vital. And something that we just touched on at the end there that I'm really excited for Brian to dig into is, what does listening look like beyond the engagement survey, right?

And how do we do that with purpose and intention? So that being said, let's give a warm welcome to Brian, uh, for being here with us. Brian, I'm gonna pull you up. Thanks for being here, man.

And I'll pass it over to you. Sounds good. Give me a second here. I'll try and get some slides up for you.

Excellent. Alright, well, Tamika, thank you very much. I learned a lot from you there. And Pat, thank you as well for what you shared this morning about the, the perspectives of the senior executive team to Z and Craig.

Thank you. This has been lovely to be, uh, a participant here today. I got an oral surgery, so my voice is a little different than normal. I have a big fake tooth in my mouth, so please excuse my extreme lisp, uh, as I make my way through today's highly visual, uh, conversation.

Maybe, uh, uh, go into the, the chat if you can and let me know if you're able to see, uh, the slideware changing here on the screens. Love to know that we're good to go here. So today I've got a, an opportunity to chat with you about a perspective that we at, at our consulting company called Vital, have known as Purposeful Listening and, and hopefully this perspective from a non-HR practitioner. Yet someone who's driven extensive engagement across five or six companies that I've worked for over the years, predominantly in the tech industry, is this notion of impact led growth.

And I assure you, when in fact you're enforcing this concept of purposeful listening, you will be able to drive impact LED growth. And to summarize what impact led growth is imagine, uh, anything that you're pursuing for your version of Pat or your version of the executive team, uh, that your programs sit within as returning business and human return on investment. And I heard that a lot through Tamika. I heard that a lot through Pat, a lot through Craig and his examples, et cetera.

Are you, in your listening approach, purposeful? Are you driving business and human ROI Now there's four archetypes that that none of us necessarily want to live in as as HR executives or executives in general. We don't wanna be non listeners, right? The first archetype to not be as the head and the sand archetype.

The second archetype to be, uh, very weary of is one that gets completely paralyzed by analysis. So the phrase analysis paralysis. Are you driving some data back from your employees from a sentiment perspective or an employment experience perspective, but getting paralyzed in the data set that you in fact do have, even if that's just single threaded survey data and not incorporating the other data. A third archetype to avoid being out in the world is as someone that's listening for listening, are you just at the concert?

Are you listening to the work? Or are you in fact contributing to, uh, to the betterment of the business and the people in it? And fourth, an archetype to to avoid is this, this inaction archetype for those, uh, that are fans of the office space. Uh, movie.

Uh, the gentleman who did less, uh, that that got promoted, uh, is not necessarily the person to be. So once you start to get input, uh, I think as Pat was saying, as the example shared about what was happening down, uh, in the, um, offices just south of the, of the San Diego border, there action got taken. The customer service teams there, uh, uh, felt action. They felt investment when they provided the input.

And it's important to, to keep doing this. So again, listening to arrive at purposeful, listening to arrive at growth or business and human ROI listening must be purposeful, right? Listening must also be business value aligned. And we can't say that enough, and I know that keeps coming up, but there are very true ways that people, practitioners can generate business value even if they're not deeply specialized in engineering or sales or marketing or legal or all the other teams that you're making successful.

And part of how to do that, and I think the real opportunity for all of us is to incorporate as many signals as we can. We heard Tamika speak to the H-R-S-H-I-R-I-S, reviews, comp data, et cetera, love that and want to extend that horizon even further. Are we incorporating, uh, how much benefits are being used? Are we incorporating learning management, system utilization, communication threads, the way that social sentiment is being expressed through the Slack channels, uh, even at a casual glance?

And are we slicing and dicing, as Craig was saying in his conversation, are we looking into the applicant tracking system? Are we building more telemetry into the business here and not being single threaded just with a survey? Are we going deeper? And it's really, I think, incumbent upon us to look at as many signals as we can.

And if we're listening to all of the data, we're likely gonna get closer to purposeful listening, which then can generate that ROI and not just be listening for listening or the other four archetype challenges that we want to avoid, uh, uh, as we, as we pursue these programs and justify the budgets for them. So, purposeful listening, four components, gonna try and quantify this and, and stay visual here in the presentation and not, not overburden you with too much content and too much framework, but I do wanna speak to four things. Are you moving from a simple survey out to a broader telemetry that in real time is hearing from more of the business, from more of the systems, from more of the points of experience in the employee journey? Number two, are we taking the insights and connecting dots for the business?

Number three, are we accelerating all of this listening and action taking with the tools that are available in the new AI universe That's upon us. And four, are we moving quickly from the signal that we start to get from that telemetry into action? So let's break those all down. This for another minute or two again, are we, and many organizations do have some form of pulse survey or some form of performance management, uh, uh, perspective that starts to form some of the, the data and the numbers that we heard earlier about moving this office, points, moving this group from a .

as you heard earlier, to something else, all super important. But are we also now looking at the other places that could feed even with no new spend? Uh, sorry Craig, if nobody spends more on the, the advanced listening tools, but just with what you have, can you do more with that? Can you dig deeply into what perhaps are even less traditional ways that we're starting to listening to the data, but at minimum, are we unite, are we unifying streams to get to a, a more real time telemetry in the business?

