KORN FERRY LISTEN

Measure and leverage employee engagement with Korn Ferry Listen

Korn Ferry Listen, our world-leading EX-based consulting and customized employee engagement survey programs, help your organization determine how engaged and enabled your employees are. Backed by SAP Qualtrics’, and with industry-leading research, IP and benchmarks, Korn Ferry Listen helps you not just measure your employee engagement, but understand what your employees need from you and how to use your engaged employees’ to drive your business further.

Korn Ferry Listen elevates the employee experience and drives organizational performance

Korn Ferry Listen brings world-class EX-based consulting, employee engagement survey solutions, IP and benchmarks so organizations can discover what their employees think across all touchpoints of the employee experience.

According to our research, your company will enjoy better results when levels of employee engagement and enablement are both high. That’s why we measure not just how motivated your people are (engagement) but also whether they have the tools and environment to do their jobs (enablement).

We offer a range of surveys to meet different business needs.

• Quick-to-use, off-the-shelf surveys with standard, benchmarkable questions designed to drive performance.
• Standard surveys, tailored to your organization, where you can choose extra questions, write your own, and include some for open comment.
• Specific surveys for different stages that take the pulse of your organization between annual surveys or survey people at different stages of the employee lifecycle.

We’ve added award-winning SAP Qualtrics technology to our employee experience survey platform to give organizations an even more flexible and engaging user experience.

Annual employee engagement surveys offer organizations value

Before an organization can improve its employee experience, it has to know what’s driving employee perceptions and motivations. Annual employee engagement surveys allow organizations to collect information from a broad cross-section of employees on a wide variety of topics efficiently, all at the same time.

These surveys provide a wealth of information to organizations about employee motivations, including what employee experiences and work environments are most motivating to employees and how organizations can improve performance at the individual and organizational levels.

What organizations need to know about employee engagement

Employee engagement is the commitment that employees feel toward their organization. Engaged employees feel pride in working for their company, intend to remain part of it, and are willing to recommend their organization to their friends and family.

Employee motivation is a critical component of employee engagement. Motivation is an employee’s willingness to contribute discretionary effort, or, in other words, to go the extra mile for their organization. There are two main types of motivation: intrinsic, or internally derived, and extrinsic, or externally derived.

Employees feel intrinsically motivated when they take part in employee experiences that tap into their self-concept and personal drive, such as tasks they find personally interesting, enjoyable, or rewarding. When work aligns with an employee’s attitude and value, or is otherwise meaningful, they feel excited, accomplished, and satisfied.

Employees feel extrinsically motivated by their employer’s actions, such as the promise of compensation or other rewards or incentives, or by the actions of a manager or leader or peer influences. External motivators can be effective at encouraging employees to perform at higher levels, so long as employees understand how they’ll be evaluated and what success looks like. And, of course, the volume of work has to align with the expected payout.

Why organizations should focus on employee engagement

Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are key components of employee engagement. But most organizations don’t know whether their employees are engaged. And the majority of organizations aren’t doing enough to motivate their employees to excel at their jobs, which hurts their performance.

Employee engagement is critical to companies for three main reasons.

1. The pace of change: Business environments are quickly—and constantly—changing. Companies must pivot to respond, which requires employees to be equally nimble. At all levels, employees face ambiguous situations that they, and their leaders, hadn’t anticipated. Leaders and managers must be able to rely on their teams to act independently but in line with their company’s goals, values, and culture.
2. Resource allocation: Employees must find ways to do more with less. In lean environments, the most engaged workers are the most resourceful when identifying new methods to accomplish their work and meet their goals.
3. A virtuous cycle of improvement: The more engaged workers are, the better their work environment, and the better the organization performs. Engaged employees lead to recruiting and retaining the best talent, because people want to work for companies where they can contribute and grow.

On the other hand, disengaged employees negatively affect everything from workplace morale to customer service, product quality, productivity, and sales.

