Mervyn Dinnen  0:10  
The HRHappyHour Network is sponsored by Workhuman. Employees recognized for milestones, are three times more likely to believe their company actually cares about them. Three times. But why are companies so bad at it? The stale bagels, the branded swag, the audacity. Workhuman believes milestones deserve their moment, a space for the people who know you best, your actual work circle, to reflect on your journey, your wins, your impact, the inside jokes, the big moments, all of it. It's called service milestones. AI finds the right people. Automation handles the rest and employees choose their own reward from millions of options curated just for them. Milestone it like you mean it with Workhuman a proud supporter of the HRHappyHour network. Find out more at workhuman.com that's W, O, R, K, H, U, M, A N.com. Welcome to the HR means business podcast, which is part of the HRHappyHour network. I am your host, Mervyn Dinnen. In a world where organizations have more data about their people than ever before, there's a growing question at the heart of it all, are we actually listening? Employee surveys, pulse checks, engagement scores, they're everywhere, but for many employees, the experience still feels the same. I've shared my views, but nothing really changes. So what does it really mean to become a listening organization, one that doesn't just collect feedback, but truly understands, responds and evolves with its people. To explore that, I'm delighted to be joined today by Nick Court, CEO of the People Experience Hub, to talk about how organizations can move beyond measurement to meaningful listening and what it takes to put the employee voice back into the hands of employees. Nick, welcome to the HR Means Business podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Nick Court  2:09  
Hi, thank you for having me as well. It's always a delight. And so yes, I'm Nick. I'm the CEO at People Experience Hub. And I guess a little bit about me. My background is I grew up in Tesco and spent 16 years there, where I did all sorts of stuff, from driving a forklift truck, working in a warehouse, all the way through to working on people's systems, people data, industrial relations and more. And from there, went into Associated British foods, Carlsberg, before setting up my own consultancy, and then People Experience Hub. So I like to think that I'm an expert in what we do, or at least very knowledgeable.

Mervyn Dinnen  2:57  
Indeed, indeed. Now Nick, we hear a lot about employee voice and listening strategies, but what does it actually mean to become a listening organization, and why do you think it's now such a critical priority for organizations?

Nick Court  3:14  
I think I mean if we go back to an individual and we think about listening and think about when we have felt heard, and when we have felt listened to as individuals, and then think about the things we know about active listening versus passive listening. And when we think about listening, I think for an organization, what we've got to think about is it moves just beyond one way directions. It moves us beyond simple surveys, simple data capture. Often the problem isn't the data we hold as organizations. It's more about what we do with it, exactly as you said in the intro, it's all about moving forward. How do we take meaningful change? So if you're going to truly listen as an organization, then you have to start making it more two way you have to start making it more about the relevance to the people in the organization, and not just what the organization needs and wants to know about the people that work there.

Mervyn Dinnen  4:13  
So would you say that, I mean from from what you see, that organizations are genuinely listening more, or are they really just collecting more data?

Nick Court  4:24  
I think it's a I'd probably say it's a bit like a maturity model here, where you can say that, how does it start for many organizations? Well, for many organizations, it doesn't start with any technical support or any active listening strategy. What it starts with is probably just being close to your people, talking to your people, and then what you're capturing is, in the moment, anecdotal data, you're consuming it as an individual or group of individuals, and responding to it. And then we have organizations, as they get bigger, more complex, start deploying technology for this, typically things like surveys or feedback solutions, manager one to ones, but a lot of this stuff is happening in isolation now, and this is that kind of low to mid maturity. Managers are having their one to ones in isolation of health and safety, talking to people about the benefits of safety, in isolation of the annual survey, in isolation of feedback loops around business performance and change. So what we end up is with multiple owners and multiple places where listing happens, and the listing tends to be a little bit more, tell me what you think, and then I will go away and do something with it, and that's where it stops. And then more mature organizations now are starting to think about listening as a more active concept, which is, when is the right time to listen? When will it matter most for us? When will it matter most for our people? And realistically, I would say that the majority of organizations are not there just yet, but it seems to be the direction of travel for most.

Mervyn Dinnen  6:07  
So I guess you know, where, where do you think organizations might still get it wrong? And also, I mean, traditionally, a lot of organizations will say that they they rely on the annual or quarterly surveys, but in today's workplace, these are fairly limited, I think. So what? What's, what's your answer to that?