Are we perhaps connecting dots for the business? Not again, just to understand where employee sentiment is, but to understand not only where their sentiment is, but how they're then gonna get a ahead to justify, um, or to, excuse me, invest more in customer sentiment increase or customer NPS, uh, or more code, uh, produced in a secure way for the roadmap or more legal contracts completed, whatever those business metrics need to be. And so maybe there's some less tradit, less traditional listening posts, uh, that are, that are leveraged by you and the team. Are the HR business partners gathering more than just how an employee feels about, about their position and about their, their loyalty to the company?

Maybe asking questions about why they're struggling in their business unit to achieve their, their business goal as well, alongside that, that human experience that they're, that they're engaged in. Number two, are we looking at all the other systems in a more, uh, nuanced way? Meaning looking at the applicant tracking system and saying, wait, when we ask the simple question, what have you heard about our culture that would make you want to join? Look at that question trend against that and see if in fact you're measuring up and, uh, and, and getting to where you want to be as a culture or looking at benefits data, what's being used, what isn't, and then surmising from that where there may be some opportunity for purposeful listening, uh, and some business and human ROI looking at the employee networks, going to them, you may call them employee resource groups or identity groups or clubs, whatever you call it.

Let's find out what their sentiment is. Not again, just on how they're experiencing employment with the organization, but how they could move the needle for the business as well. And li being listening, uh, with that purposeful ear and and leader, uh, one-on-ones and leader team meetings, are we in a position to perhaps even capture some of those one-on-ones or capture the content of those team meetings in a digital format so that they can be fed back into a model that leads us into this concept of AI acceleration, uh, in the listening, uh, the listening era here. And if we can get the candidate to paint, so the AI acceleration here, if you want to move quicker from a threat and into an opportunity or threat and opportunity detection or prioritizing the action that you take, taking that employee one-on-one transcription, taking all the data that Tamika spoke to, feeding those things into some of the language models that that technology team, if, if you're supported by those, uh, professionals in your organization, have some of the language models unique to employee listening, unique to employee sentiment, unique to the input you're getting, to get to and detect what the business could do to cover a gap or, or leap over a gap for, uh, the business, uh, plan that you have in place, or the business objective can in fact be very helpful.

So can the new learning model start to learn from your data to then help you produce content for department leaders, for senior executive team, or perhaps even for the board that again, is learning as you are and gives you a more real time pulse on what's there. Last but not least here in purposeful listening, we think about moving quickly from signal to action as we heard in the signals, uh, uh, in the example earlier, um, was what was going on in Pat's office there with customer service being really, really low and cus and clients not being engaged, an opportunity for HR to step in to enlist that leader to work together, to build a pilot or build a value kit on what would help those folks in those call centers, if they were call centers, whatever, whoever's that customer service folks to execute their work better. And in fact, then, then get those victories that build their, uh, confidence and build their ability to go against that business objective and in turn, get that human ROI from that momentum and being heard. So can we, in those pilots or value kits or those, those, those, those ideas that we form as a people team over to the business, whether it's delivered from the CEO down or to the department lead or to the department leads, directs, are we also then looking at that pilot or that that advice that we've done a little bit or taken maybe another step or two against an, an intervention or an opportunity to make a change and then determine if we need to start, stop and scale that in collaboration with that business unit.

So again, getting to action quickly and maybe starting with a low risk pilot to address the needs that they have in that area. So let me share three quick examples as we kind of go through this lightning talk here today. Not necessarily the kind of action that you'd see a lot of folks take as you see these next few slides. When you see something yellow, that's a challenge we heard something challenging come back from our listening, uh, traditional or less traditional, uh, reactive or proactive, no matter what our listening revealed something that we need to go as a people team take action against.

And I'll give you just one or two quick, uh, pulses of, uh, of advice or, or perhaps enlightening thought about these. So the first one, you do the survey, you move into the revenue side of the organization and you ask, what may be some sad staff? Um, what's going on with your work in the field in selling, asking these go-to market colleagues. Uh, and the feedback is we can't open doors.

We're not getting to enough clients, we're not able to do enough here. And my contention is if we're purposefully listening to that concern from the sales side, it's easy to just wash our hands and say, Nope, we're the people team. We're not gonna focus on helping you open more doors or differentiate with your accounts. But in fact, with purposeful listening and with the engagement of some, uh, of, of tactics that you can employ, it may just be as we did eight or nine years ago with the example you see on this slide with Okta.

Okta didn't yet have Okta for good setup nine and a half years ago. And with the HR team, with the employee advocacy team with marketing, a group of people sat around the table with the, the founders and said, we could turn on something called Okta for good, and maybe just maybe if we do that right with lots of influence from people and later ownership from the people team believe it lives in under the chief operating officer now at Okta. But you look at this very month in the last month, Okta has deployed billboards in major cities about the nonprofits that they work with. They've deployed Major Wall Street Journal ads about their work that helps sales executives tell a better story in their work to open more doors.

