Speaker 1: Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the simple and AI-powered rewards and recognition platform for employee engagement.

Speaker 2: Employee feedback or surveys add value, respect, and inclusivity to your company culture. Great employee experience is about trust, performance, and equal opportunity, and one must understand employees' needs and work on them to make their employee experience great. Thus, employee pulse or feedback surveys help you improve the employee experience for enhanced engagement, productivity, and retention. Hello, listeners. Welcome to Vantage Influencers podcast. I am your host, Gautam. Today, we talk about the importance of employee surveys and how it helps improve employee experience in the workplace. To shed light on this topic, we have with us Adam Zuckerman. Who is Adam Zuckerman? Adam Zuckerman is the global product leader for the Willis Towers Watson Employee Engagement Software. He is responsible for leading the product vision, strategy, development, and ongoing enhancement. Adam also teaches organizational attitudes and survey development at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Hello, Adam. Hello. Nice to be with you today. Good. Why don't you begin with brief us about yourself and let our listeners know what you are all about.

Speaker 3: Great. I have a doctorate in psychology from NYU, and I started my career in the late 90s with a boutique consulting firm focused on employee surveys. At that time, we used to call it employee satisfaction. That concept has evolved over time to employee commitment, employee engagement, and today employee experience. But the construct is similar and the work is similar. I've really been doing that work ever since in different forms, trying to help clients to better understand the employee experience and make changes to improve it to improve business performance. My current role is focused on the software that clients use to survey employees, understand their views, and take action to improve the experience.

Speaker 2: That's great. If we have to talk about employee experience, what is the true meaning of employee experience to you?

Speaker 3: Well, in a generic sense, people define it differently, of course, and I think there's value in understanding it from different perspectives. At Willis Charles Watson, I think the most generic way of understanding it is that employee experience are really all of the touch points or moments that matter between an employee and an employer. Sure. It's the full collective. In our view, that can be broken down into really four foundational components. Two of which relate to a sense of connection, and two relate to contribution. We would say the purpose and the people are part of the connection that the employee has, and the work itself and the rewards relate to the contribution, helping employees and shaping their contribution to meaningful work and rewarding them appropriately. We would say purpose, people, work, and rewards are the four foundational components of the employee experience.

Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. Definitely. Contribution and connection plays a very important role while framing the employee experience for any organization, I believe. What is the most significant way for any company to improve the employee experience in their company?

Speaker 3: Well, I think starting with an intent to do so, is probably the most critical thing. Recognizing the importance of the employee experience is valuable. I think there's a growing recognition among companies today of the importance of it, especially today with the great resignation, but even before, I think it's really grown over time. Acknowledging its importance is critical. Training managers and leaders in a way to appreciate the employee experience and the importance of the employee experience. Listening to employees in a variety of ways is really critical interpersonally, individually, but also through things like focus groups, more formal means, and then, of course, organizational surveys, I think, is one of the most effective ways to listen to employees so that you understand the employee experience and you can use that insight to guide actions to improve it.

Speaker 2: Well, I think being a part of Vantage Circle myself, we do give a lot of emphasis on employee surveys because ultimately when you listen to your employees, you make them feel valued and wanted, and they would want to be more productive in their work, I believe, right?

Speaker 3: Absolutely. I know the work you do there is terrific, and I think there's a lot of great firms today who are doing really valuable work in this space, and I often say that it's less about the particular tools you're using and the particular models and frameworks. There are a lot of valuable ones out there. The key to me is to find the one that resonates with you and will work inside your company, and then really commit to it, make the most of it, get all you can out of it. That'll make the difference. I think there's just more good work being done today in this area than ever before.

Speaker 2: Agreed. If you'd like to believe that employee surveys or feedback surveys are the key to improving employee experience in a workplace, so how would you speak about that? How do you think that it improves employee experience in the workplace?

Speaker 3: Well, the key is that not just to survey employees, not just to listen to them, although that's where it starts, but to take action on that information. That can be the real hard part, is to actually convert those insights into meaningful change, and that's where a lot of organizations do struggle. There's some best practices there. First of all, make sure that what you're asking about up front, you're really committed to act on. If you're not committed to act on it, don't ask about it. Make sure that all the key stakeholders are on board. Then when you get the information from surveys, make sure that you share it with employees quickly, review it in a thoughtful way, have a plan for how to review it and prioritize it, which is really a critical step because most surveys generate all kinds of things that you could focus on. But it's really important to prioritize the few that are most critical, and then make sure that you're willing to deploy resources against those priorities. My experience, doing just one or two things out of a survey, and even though a survey might identify a dozen things, you could address, picking just one, even just one or two, and focusing on them can have a great impact.