Nick Court  6:29  
I think it's, I think it's limited in design, and it's limited in as much as it's not going in as part of a listening strategy. So I think that when you have your annual survey, when you have your quarterly surveys, your poll surveys, and they have a place in a well designed listening strategy, then what they what they serve is is clear and evident, because it's more a strategic survey, or it's more of a research survey, it's more of a lifting the lid survey in amongst the other listening that we're doing. So I think what's happened is there's been a huge I guess, pre pandemic, there was a big push from some of the big tech players to sell technology as a solution and listening, listening technology as a solution. And in that place, you don't need consultants. You don't need anyone else. You just need to deploy some software. Ask your people some questions, they'll answer. You'll get your results. The problem with that is it's predicated on somebody, somewhere in the organization does have to do something. So we've had this sustained focus on measurement, employee engagement hasn't really undergone a step change, improvement. People are chasing a huge goal on engagement score or culture score, and what they're not doing is really saying, Why is it failing? What they're doing is they're trying again and again and again, because perceived wisdom is this is what organizations do. So, so So what should they be doing differently? And I think it is in the design, which is, if you design a poor question, you'll probably get a poor answer that doesn't help you too much. So why would you want technology to just shift lifts little listening out there for people? Why wouldn't you want a organizational psychologist? Why wouldn't you want a behavioral psychologist? Why wouldn't you want a specialist in your context to help design something to make it yours, not everyone else's. This one size fits all model is slowly falling away. We're seeing that with any of the employee survey organizations that just shared templated surveys. If you ask these 20 questions, we'll be able to tell you against these other 100 companies where you fit today. Well, that's great, as long as those 100 companies are broadly the same. Are they all going through the same thing? Are they all in the same industry? Are they all at the same place? And the answer often is no, but we love a benchmark, so what we've have is all of this, this stuff that self perpetuates, win an award, get a benchmark, give us your survey data, and then we'll do it again, and nothing changes. So the design is everything. What we're trying to do is a lot more, a lot more considered. So only ask questions of people when they need to, when they're going through something. So employee life cycle, measuring the moments that matter. The only person that is going through what it feels like to start their parental leave is the person that's just put their map b1 end and when your colleague puts a map b1 in, you may only have 30 or 40 colleagues who go through that this year, but let's ask them the question at the time that it's relevant to see, how are we doing right now? Let's not ask 1000 people. Do we have great maternity policies? And as our approach to maternity, great, let's just ask the people who have experienced it and ask them whether it's great, and we'll ask everyone else questions when we want a more strategic people strategy input.

Mervyn Dinnen  10:16  
So what would you say it feels like for an employee to be inside a true listening organization? What are the key behaviors or signals that indicates to them that the organization is actually genuinely listening?

Nick Court  10:32  
I think it's for me. I think, I mean, this is a great question, because ultimately, this is the test of everything so I can do my job, and when I get to a point where I can't do my job, I know that I have a voice, and when I have a voice, I know that someone will listen, and when somebody listens, they tend to act. And I see the improvement as a circle so and that problem that stops me doing my job could be manifest. It could be I've witnessed bully and harassment. I've experienced bullying and harassment. It could be I don't have the tools to do my job. It could be there is a safety issue. It could be my manager doesn't care about me enough. So there's lots of things that could stop someone being able to do their job as effectively and efficiently as you'd want them to, and they want to. So when I do raise my voice, it's responded to, and I'm able to do my job without every five minutes somebody saying, Excuse me. Would you mind taking part in this survey? Excuse me. Would you mind joining this focus group? Excuse me, because that volume cannot be responded to. You know, I keep telling you what I think at work, you don't do anything. So I will stop telling you what I think, and I'll just get on and put up with it or leave. So to be in an organization is to say it. In a listening organization is to say, I feel seen, I feel heard. I feel I have a voice psychological safety. So I feel I can raise my voice, not just the vehicle to raise my voice. And when I do, action is taken.

Mervyn Dinnen  12:15  
And there's I hear the expression a few times. Yeah, always on feedback and continuous listening, and what I mean to you. What does it actually mean beyond being a buzzword, and what, what? How does it feel for the employee? I mean is it, is it putting the employee, Vice voice in the hands of employees? And how does that change the dynamics?