And so in this moment, we listened, we were purposeful about how we heard sales challenge, but we also turned on something proactive that in fact helped them in their role. Did it also help them drive more affinity and more engagement, uh, and more dedication to the Okta mission? Perhaps? We hope so, but at minimum it helped those, uh, customer facing, uh, folks because of the story that they now had to tell that maybe some of the other identity and cybersecurity companies aren't able to tell.

And the people team was able to take action there when they heard that concern and not just hit idly on the business feedback. Number two, maybe you heard that some of the sustainability wins that you as a business have. Perhaps it's just a discreet carbon footprint that somebody advanced in the past. Maybe you as the people team were pursuing the sustainability agenda for your organization.

But at minimum, complain employees are complaining that those secrets are being kept and that nobody is sharing, uh, the good wins that you have there. Well, fortunately, Harvard Business Review to the rescue this summer, they produced an article that said, when we're hearing our employees ex share their expectation about certain things and our customer's expectation, for example, not sharing enough of the work that you are in fact doing from a sustainability perspective, helping folks then through storytelling connect emotionally to your culture, to your business, to your strategy beyond just a sustainability report can be extremely important. Here, we're purposefully listening. We heard a concern that, hey, we're doing some good things in sustainability.

I know it's not that popular to go talk about that right now alongside many of the other great programs that help drive culture and drive business value. But that said, maybe we should buck the trend a little bit and tell stories in this area because in fact, green winds can be organizational wins. And one more example here, the burnout was spreading fast. We're seeing that in employee reviews.

I think we've seen a little bit about, a little bit less quiet quitting right now. I I'm, I'm not aware Janna or Tamika are in this data to tell you whether or not burnout is still a big problem. I know most of the people we work with are pretty stressed out. But then I asked the question, if you're seeing burnout spreading quickly and you're doing purposeful listening about that, perhaps there's something as now we talk about the intervention that you could turn on.

Like this example of a company SalesLoft who got together, uh, with green places and put together a a month of, of effort to engage employees and engage employees both in, in a sentiment that they authentically aligned with. In this case, it was doing some things that were more sustainability or green oriented, but they had the employees engaged, they heard the concern that there's burnout, they advanced that listening purposefully, and they turned on some engagement that would help the employees in an area that they had expressed value for, for customers perspectives and their perspectives. They purposely listened, heard the burnout concern, advanced a pilot, and then advanced a more formal program to get employees involved in the topics that they were passionate about. And I just really appreciated the way that the purposeful listening led to that.

So purposeful listening through the things we talked about, right? More signals connecting the dots for the business when we listen, accelerating what we can through large language models and the other tools that are available with the data that we gather and getting quicker to action, like the three areas of action that I expressed can open doors for the selling teams can help the organization start to differentiate itself, can help engagement spread, keep the culture scores rising. But we're not just doing that. So we can get a instead of a .

We're doing it because we know we can drive that business and human ROI And that's purposeful listening. Uh, I'm gonna close with a bonus point if anybody stayed with me through this talk. I hope you did. I know I went quickly.

I was doing some extensive research a few months ago about why soldiers are willing to bravely fight when they are joining the service. Uh, that, that they've joined. And believe it or not, the order are, they fight for comrades. So they fight for their brothers and sisters.

They fight for the shared mission that their, that their side of the conflict has. And they, they fight for personal honor, right? They fight for their version of, of, of, of what honor is. And if our listening is driving us to drive our employees to be these comrades driving a shared mission that maybe goes a little bit deeper than just a hollow mission of, of earning more money or having more profit.

And to turn on personal honor so that people can identify with the work because they're heard, because action got taken and because they saw that momentum and progress. It's what it, it's what inspires soldiers to fight bravely. And I would contend that would also be the types of things that will help our employees fight bravely in the work that they're doing. And I think it's incumbent upon us as, as people, professionals or folks like me who want to empower people, professionals, because I completely honor and admire the work you do to fight harder, uh, and, and get that business in human.

ROI Back over to you, Zach, in case there's any questions here. Wow. Thank you so much, Brian. First.

Yeah. Can we give some love and appreciation, Brian, for kind of breaking that down? I really enjoyed the purposeful listening aspect here because at this point we've kind of talked about like just standard best practices with listening and onboarding, with retention, with offboarding. It's like, okay, those are maybe your ticket into the game.

The next level here, I feel like is strategic, purposeful listening as you kind of broke down. And one thing I would bounce back to you, you shared some good examples there, but as maybe an HR executive or a people leader, how might they help uncover some of those purposeful opportunities, like the strategic challenges and things, right? Like there's almost like an element of listening they need to tap into, to uncover where do we need to do purposeful listening? So how do you uncover Yeah.

How do you uncover some of that? I mean, I think, I think one quick thought is that the people executive in a really tiny shop, maybe she's just alone in that battle. She's going for it with, with a big growing team of eight people, people, people, or a really large organization that's hundreds of HR business partners. It's like showing up where the sausage is getting made for the business.

