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Business to Employee Listening
If you need better information on which to base business decisions, your own
workforce can be a rich source.
B2E listening is an employeecentric information gathering
approach that you can use
to improve and inform
decision-making
Most businesses are now well aware
of the benefits of listening to what
their customers say at every touch
point. Not many realise how much
they could learn by paying equal
attention to their own employees.
This paper explains the rationale for
doing so, and introduces our new
concept to make it possible.
Whereas you can dress appearances
up for the customer, employees
see the business “warts and all”,
and can tell you home truths about
what’s really working and what isn’t.
More importantly, by listening to
employees you can understand what
it would take to make them more
efficient workers.
The information available from
this “business to employee (B2E)
listening” is of great value to virtually
every function in an organisation –
from the CIO considering a system
upgrade, but not sure how much
the present system is used, to the
operations director evaluating
sourcing options.
The challenge is not just to gather
the information, but also to organise
it in a meaningful way, given that
each employee has hundreds of
interactions each day that are of
potential interest.
What is B2E listening?
B2E listening is much more than
an engagement tool for making
employees feel involved. It’s an
employee-centric information
gathering approach that you can use
to improve and inform decisionmaking.
It uses a variety of “listening posts”,
or methods of finding out what
individual employees are saying.
We then use our psychological,
organisational and modelling insights
to paint a picture of what the
workforce as a whole really thinks,
and report it in a “flower” form that
is instantly informative and enables
better decisions.
Defining the question
The first step is to work with
stakeholders to define the question
or questions that need to be
answered (for example, “how much
is the system being used and why
isn’t it used more?”), and the format
in which the answers are required
(usually a mixture of qualitative and
quantitative feedback).
We then map the type of interaction
that we need to listen to in order to
obtain employee feedback that will
allow us to answer the question.
Figure 1. Four examples of listening posts
Monitoring of the social web to keep track
of what your employees are saying
Mystery employee/team member
Employee vision zones
Floor walker, at-desk immediate
response surveys
Gathering employee feedback
We can use a variety of listening
posts, depending on the type of
interaction and feedback we are
interested in. Four of the commonest
options are illustrated in figure 1.
Example 4: Surveys of various kinds
can elicit opinions from people who
are in the act of carrying out the
processes we’re interested in – for
example, they can use green/red
buttons on touchpads at their desk
or workstation, or floor walkers can
ask them what they think.
Some situations where B2E
listening is valuable
ƒƒ Suppose the CIO is assessing the
business case for upgrading a
collaborative application available
to employees. B2E listening can
reveal how much benefit the
company is really getting out of the
current system, and therefore give
the CIO a far clearer picture of the
likely ROI from the upgrade.
ƒƒ For any CxO designing a new
agenda, B2E listening makes it
possible to find out what currently
is and isn’t working, and hence
to prioritise areas that impact the
employee.
ƒƒ B2E listening can also be useful if
the operations director is thinking
of changing the operating model,
for example by moving a back
office function to a shared services
centre, or outsourcing it. Finding
out what employees think of the
current service can inform sourcing
choices as well as suggesting
features that should be built into
the new model.
ƒƒ If employee benefit take-up is low,
the HR director could use B2E
listening to find out how what’s on
offer differs from what employees
really want. Employee feedback
will make it possible to modify the
range of benefits offered and/or
explain the current selection better.
ƒƒ For any proposed change project,
you can use employee feedback to
find out how feasible it is and how
best to engage with employees to
achieve your objectives.
2
Example 1: Monitoring the
social web can tell you what your
employees really think. However, it
has to be used with caution and an
awareness of privacy issues. Data
should always be anonymised and
aggregated.
Example 2: Like a mystery shopper,
a mystery employee or team
member can tell you what a process
(induction, for example) looks
like from a “consumer” viewpoint.
This can be done by asking a new
employee to report their experiences,
or by asking top management to
spend a week in a shop-floor team.
Example 3: Vision zones are
effectively focus groups where
employees are encouraged to share
their perspective in a structured
group interview.
Information from listening posts like
these can be tremendously powerful,
especially when combined with
information that is already available
within the organisation. For example,
if you are thinking of upgrading a
system, there will already be audit
trails and system statistics to tell
you how the system is being used
in numerical terms. You can then
combine this information with the
experiential data available from the
listening posts to get a complete
picture of system usage.
You can choose to collect feedback
from just a segment or sample of
your workforce, but you also have
the option of studying the entire
workforce: this is now feasible even
in global organisations, thanks to
automated listening and “big data”
analytic techniques.
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If you are thinking about making an
investment, you can get a realistic
idea of whether you are likely to see
the right ROI. If you have already
decided to invest, you can make
sure that the benefits you have been
promised actually materialise. And
if you have made a change, you
can find out what has worked and
what needs further adjustment to
maximise benefits realisation.
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Figure 3. The flower after use of the listening posts
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The benefits of B2E listening
This approach can be used in a wide
variety of ways, a few of which are
listed in the panel opposite. What
these applications have in common
is that they are all ways to avoid
wasting money.
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By using the flower to map employee
interactions and then to evaluate
employee opinion, sentiment and
perspective, we help leaders better
understand where they should invest
money, resources and effort for best
results.
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The flower in figure 2 shows selected
employee interactions and touch
points across the organisation. The
hotspots on the flower in figure
3 summarise the outputs of the
listening posts; the hotspots will
vary based on the findings from the
employee analysis of the listening
posts and our recommendations for
converting the hotspots.
Figure 2. The flower
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Analysing and presenting the
employee feedback
By combining and analysing data
from listening posts and other
sources, we populate a digital
“flower”. This presents our findings
in a visual way that is instantly
meaningful to decision-makers. Key
themes relating to the question(s)
we are exploring are identified in the
form of colour-coded “hotspots”.
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Conclusion
We have made B2E listening sound
quite simple, and outwardly it is. The
skill lies in applying organisational,
psychological and analytical knowhow to decide what to listen to, and
then interpret the findings. Another
requirement is familiarity with data
protection issues, so that you know
what you may and may not listen to.
Kevin Simmons
Vice President
Capgemini Consulting
[email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 870 195 1400
Mira Magecha
Senior Consultant
Capgemini Consulting
[email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 870 195 1683
Alun Soper
Senior Consultant
Capgemini Consulting
[email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 870 366 1747
Raj Dosanjh
Senior Consultant
Capgemini Consulting
[email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 870 194 6601
®®
If you’re undertaking, or
contemplating, an investment or
transformation that affects your
employees, it makes sense to
understand their opinions, sentiments
and perspectives before, during and
after the change. Doing so will lead
to improved performance, quality,
innovation and organisational
advocacy. Can you afford to miss out
on the bottom-line benefits?
For more information, please contact:
How B2E listening eliminates waste
With B2E listening, you can:
ƒƒ Avoid wasting money on systems
that never get adopted because
they aren’t what employees need
or want
ƒƒ Prevent “shadow” organisations
emerging to hamper transformation
programmes or operating model
changes
ƒƒ Ensure your new CxO focuses
on strategies that really make a
difference because they matter to
employees
ƒƒ Check that your communication
serves a purpose and is not just
communication for its own sake
About Capgemini
With around 120,000 people in 40
countries, Capgemini is one of the world’s
foremost providers of consulting,
technology and outsourcing services.
The Group reported 2011 global revenues
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clients, Capgemini creates and delivers
business and technology solutions
that fit their needs and drive the results
they want. A deeply multicultural
organisation, Capgemini has developed
its own way of working, the Collaborative
Business ExperienceTM, and draws on
Rightshore®, its worldwide delivery
model.
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