Nick Court  12:38  
Yeah, and it is a dynamic, right? So we really are talking about, you know, a challenging term of always on feedback. And if I think about what I've seen out there in the world, I've seen people saying, well, I've got a survey link that any point someone can click and answer these, you know, five questions on a five point scale. Or every week, we'll ask people how they're doing at work and ask them for some context. But the reality is that's still a push. That's still a push. So always on a push to the employee, nudge to the employee, you know, and almost, I don't want to say it feels like an excuse. Of course, you can tell us how you feel at any time by simply taking part in this survey. Feels a little bit trite, whereas I think always on as a concept is two things. One, the technology side of it. I don't think always on is a survey. I think it is a lot more qual I think it is a lot more my own words. I want to talk with you, and I may want to do this anonymously, and that's where technology is great. Yeah, we have a solution called your say, where people can design, I mean, we call them buckets. They might be channels. You design the ones that you need. So ask the CEO a question, anonymously. Raise a safety concern, raise a ethical concern, and but it goes to the right people. So it goes to the functional teams, the safety teams. It's not living in HR overseen by HR with oversight and management. It goes out to the world. Listening is is freeing that up so that the people who need to know need get to know and employees who do that. So that's the technology side of it. And then I think that always listening approach is about availability and management training, if you are not upskilling your line managers and your leaders, to take the moment to listen to always be available, simply saying that my door is always open, is not enough. To create moments when you are in the spaces with your people, when you make yourself available, to listen to what they're saying, not to defend your position, not to have a rebuttal, but simply to listen and to take it away, to act. I think always on has that human element as well. So it's about coaching line managers, different line manager skills are needed for that.

Mervyn Dinnen  15:03  
Is there a risk that it could overwhelm organizations, or does it really empower employees, do you think? Or is there a potential for kind of feedback fatigue, shall we say?

Nick Court  15:15  
Yeah, it's it truly is interesting, because when you think about it, how much actually asking happens in an organization, quite a lot. And you know, the definition we always use about survey fatigue is, isn't so much the amount of questioning you do or asking that you do of people, it's your ability to respond and act. So if you do a weekly pass, but you can respond weekly, that's great, but most organizations can't. So there's an expectation set. So for an employee, if you ask me a question and I give you a response, I expect an answer back, maybe not immediately, because I know you've got some stuff to do, but at some point I expect to see an answer to my response, because you took the time to ask me the question. I took the time to respond. And I think the risk there is that's when you break the cycle of trust. That's when you break the stuff of Well, look, there's no point me telling you so for the individual, too much is too much. And for an organization, data overwhelm comes, I think, from two areas. Number one is the wrong technologies, or disparate technologies. So if all of this is coming into a home and therefore can be analyzed, and this is where AI has some great advantages. So all of this is coming in can be analyzed and consumed in a way that makes it consumable for line managers, analysts, CEOs, happy days. Great. If it's coming into disparate places and somebody's got to connect the dots, probably impossible. And that's where huge overwhelm happens. If you're asking all the wrong questions at the wrong time, it will feel overwhelming as well, because I've been in so many situations where you say, Okay, we want to run a survey, a large survey. It's going to be 35 questions designed by behavioral psychologist who is talented in what they do and has your business context. And then someone in the organization says it would be great to also ask these three questions, because I would be interested to know how many people shave on a Monday and how many people shave on a Wednesday. It would be great to know who wears hats in our organization. It would be wonderful to know, do the hat wearers who have blue eyes have a different opinion about the color of hats to those with brown eyes? And what we end up with is a survey that has moved beyond its function and design because somebody has gone it would be interesting to know that not actionable, not meaningful, it would be interesting, and that's the curse of a poorly designed survey, is if we're feeding interest, not action, we are not carrying out employee research, and we are not there for listening people to the things that are of interest to them.

Mervyn Dinnen  18:21  
I mean, yeah, over the years, I've heard it so many times when back in my recruitment days, interviewing HR people, and obviously the work I do now as an analyst is like, they get all this information, they get all this feedback, but, but nothing changes. Nobody acts on it. You know what? What the I suppose the move from listening to actually doing something meaningful with what you've heard is a step that people organizations find quite difficult. And is that? Do you think that's to do with design? Do you think it's because you know, who actually owns action? Is it HR? Is it leaders? Is it down to everybody? You know, What? What? How can you actually get it unified, shall we say?