Super, super important. And I know we don't all have that luxury, but to sit in those quarterly business reviews, to sit in the back of the board meetings that are appropriate to a wider audience than just a couple of, you know, the, the CEO and a couple of, uh, other executive team members. But to sit in the place where a lot of big decisions are being made that do affect the, the arch of the investment arc of the investments in the entity will also I think help us understand where in fact the listening at a human level needs to plug back into that. So getting super fluent, uh, in those bigger areas where the needles are moved, uh, in my opinion, kind of getting to the, getting to the, the Pat's team, uh, or to pat when it comes to those things is pretty important.

'cause then we go into the listening piece with a lot of business context. Yeah. Uh, and I think that's really seen as, as refreshing and the, the, the HR business, uh, leaders or the folks that, that are reaching across into various departments, not just speaking to compliance or compensation or kind of the employee experience, but for a moment just speaking to, Hey, how are we doing against the number? Or how's the product coming?

Are we on, are we, are we on track for in their, on the roadmap? And the more that that gets fed into the consciousness, I think of, of our listening motion, it doesn't come back to some of the HR practices that maybe got tied to the discipline of, of, of people leadership, but also get tied into a broader business value discipline, uh, and informs that. I hope, I hope there's some, some gem in there. Absolutely.

I think part of like us as people, professionals, and really executives in any role is kind of like building that discipline and the conditioning to always be listening and engaging and kind of feeling the vibe and that, and like what's happening in the field, right? And, and actually putting yourself into these moments. And I think one of the biggest challenges for a lot of groups is if you are a remote workplace or a hybrid workplace, you don't necessarily could like just physically put yourself That's right. A certain environment.

So it takes a lot of intention of like, how are you, and this is something I think I would encourage all of you as HR leaders, probably a theme I've seen a lot in this domain is kind of being more assertive with our role, right? Like, it's our responsibility to be able to undercover, uncover and understand these things. We shouldn't be waiting for permission to get access to some of that stuff. We should be asserting ourselves proactively into these spaces, right?

And these, these conversations couldn't agree, right? So, um, I couldn't agree more What you shared. You could start to uncover what, what those opportunities are. That's right.

And, and, and not every one of us that has discipline, for example, the hundreds of us on this call that are HR practitioners, we may not have in-depth engineering experience or sales experience or marketing experience or market vertical experience. But that said, the internet is pretty surprising. And people that come into the HR profession have been in a lot of other chairs in a lot of other seats. So it maybe isn't us going to the sales leader after we get that a bad, uh, you know, series of data about the culture in the, in the sales team and, and, and sort of explain, this is how you guys need to sell.

This is how you need to set yourself apart. It's actually possibly doing some of that research and effectively then going back into, uh, your executive champion to then engage that, that organization. But you still know that you and the team have driven some of the business ROI even if you had to do that through a messenger that would be seen as more credible, right? So it's another peer.

So that's where I think sometimes when the HR team is doing purposeful listening and then they're proactive about launching a pilot or creating a kit, sometimes the, the, the chief people officer going directly to the investment team or the sales team or somebody else, they're gonna, they're gonna say like, what, why are we having this meeting? Like, you're not an expert in this. Yeah. But in fact, you may in fact be, and the team may have a lot to add to the business, uh, plan, but sometimes it has to get to that leader that's, that's struggling or has a team that's struggling through a messenger.

Yeah. Uh, and, and that, that's the story I I I, I was going through even just yesterday, uh, with the chief people officer where he is like, I, I shouldn't have gone directly to that business team, but if I'd gone to the, if I'd, if I'd sent my, my prepara my preparation and my value kit to the CEO and let him go to the meeting, uh, on our behalf, uh, it would've, it would've accomplished the, uh, the goal. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think sometimes, like, I struggle with that too because like, I wanna be part of the solution and I, I want some of that, I want some of that recognition for being the solution. But I mean, that's very ego driven mindset. I think sometimes like we have to kind of set aside us being in the spotlight and, uh, kind of going to champions and influencers like the CEO or a practice leader and actually like enabling them to actually be the champion for this solution, right? And that's how absolutely right in there, right?

Yeah. 'cause if it's gonna get to the business result, that executive that helped you carry it in there is gonna be super stoked and you're in good shape. Whether or not you get a, you know, two minutes at the, at the all hands or not, doesn't matter. You got the win.

Well, Brian, thank you so much. I appreciate, it's my pleasure having some time with us. I added Brian's LinkedIn in the chat there. Make sure you connect with 'em.

Oh, thank you. And Brian, I saw in the chat that the QR code wasn't maybe working for some people, so I don't know Okay. What the link back in the chat for, for wherever that was. Um, and, uh, but yeah, thank you so much for, for breaking this down with us.

Of course. I'll put, uh, put a link in the chat to our website. Thanks very much for the opportunity to share some ideas today. Yeah.