Speaker 2: Sure. When we talk about review, when we talk about employees, when we talk about our own workers who give their immense contribution, but very often we tend to forget that what they might be feeling or what they are going through. In that kind of a situation, when we talk about employee feedback, what do you think, what type of questions or inputs must you incorporate in an employee feedback form?

Speaker 3: Well, I think, yeah, it's a great question. I think that, as I said before, at Wills Charles Watson, we have a framework for identifying and measuring the employee experience. We call it the high-performing employee experience, and it's based on our research into financially high-performing companies and the experience they provide to their employees. We have questions that map onto that high-performing employee experience or HPEX. We would recommend that clients follow that structure if they buy into that framework and the research behind it. But again, I would say, there's a lot of great frameworks out there, different models out there, and I think they all or virtually all of them have value. The trick is to find one that resonates with you, and that'll work inside your company, and then to stick to it, and to commit to it. That's more important in some ways than the framework itself. Because again, I think there's a lot of value to a lot of the frameworks out there. But typically, they're going to include all of the standard dimensions that you would imagine. You want to ask about communications, collaboration, leadership, development opportunities, rewards, all of the things that employees experience. Measuring all the touch points is, again, are moments that matter between an employee and an employer.

Speaker 2: Wow, I think that was great listening to you about that, because I think when we talk about a lot of companies, sometimes they think that, so what do we add in our feedback? Just normal questions, how they feel or what they feel, but I think it has to be more personal as well as to how they're doing in your organization. What do they feel being in your organization, right?

Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's important to have a measure of attachment or connection to the organization, which is typically captured through engagement, we call it employee engagement. But it's also important to capture it in a variety of different ways. So people often think of surveys with quantitative data, a multiple choice question, which are really valuable because you can benchmark it and you can track it over time and do advanced analytics. But I often find too that adding in open-ended questions for qualitative input is also extremely valuable. You get very rich information from that kind of question as well.

Speaker 2: That's nice. So, now that with all the globalization happening, with a lot of diversity and inclusion happening in most of the companies and worldwide, especially after remote work is in place. So, do you like to believe diverse and inclusive employee feedback helps improve employee experience tremendously?

Speaker 3: I do. I mean, I think listening is one of the things that really helped me. A lot of the clients that we're working with are focused on DE&I issues. And starting with understanding the employee's perspective is really critical to those kinds of initiatives. It's very dangerous to assume the employee's views or how they're experiencing diversity and inclusion related issues. And surveys are a great way to understand that particular topic. Well, I think that's good

Speaker 2: because I think more than framing prejudices, I think we really need to understand that every employee is different and they might come from different backgrounds, right? And I think that is what can make a very good company culture when we start recognizing them very often.

Speaker 3: Absolutely. And that's also relevant to not only the surveys and the questions that you asked, but the analytics that you do. Being able to look at the results as a function of various demographics and multiple demographics at one time really allows you to understand the employee's perspective at scale in a way that's very difficult to do otherwise.

Speaker 2: Wow. Thanks, Adam. That was great listening from you. And so in the end, how would you like to summarize your inputs on employee surveys and employee experience? And how does it help in building an equal, diverse, and then engaged company culture?

Speaker 3: Well, I think to me, it's the most interesting and most valuable part of business. Understanding people, culture, and the employee experience is something that is one of the few remaining competitive advantages that companies have. It's something that you can't steal, you can't copy, so you have to develop yourself organically and it can be a true differentiating capability if you do it right. And to me, it's at the heart of business success. There's, you know, you need a good strategy, you need good operations, you need to execute that strategy and understand your customers. All that is important, but it starts with your people.

Speaker 2: Wow. I think that's great to hear that it starts with your people because I think it's the people in the office that can, you know, truly make it or either break it when it comes to employee experience because we never know that what employees are going through, you know? And I think more than judging them, I think we really need to understand them at the beginning, right? Absolutely. So, you know, now that we are slowly approaching towards the end, I would like you to, you know, tell our listeners that how can they reach out to you if they have to, you know, know anything from you?

Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks very much. Well, you can always contact Willis Towers Watson on the internet. And I'm very active on LinkedIn as well, Adam Zuckerman, PhD. I'm regularly posting there on issues related to employee experience, culture, and leadership.

Speaker 2: Wow, thank you. Thank you so much, Adam, for joining us today. Your knowledge and insights on employee surveys have surely given our listeners and us a new direction towards improving the employee experience in the workplace. Great, thanks very much. Hope you have a great weekend ahead, yeah? You too, thank you.

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