For these reasons, organizations should study the employee experience and determine whether their employees are positioned in ways that advance the organization toward its goals.

Employee engagement alone is not enough to deliver a great employee experience

Korn Ferry has seen a number of organizations with high employee engagement struggle with performance issues. Even if these organizations have taken steps to energize their employees with appropriate goals and objectives, employees aren’t optimally productive in their jobs. That means employee engagement alone is not enough to sustain maximum employee or team effectiveness.

Our research has shown that 67% of employees globally are engaged, but their personal motivations outweigh their external, company-driven motivations. Only 59% of employees believe that their company motivates them to do more, compared to 70% of employees who feel intrinsically, or personally, motivated. Too many employees don’t feel confident in their ability to achieve their career objectives, are lacking the authority they need to do their jobs well, struggle to receive support from other teams, and find their organizations poorly organized and structured.

This motivation gap is pervasive, across every geography, industry, and employee demographic. That means organizations must ensure their employees are engaged as well as enabled. While engagement is the “want to” of work, enablement is the “can do”: it concerns whether employees’ skill and abilities are being fully used in their roles and whether the organization’s environment supports them.

In short, organizations need to improve the motivation and resources they deliver to employees to fully harness their workers’ energy and enable them to perform at their best. They need to optimize the employee experience.

For an employee experience that enables employees to achieve at the highest levels, organizations must do two things:

1. Optimize their roles: Ensure employees are using their skills and given opportunities to do challenging, interesting work.
2. Provide a supportive environment: Employees are best able to apply themselves to their work in an environment that gives them sufficient autonomy plus the support they need to excel and when their employer ensures that they are clear on their roles, responsibilities, and processes.

When a significant gap exists between an employee’s internal and external motivation, employees may seek additional motivation from the organization in the form of higher compensation and rewards or promotions, or they may disengage and look for other employment opportunities.

This is where employee engagement surveys come in, ensuring that organizations have a comprehensive understanding of the employee experience.

How organizations can improve their employee experience

The employee experience is everything an employee encounters, perceives, or feels at work that matters to them. Employers that respond to this experience are more likely to attract and retain talent and drive employee performance.

You can improve performance through better engagement or better enablement alone. But to achieve the most impressive results, you need to combine them. Organizations with high employee engagement and enablement generally have higher employee productivity, customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and net profit. They also experience significantly lower employee turnover. Research shows that your people who are both highly engaged and highly enabled will be 50% more likely to perform better than you expect and 54% less likely to cost you money by leaving your organization.

Your organization can close any gaps in employee motivation, maximize the return on your employee engagement efforts, and see measurable increases in your employee experience in just three steps.

First, you must identify any misalignment. Survey the workforce to determine where the most significant gaps in employee motivation exist. The greatest gaps indicate employees who are at the highest risk of disengagement or attrition. With information from employee engagement surveys, such as Korn Ferry Listen powered by SAP Qualtrics, you can start building action plans to target these employees.

Second, strive to increase employees’ extrinsic motivation. Use employee engagement survey data to discover where to pull levers to enhance extrinsic motivators, which are the primary source of motivation gaps. Increase tangible rewards, such as bonuses or incentives, or build other supporting structures to improve the employee experience. Some options include:

• Creating opportunities for employees to do challenging and interesting work that fully leverages their skills and abilities.
• Establishing a strong value proposition to attract key talent and to remind employees why they work for a winning team.
• Removing bureaucracy, poorly designed processes, and other institutional barriers that stand in the way.
• Connecting learning and development opportunities with future roles and career paths.
• Empowering employees to devise new ways of working based on their unique differences and perspectives.
• Ensuring that financial rewards are fair and competitive without overstating the importance of rewards as a motivator.
• Encouraging managers to recognize employees who go above and beyond.

Third, nurture intrinsic motivation. Consider how to improve the meaning and fulfillment that employees find in their work. Focusing on the key drivers of employee engagement can improve intrinsic motivation, and it’s critical to ensure alignment between internal and external motivation, so be sure that any external rewards don’t negatively affect the factors that drive personal motivation.