All right, everyone give Brian a round of applause and some appreciation, uh, purpose. Aw, sweet. Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah, I think like so far as a program, right? We've broken down some fundamentals all the way from Pat talking about actually connecting this to business value next level, thinking about how Tamika talked about like kind of breaking down, listening at the different stages of the employee life cycle and leveraging data sets that you already have access to. And then obviously the next stage of almost maturity and development as Brian broke down is one, leveraging the data sets that you have access to. Like, if you remember that slide, it kind of was like a big wheel where you kind of showed, all right, all these different types of access points, I think I saw like employee reviews, employee engagement, data communication channels, uh, LMS systems, like our people engaging with development, uh, applicant tracking, system systems, time tracking, like all of that is really insightful information that enables you to kind of be more strategic without deploying another survey, right?

Like, I think that's some of our concerns or leadership concerns about listening. It's like, what do we really have to set out another survey? Like, no, actually we could just robust and improve our data sets and use that as indicators for listening and then purposeful listening as the next stage, specifically look at challenges, things that are coming up in the field, and use that to reinforce why we need to dig deeper and uncover this so that we can move the needle on these key priorities. So, all right, next up, I'm really excited to welcome a friend, mentor, founder as a part of our community.

I've been part of, you know, this network for some time. Gianna driver, chief people officer, Jan, lemme bring you up here. Where are you hiding? All right.

Thank you for being here so much. Uh, we're gonna unpack these things as a, as a little bit of a discussion. So everyone, especially if you have some questions from those last sessions or just in general, this is a really good time to put those questions in the chat or the q and a function. We're just gonna kind of unpack some of these different things.

But Gianna, thank you so much for being here. It's so great to see you and really excited to share the stage with you. Yes, it's wonderful to be here. I'm super excited.

And I have to say, you know, I've been listening to Brian and Tamika and Pat, and I'm just like, yes, yes. Like, they get it. So I'm just, yeah, super, super, um, excited and, and jazzed. So let's dive in.

Awesome. Well, let's dig into this. We got about minutes here together. Uh, one would just love, let's start kind of high level and then we can kind of dig into some more specifics.

I think, um, I think sometimes one of the hesitations with listening both for, uh, like leaders at organizations is they're not feeling prepared or ready with what they might hear from listening. Mm-hmm. And then on the other end, employees might not feel psychologically safe to even provide their viewpoint. They're like, okay, I've been trying to kind of stay under the radar.

It's kind of maybe a bad environment right now. I don't feel safe actually voicing my concerns. So can you talk through maybe how we start to just build the readiness for listening between these two parties? Yeah, definitely.

Well, someone had, um, touched on this a little bit earlier, so I wanna just sort of, you know, double click on that. Um, and it's around, um, trust, right? So before doing any sort of listening campaign, be that surveys or, um, engaging ERGs or whatever it is, I think it's really important to first establish trust. Trust is one of those things that, um, is, is earned in drips and lost in buckets.

Um, and I've worked in organizations where, I think you mentioned this just a second ago. Um, the CEO was like, Gianna, let's not ask about, you know, these different things because we know it's broken, and I'm, I'm not ready to hear that right now. So that was more of a fear-based response. Um, and my, my sort of, you know, counter to that was yes, I hear you in term, like I hear you CEO in terms of saying, I don't want to ask about this set of questions.

Um, because, you know, I, I know what people think I said, however, we've had a lot of new hires, we've had a lot of different movements and various things in the organization. Let's listen. First, let's ask the question, um, and then let's let people know that we heard them. Because I think a lot of times with listening, we're so focused on, on asking.

Um, but then part of effective listening campaigns in organizations is seeking to understand. So going back to employees and saying, here's what I heard you say. I heard you say , , , , and five. Now we can't do three and five because of these different reasons, but we hear you.

And we're hoping that next year, next quarter, whatever, we will be able to do those. We can't do those because we're focused right now on our go-to-market engine or, you know, product launches or whatever. However, what we can do employees is, um, we can start working on one, two, and four in this example. Um, and I've, I've found in my experience that employees are humans.

And if you're real with them, if you treat them as you would treat a friend and say, look, here's what I heard you say and here's what we're gonna now do about it. Um, they, they lean in. The other part of effective listening, um, and effective listening campaigns is following it up. So in other words, it's not just the, the asking and the the seeking to understand, but then it's also going back next month, next quarter at the all hands and saying, remember how we said that we were gonna start working on one, two, and four of that list of five things?

Here's where, here's where we're making progress. One, we knocked it out of the park. Two was so-so, and four, we thought we were gonna be able to, to impact this last quarter, but we weren't able to. Right.

Because that builds trust and accountability. I love that. I think one, like one thing that you immediately hit on with kind of the strategy, especially when you're trying to get the csuite or the CEO bought in, is alleviating some of that pressure that it's okay to not have the answers, right? Yeah.

And it's okay to feel like we have to prioritize our time. We're already spread thin, we're already asking to do more with less, so we're only able to tackle certain things at this current time, right? Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that we forget is like, it, it, there's more, there's a lot of value in just being heard and, and listened to.

