As the focus on employee engagement has grown over the past several decades, an important point is often overlooked: Engagement is an outcome, the result of the entire employee experience. It is one metric, alongside many others, that helps us uncover opportunities for improving the total work experience.

The employee experience is defined by everything from the physical work environment to the relationship between employees, management, and executives, and even includes factors not directly connected to the job—health, finances, family, and social life—all of which impact employees’ total well-being. While a positive experience has always been important to reduce turnover, in our current tight labor market it becomes a real differentiator in attracting key talent

The six chapters in this playbook are focused on how you can optimize your survey program to reveal important insights throughout the total employee experience.

As the field of people analytics expands to incorporate data gathered through relational analytics, organizational network analysis, and other streams, the employee survey remains a critical tool to support a comprehensive people analytics practice. Passive monitoring of email traffic, social media connections, proximity data, and other sources of data can indicate where there are strong and weak connections within organizations, but like demographic data or organizational hierarchy, these are descriptive statistics that do not measure the employee experience or how individuals perceive their workplace.

Responses to employee survey questions provide qualitative data representing the opinions and perceptions of employees throughout the organization. Without this data, HR can at best describe the workforce; it cannot get at how employees feel about the company or their work, or the why of employee sentiment regarding the company, leadership, management, or culture. Most importantly, it is difficult to infer what leaders can do to improve the business when they are limited to quantitative descriptive statistics. Strategic surveys that include questions related to culture, engagement, and the employee experience allow organizations to conduct crucial conversations at scale.

This guide will outline how to use employee survey questions to support a people analytics practice.

Continuous listening has become a buzzword in HR circles over the past several years, but many people lack clarity about the meaning of the term. Broadly defined, continuous listening refers to gathering feedback from employees about the work experience continuously throughout the employee lifecycle.

More feedback is a good thing—if it provides the insights leaders need to make improvements in the employee experience—and, by extension, the organization’s success. The most important features of a continuous listening strategy are determining what to measure and why, which survey tools will best capture the data needed by the organization, and how often to measure. This guide will examine the key considerations for designing a continuous listening strategy appropriate for your organization.

As the field of people analytics expands to incorporate data gathered through relational analytics, organizational network analysis, and other streams, the employee survey remains a critical tool to support a comprehensive people analytics practice. Passive monitoring of email traffic, social media connections, proximity data, and other sources of data can indicate where there are strong and weak connections within organizations, but like demographic data or organizational hierarchy, these are descriptive statistics that do not measure the employee experience or how individuals perceive their workplace.

Responses to employee survey questions provide qualitative data representing the opinions and perceptions of employees throughout the organization. Without this data, HR can at best describe the workforce; it cannot get at how employees feel about the company or their work, or the why of employee sentiment regarding the company, leadership, management, or culture. Most importantly, it is difficult to infer what leaders can do to improve the business when they are limited to quantitative descriptive statistics. Strategic surveys that include questions related to culture, engagement, and the employee experience allow organizations to conduct crucial conversations at scale.

This guide will outline how to use employee survey questions to support a people analytics practice.

As the focus on employee engagement has grown over the past several decades, an important point is often overlooked: Engagement is an outcome, the result of the entire employee experience. It is one metric, alongside many others, that helps us uncover opportunities for improving the total work experience.

The employee experience is defined by everything from the physical work environment to the relationship between employees, management, and executives, and even includes factors not directly connected to the job—health, finances, family, and social life—all of which impact employees’ total well-being. While a positive experience has always been important to reduce turnover, in our current tight labor market it becomes a real differentiator in attracting key talent

The six chapters in this playbook are focused on how you can optimize your survey program to reveal important insights throughout the total employee experience.

Continuous listening has become a buzzword in HR circles over the past several years, but many people lack clarity about the meaning of the term. Broadly defined, continuous listening refers to gathering feedback from employees about the work experience continuously throughout the employee lifecycle.

More feedback is a good thing—if it provides the insights leaders need to make improvements in the employee experience—and, by extension, the organization’s success. The most important features of a continuous listening strategy are determining what to measure and why, which survey tools will best capture the data needed by the organization, and how often to measure. This guide will examine the key considerations for designing a continuous listening strategy appropriate for your organization.