By building a program to monitor employee engagement, organizations can focus on improving employee experience, eliminating motivational gaps and increasing intrinsic motivation.

How frequent feedback through pulse surveys helps organizations improve the employee experience

Traditionally, organizations conducted employee engagement surveys yearly or every other year to get an overall picture of employee satisfaction. But pulse surveys and polls that collect data monthly, weekly, and even daily are more common today: they’re faster, easier to conduct with today’s technology, and less cumbersome than annual surveys. Moreover, continuous feedback gives organizations better insight into key metrics, emerging issues, and areas of significant organizational change.

Organizations can use pulse surveys to focus on key groups (such as business units, job levels, and functions) to gain an in-depth understanding of the employee experience. To be most effective, organizations implementing pulse surveys should do three things.

1. Understand what to monitor and measure to get the right insights. Organizations need to determine what insights they need to gather, then solicit guidance on how best to organize their employee engagement surveys to accomplish their goals. Organizations will need to collect different data in different ways to avoid feedback fatigue and be guided in how to interpret that feedback, especially in comparison to their peers.
2. Change the culture around employee feedback. Organizations moving to a frequent feedback model with pulse surveys must also create communication strategies that inform employees of how they are using and responding to employee feedback. It’s essential for employees to be able to connect their input with the company’s actions and progress.
3. Connect feedback efforts with wider organizational and talent considerations. The goal of employee engagement surveys is to discover how factors in the work environment affect organizational goals. Organizations should integrate their pulse survey feedback with ongoing business activities and allow the data to enrich, as well as be enriched by, wider organizational and talent considerations to improve the employee experience.

Korn Ferry offers three pulse survey options:

• Planned pulse surveys: Build regular surveys into your annual employee experience survey plan; Korn Ferry helps you choose the right survey frequency and questions to collect insightful, reliable data.
• On-demand pulse surveys: Gather feedback quickly as issues emerge or changes happen.
• Temperature checks: Collect extra feedback monthly, weekly, or daily on topics or issues that have emerged from other surveys. These tools have interactive formats to encourage employees to share their viewpoints.

Learn how to motivate and retain talent with employee life cycle surveys

Leading organizations know that their people are their most valuable asset, and when they lose people, it can be incredibly costly. High-performing organizations use employee experience surveys to learn why people join their organization as well as why they leave. Then they use that information to retain their top talent.

Korn Ferry life cycle surveys allow organizations to survey their employees at key points in their employee journey. Organizations use life cycle survey feedback in conjunction with annual surveys and pulse surveys to assemble a complete picture of how the employee experience changes over time.

How Korn Ferry Listen helps organizations deliver a better employee experience

Korn Ferry Listen is a survey platform that enables organizations to collect and analyze feedback from employees quickly, easily, and in real time—whenever they need it. Organizations can launch multiple surveys of any available combination of demographics within minutes.

Organizations can choose from two ways to create an employee experience survey: they can build their own custom survey to address an issue specific to their business, or they can choose from proven Korn Ferry surveys, including these:

• Engaged performance.
• Leadership.
• Mission and strategy.
• Performance and rewards.
• Structure and jobs.
• Talent and engagement.
• Values and culture.

Users can view Korn Ferry Listen’s online dashboard to see results in real time, then drill down into survey results using the platform’s advanced data aggregation capabilities; for example, demographic filters allow users to explore patterns within and across employee populations. Organizations can also understand their data in context by comparing their data against internal and external benchmarks: Korn Ferry has one of the world’s largest databases of opinion information, having surveyed more than 8 million employees worldwide.

When organizations opt for Korn Ferry Listen powered by SAP Qualtrics, they get access to a best-of-breed employee experience management platform and expert technical support from SAP Qualtrics alongside Korn Ferry’s expert implementation and engagement advisory teams.