Yeah. Other than just like everything being solved. So I think alleviating that pressure on the front end can go, okay, as a CEO E is like, okay, well I'm still gonna have to go to this town hall is just gonna be really tough because I don't have the answers. It's like, actually, that's okay.

That that's totally fine. They just want to feel heard and know that we're accounting for these different things that they care about. Absolutely. These like listening campaigns are opportunities to build trust with, with our employees.

And we have an opportunity to either build that trust and hold ourselves accountable and be authentic and real with them. Or conversely, um, if we don't do it, we don't do it well and we're not real and authentic with it, it erodes trust. Um, right. And so I think, um, you know, de-stigmatizing this for CEOs and making them feel a little bit more comfortable not having all the answers will ultimately net in an, in a overall gain and trust, or at least that's been my experience with employees.

Yeah. Okay. So now if we've gotten the buy-in from the CEO and, and now we're doing listening and we're starting to look at the data, or we're starting to look at the insights, right? We wanna be strategic within, understand what we can and can't take action on, we also wanna make sure that we're taking action on the actual insights and we're going below maybe surface level data.

And I think one thing that you've said, and we've talked about in the past is how data can be misleading if we stay at the surface level. And so I'm curious for you, like what's kind of your playbook or view on turning some of these surface level signals into deeper conversations or insights that we can use to actually take effective action? Yeah. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll share, um, a specific example.

Um, so I, uh, when I worked at a cybersecurity company, um, you know, we did the, the annual survey, um, you know, got the data back. Um, and I think it's always interesting to look at this from a company-wide perspective, but then also look at data by department, by region, by, by ethnic group, by gender. Like you have to be able to slice and dice the data in a lot of different ways. Interestingly, um, in one of our departments, it was, um, in a, in a subset of sales, um, and we were very transparent about the results, right?

Like with, with the leaders. Um, that leader had very high engagement, um, scores. And, um, yet we knew that there was a, an attrition and turnover problem in his, in his department, like on his roll up, you know, global team. And, um, one of the, um, meetings, uh, one of the leadership meetings, he was like, yeah, well, you know, like, not really an issue, you know, for my, for my team and my department, our engagement scores are, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I said, yes, true. You do have high engagement and that's wonderful. However, let's look at the number of people who actually responded. And from a percentage standpoint, he was at something percent, um, respondents in his overall organization.

And so it's like, okay, you have to really dig into the data because surface level data might tell you one story. However, truly understanding the data is a different story. And in his particular department, we happened to know through our ERGs who were part of that department, as well as the HR business partner, as well as just anecdotal, you know, sort of information, talking to people that there was an engagement problem. There was a very, very deep engagement problem.

And his results were such that the majority of people on his team were so disengaged that they couldn't be bothered to take the survey to tell us how disengaged they were. Right? So that's an example of data. Now, Zach, you asked about another, um, you know, another element around turning some of the data into insights.

So same company, cybersecurity company, slightly different take on, um, turning some of this into, into insight or into action. So we knew that we had an attrition problem with some of our high potential high performing employees. Um, and looking at data, not just the employee survey. 'cause that's one way to listen to employees, but you also, I think Tamika had mentioned this, you also have exit survey information.

You know, you've got, um, round tables, you've got a lot of information. We knew that people were leaving, um, because they didn't feel like there was a career path for them at the company. Um, now we, we had a promotion cycle, uh, right? And I think the executives all felt like, oh, well, we do invest in our people.

We, you know, advance their careers and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. However, that wasn't being, um, understood by the majority of people in the organizations or in the organization. And specifically with our high potential and high performing group, we care about all employees, but that subset of high performing, high potential folks, we care a lot about the experience they're having because we want to retain them. We want them to know that they have a future at the company.

Um, so what we ended up doing is all of the data told us that employees didn't feel they had a career path at the company in one of our all hands. We were honest with people. We said from our, you know, from our listening strategy, we've learned, you know, these different things. And some of the other things weren't related to career development and career pathing and stuff.

But what we said is, for this next quarter, we're gonna focus on building out robust career paths and making sure we communicate about them. We actually do have career paths here, but we realize that we've not, you know, communicated that to all of you. And we know from what you're telling us that you want to better understand how to be promoted and how to advance your career. Here we have that we're gonna work on making it even more robust, and we're gonna do a better job of communicating to you about it.

That's going to require, by the way that you spend some time with us, managers and leaders to build these things out a little bit more robustly, right? Because you're the subject matter expert for your, you know, your functional vertical. Um, and I have to say, did we do it perfectly? No.

But we did start to notice a significant decrease in regrettable attrition for our high posts. Wow, there's so much to unpack there. I appreciate you kind of breaking down the end to end. And, and for everyone listening out, again, kind of recap some of the things that Jana started with, which was like, how rich are you able to kind of segment and piece your data apart?

And where there's disengagement, like a % participation rate in the engagement data? That's a data point itself, right? So how often, I'm assuming many of you have gone, Hey, we wanna do this initiative, and the CEO's like, what do you mean everything's great? Like our engagement's better than ever?

Like, I saw the score, like, it's looking amazing. We don't need to invest more here. We just need to keep doing what we're doing. That's where you need to start being able to come back with what Gianna just shared.

Like, well, there's actually blind spots to this data, and there's actually a whole nother data point here that signals something very serious, which is % of the organization didn't even take this survey, which means there's a whole nother realm here of information that we're not getting that probably speaks to a huge reality that you're not aware of, right? So I think having that and then going deeper of being able to segment it by department, you know, by role, by sex, by, you know, different geographic locations that will help you gain more specific into those blind spots. Yeah. So next question for you, Gianna then.

Uh, you, you talked a little bit before about the campaign aspect of our listening and having kind of an ongoing cadence and building a muscle and almost a ritual around listening within the organization versus just doing this like annual onetime employee engagement survey. But then on the other end, if the organization maybe can't keep up or, or act on this or survey fatigue becomes a thing, right? So how do you maybe approach determining the ideal listening cadence and keep trust at a high level while you do that without overwhelming maybe the system or the people within it? Mm-hmm.

Great question. Um, survey fatigue is real, right? Like I've, I've experienced it myself, and I, um, yes. Like it's, it's one of those, um, things you don't want, um, folks to spend so much time taking the surveys that they then start to complain they don't have enough time to do their job, right?

Um, so what, what has, you know, worked well, um, at, at several different companies? Um, and again, I I want to clarify, there's not an absolute right or wrong here, right? So this is, you know, something that, um, you can use or a way to think about this, but, um, this is gonna vary depending on the needs of specific organizations and if they're quickly changing versus, you know, not, et cetera. Or if you have events like a reduction in fours, like that's, you know, like a different set of, you know, surveys and listening campaigns.

Um, so first of all, I do believe in having at least an annual survey, um, that's a little bit more in depth, um, because that's gonna help you establish some type of baseline for organizational health and just sort of understanding year over year how you're tracking at a company level. So very, very much believe in at least an annual, ideally twice a year. And maybe that second one is a lighter touch than your first one. Um, but that as a, as a baseline.

Now, outside of that, I think it's event-based. So in other words, if the company is, let's say, buying another company and merging, you know, the two together, um, that's an opportunity to start to get into the rigor of listening. And also to let you know the, the new entrance into the organization know, you know, this is, this is how, this is how we work, this is how we listen and engage and act on, on employee feedback. Um, another, uh, thing too that I think can be very, very effective is if, you know, there are pockets in the organization of concern or pockets where you want to listen more deeply, it doesn't always have to be negative, by the way.

Um, you can do pulse surveys, right? So you can do targeted listening campaigns, um, that are within a department, that are within a region that are within a product line. Like you can slice and dice this different ways. Um, but what's important now, this gets to some of the survey fatigue piece.

If employees know that you're gonna do this at least once a year, possibly twice a year, and then as needed, and you make those as needed times truly pulse surveys. So what I mean by that is we're talking, you know, two, three, maybe maximum five questions. So it's like a quick hit, right? Like it truly is a pulse.

And then you do that follow up loop where you say, you know, I asked you what you thought, here's what I heard, here's what I'm doing about it. And then the next month come back and say, here's what I've done about it and here's what I'm continuing to do about it. That seems to quell a lot of survey fatigue concerns. Is it perfect?

No. But if people know that their voice matters, they're a lot more keen to tell you what they think. Yeah, I think so much of it's rooted in intention and purpose. And what I like about how you shared like these events based listening strategies, one takes the pressure off of all of you thinking like every employee has to be part of every survey.

No, it doesn't. It could be just a team, it could be just a department or a specific cross-functional project area, and just be purposeful and strategic about why you're engaging in that group, because there's certain things that are coming up and you wanna serve them at a deeper level. Let's do a quick pulse, right? So I think that alleviates the pressure of like always having to do organizational wide stuff.

Yep. And actually, Zach, that, that reminds me, um, at, at one of the companies what we did. Um, speaking of kind of making it event based or sort of like really targeted pulse surveys, I think it's important that employees know we're not just asking them, um, when there's, when there's a concern or something negative or whatever. So what we, what we did, um, is we, uh, we asked, uh, so our office was in Foster City, um, and monthly we would have these like pizza party types of things.

Um, but we didn't know that, uh, we always had leftover pizza. I know like, bear, bear with me, I'm gonna bring it home. I'm gonna bring it back. Um, and uh, so we thought, well, maybe people don't like pizza.

And so we did a quick pulse survey for all of the employees who were, you know, in the foster city office or like within a minute commute of the office. Um, and it literally was like, I think it was three questions, and it was about, you know, do you come in for like, does food matter? Do you come in for food or some, something like that, like a quick yes no type of a thing. Do you like pizza?

Yes. And if you don't, like, what are some of the other, you know, like food? Well, we realized that we had so much leftover pizza because people actually, we had a lot of folks who were, um, like the low carb thing and da and um, and, and gluten. And, and so we're like, oh, oh my gosh.