Korn Ferry Listen offers flexible support options to meet every organization’s needs

The most effective employee engagement surveys aren’t one-size-fits-all; they’re tailored to the company’s needs. While Korn Ferry Listen gives organizations powerful self-service tools for designing and deploying surveys, Korn Ferry also offers three types of services that enhance the Korn Ferry Listen experience: product services, implementation services, and advisory services.

Product services are a core set of support services designed to help organizations get the most out of their survey program. There are three levels of service:

• Silver: For organizations confident in their experience and ability to use Korn Ferry Listen, this package helps organizations manage their experience and get resources in real time.
• Gold: For organizations that regularly implement projects using Korn Ferry Listen and need more help driving the outcomes they want, this package delivers support directly from the Korn Ferry team of more than 250 employee experience experts across 50 countries.
• Platinum: For organizations that need deeper, more personalized support or that might be implementing large projects, we tailor our support services to your requirements, with personalized insights from our seasoned team.

Implementation services help organizations with hands-on project management support and assistance in managing survey logistics, freeing them up to focus their efforts on responding to survey results.

Our advisory services provide a range of options, including access to our broad consulting capacity to help organizations take targeted actions and implement lasting change, such as connecting survey processes with business and talent priorities, conducting more advanced analyses, and designing and implementing change initiatives.

Elevate the employee experience with Korn Ferry Listen – enabling Human Experience Management (HXM)

HR leaders have long understood the value derived from HCM - but HCM isn’t optimized to meet employee expectations or fully unleash their potential, primarily because of its very nature: as a non-people-centric, top-down, series of HR processes and systems that fundamentally views people as commodities.

HCM is fundamentally transaction-focused and, as a result, neither its systems or processes has ever been really designed to capture, evaluate, or act on employee experiences or expectations and empower people – the very things that can be a deciding factor in the extent to which employees choose to unleash their discretionary energy and drive organizational performance.

Hence why HXM is now coming into its own. Human Experience Management (HXM) is the next-step evolution of HCM. While HCM will always be valid and valuable, HXM lets organizations go beyond that transactional relationship and reinvent employee experiences for everyone – from candidates, new hires, and employees, to managers and HR leaders.

So how does the Employee Experience (EX) fit into this? Put simply, EX is the means by which organizations can fundamentally enable, execute and deliver HXM. As such, EX is at the core of HXM and is its guiding principle.

With the 2020 Covid crisis, we saw the use of data and analytics - enabled by technology platforms – acting as accelerators for enabling individuals and organizations to make better and more intelligent decisions.

And, in many respects, this is analogous to the Internet of Things (IoT) as regards manufacturing. For example, when sensors tells you this machine is a needs repair or maintenance or now's the time to refill your inventory, they use that sensor data to gain intelligence and make better, more intelligent, manufacturing decision or supply chain decisions.

Similarly, Human Experience Management (HXM) is also fundamentally about gaining data and information about human interactions in the workplace – and using that capability to gain insights and connect people to an organization’s purpose, to the skills required, and to give an organization feedback in how to operate better. In short, HXM in this context, is about having that much more key information that can help organizations accelerate.

Looking at our partners, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Qualtrics are enablers of HXM insofar that their platforms will help generate data. But what comes from that HXM data, however, and where we come in, is not only the intelligence derived from that data alone, but the ability to connect (the intelligence gained) to factors around human motivation, awareness, consciousness, decision-making and leadership behaviors – that confer true insights and let organizations behave better and make intrinsically better decisions that drive both business and financial performance.

And again, leveraging the employee experience (EX) is how organizations can deliver HXM.

Elevate the employee experience with Korn Ferry Listen powered by SAP Qualtrics and SAP SuccessFactors

Korn Ferry Listen powered by SAP Qualtrics is a survey research solution that helps organizations generate breakthrough insights so they can attract, motivate, and retain top talent and improve their operating effectiveness.

Contact us to put the world’s most powerful digital employee engagement survey tools and award-winning SAP Qualtrics technology behind your employee experience strategy.