Like, well, let's, let's start offering like some salads and some other stuff. And so I think that type of muscle where people realize, oh, this isn't like, you know, some big, you know, terrible thing, oh yeah, they're gonna ask me sometimes, like these short things, um, and then they're gonna act on it. My voice matters is really important, um, to convey in listening campaigns and, and we did start to, you know, change up what we offered, um, you know, for the, for the lunches and stuff. And so I think those are the actions that help to address survey fatigue.

Yeah, I mean, I remember the last organization we were with, we were building out a whole new office building. We're moving to a much larger space. We grew and we did certain listing engagements. I remember like uncovering little things, like there's not enough bathroom stalls in the men's room, right?

Like, and when that morning coffee hits, like you need every stall you need, but that's besides the point. But I'm just saying like, it, thinking of the events and the purpose of certain listening engagements, it doesn't always have to be necessarily like targeting a group because there's something wrong, right? Like you can leverage it in different areas to enhance the overarching experience. And I would even say like, think about the wins and the successes that are happening, and leverage listening instances into that as well to understand and capture those stories and use it as a part of your rewards and recognition aspect of the company, right?

So listening doesn't necessarily have to be just on the negative gaps, challenges, although that's where you're gonna get a lot of buy-in because there's some big needle moving, like impacts there. But then on the other side, like leverage it in other domains to help build that muscle, but also that trust of like, okay, my voice matters in many ways, and I'm willing to engage with that type of listening. So yeah. Okay.

So we are coming up on time. Jenna, this flew by. I was just Gonna say, we just started. I know.

Seriously. So I would love maybe just like closing thoughts, like especially for those groups, uh, leaders in the, in the chat here and attending. You know, we did a score at the beginning where someone like I'm a zero on a scale to one, to zero to five on my listening strategy. What would be some of your immediate suggestions for how people should get started with their listening strategy, especially Q4 is here perfect timing to kind of propose some of these strategic initiatives.

Yeah. What would you suggest on like the get starting kit? Yeah. Well, so I think about crawl, walk, run, run, right?

So you first crawl, you walk, then you run. Um, and if you don't have anything right now, I'd say like, just get started, right? So do, if, if it seems overwhelming to think about some type of a large company-wide engagement survey, then do a, a targeted, um, pulse survey, ideally company-wide, right? Like, if you don't have anything, um, and I think it's important to, um, as we're talking about, like speak to your employees very authentically, um, let them know, like, look, here's where we are in this listening journey.

Um, we're gonna do a survey, we're gonna do a pulse or whatever it is, tell them what you heard, um, and then break it down into some actions. Um, right? So this doesn't need to be boiling the ocean. Um, it's okay to not get it right the first time.

Um, employees want to see that there's action happening, not that everything is perfect. Um, and remember too, that an effective listening campaign isn't just a survey. Um, you know, whether it's an, you know, the annual engagement survey or, or pulse surveys. There are also, um, ERGs or affinity groups and circles that you can leverage.

Um, if you have an extended leadership team, there's a way to sort of harness the collective wisdom and feedback from that group. If you've got other, um, pockets in the organization, um, whether you've got, you know, office managers who can like gather people together for small, you know, round table discussions. Remember that listening doesn't have to be this huge, overwhelming, big, scary, um, initiative or event. It can be much more targeted.

Um, and it's okay to start small. Remember, trust is earned in drips and lost in buckets. And so every little drip of trust and action, um, you, you listen, you tell people what you heard, you understand, and then you act. And it's an iterative process.

Listening is iterative. It's, it's not a, it's not a destination, it's a journey. Well, thank you for reaffirming that. I think the crawl, walk, run model is a great just like mindset to have as we approach this.

Like, don't try to go into outer orbit to Mars, right? Like, just try to get, you know, off the off land and flying and I think serve building daily momentum. And I think that's something Pat, the CEO kind of noted earlier was, where can you find early wins, small and early wins that help build momentum, that build more trust as you share and, and start to get more buy-in for bigger things, right? So Gianna, thank you so much.

This was incredible and it was wonderful to have you here with us again. Yeah, thanks for having me. Bye Everyone. Give it up for Gianna warm, uh, uh, applause there.

That was incredible. I mean this, this whole section of the agenda, these impact accelerators, Tamika, Brian, and Gianna, I mean, that was awesome. I mean, we broke down the fundamentals of listening today, and we're gonna get to some more advanced frameworks and strategies with AI and all that good stuff. But ask yourself like, are you doing some of the minimum and the foundational things from an employee lifecycle standpoint, from a leveraging data sets you already have access to, to then integrating purposeful listening and event-based listening into your strategy?

And next thing you know, as Jana shared, you're gonna be running, you're gonna be creating so much momentum. And as she even shared, I think trust is really at an all time low or continues to trend lower within the world of work. And some of you may have had to make some difficult conversations from downsizing or riffs or some, you know, performative type, uh, decisions with people. And that's really tough and that's part of the realities of, of being in business.

But that means we have to start taking action around things that build trust. And listening and engaging in co-creation and conversations with your people is gonna be some of the ways to build some of the momentum.

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