Nick Court  19:01  
I think you've, you've hit the nail on the head there around that because ownership matters and that org design therefore matters, which is, if listening to our people is seen as the full ownership end to end by the HR, other people teams, then you've got a relatively small team trying to manage everything. So you're going to have to sacrifice something so listening and acting and ownership, then must span across the business. And this is where, you know, give you a use case, say, for hospitality business that's using our always on solution, the your say, stuff, you know, somebody goes in there and says, you know, I've raised a couple of times now about the knives. I have to do my job. I'm a back of house. I'm a head chef. I'm supposed to create quality food, but I can't create the quality food with the knives I have. I'm about to buy my own if you don't bring me some, and that's going to piss me off. The next day, the area manager comes in and says, I was alerted to your comment through the channel. I'm sorry this has taken so long. I'm here with the knives. Here they are. That's culture in the moment, that's ownership of the action that is fixing stuff in the moment. That didn't require an action plan. It didn't require someone chasing it didn't require a strategic meeting with 17 people. It didn't require anything more than reading and responding, and this is where design matters, which is strategic design of large surveys mean that you probably are going to take a little while to feed that back, communicate it, make sure it's effective, give it to the right teams. In the moment, feedback and culture response in terms of taking action, it's about giving people ownership. You are able to fix the things for our people when they tell us, you have the authority to go out there and make everyone's world a bit better because you're a line manager, an area manager, a shift manager, you have control, your freedom within framework. You can't go and spend 50,000 pounds. What you can do is use all the tools that you have to make sure their concerns are listened to and responded to. And I think that is probably the biggest challenge right now, which is putting putting the authority in the ownership, the data of what do I need to do into the hands of line managers, second line managers, I think is key to any listening organization, unless you want a bottleneck in the people team.

Mervyn Dinnen  21:29  
Now I was my next question was going to be the role that leadership plays in building a listening culture, but how? How can organizations build trust so that employees feel safe to speak honestly and actually believe if they do, it will make a difference, they won't be judged?

Nick Court  21:48  
So I think there is a call and response thing here, which is, if you ask and they say, Well, you ask, they respond, then you have an obligation to communicate back what you're going to do with that. And we always say that that's part of the design of the listening strategy. This isn't part of this isn't a secondary thing. This is part of the whole you can design your questions. You're gonna design the what you're trying to measure. You can design all of this stuff. Then you also have to design the communication into the listening. So why are we listening right now? Why are we asking questions right now? What are we looking for from you? What are we going to do with this information? What's the process? What's the timeline, deliver the survey in this instance, for example, and then stick to it. We said after two weeks we'd present back to the board. We have presented back to the board. We said after another two weeks we'd present to the senior leaders, we have presented to the senior leaders. Every line manager has their own dashboard, and we'll be taking their team through it. They have done that, and I think it's delivering on promises other things that matter, and not pooling all of that action planning in one place for too long, but talking to people, getting them to respond. It's about when you have anonymity thresholds, when somebody has a non anonymous voice to raise, that the kettle in this kitchen area isn't isn't working, that nobody says, who said this? That we simply fix the problem in the area that there is. And when you do that, when somebody says, If I raise my voice anonymously, somebody comes along and fixes the problem. I don't need to do that. If I'm if I feel safe, I might raise it one to one with my manager, in which case my manager has to go and fix that. And if we're honest, if you are in a if you're in retail, if you're in a store, and you raise it to your the grocery manager. Do they have the authority to buy a cat, or do they have the time to go and take this on for you? Do they have the time to do all this stuff? Probably not. Therefore, what we introduce is your problem has been verbalized to somebody who can't do anything about it. So let's put channels in that goes bypass that and goes to facilities too. Who can go and fix the kettle? So it's about the right people listening when somebody needs to say something.

Mervyn Dinnen  24:12  
Actually, that makes me think about leaders. Is listening a skill they need to learn or a mindset they need to adopt, do you think?

Nick Court  24:26  
That's interesting. So, I mean, I can only talk about my own experience, and I would probably say both, which probably is a terrible answer. I was, I think the skill I was taught, you know, as I developed as a manager, was, I went on active listening workshops. I went to, you know, negotiation and consultation training, right to understand, you know, how do you get to a win win situation? What happens when you're in a win lose situation, when using people's names, maintaining eye contact? When do you do this stuff? Yeah, and the skill, I think, is, is there to be taught? I think the behavioral stuff is a lot tougher, because if you don't have that as your frame of reference, that's not the sort of person you are. You better go and hire somebody who does have that as their frame of reference and the sort of person they are, because that mindset piece is about going not only am I willing to ask the question, but I'm willing to hear the honest and sometimes brutal answer. I have to be ready to hear the answer that I am uncomfortable with, as well as the answer I am delighted with, and respond.

Mervyn Dinnen  25:41  
I obviously would be failing in my remit if I didn't mention the letters I and A, but not necessarily in that order. So how is technology, but I suppose really I mean, AI changing how organizations Listen, or is it too early to know, or is it beginning to develop slight, slightly differently?

Nick Court  26:07  
I think right now, in my heart of hearts, it's too early. We have a lot of promises that are being made, and we have a lot of ideas that are being put forward as well tested. I did a podcast with Ciprian Arhire recently, and he's got an amazing background in this. And he said, and he said to me, he said, No, no matter what anyone says, we are still in the playground phase with AI. We are still pushing it around and testing it, we are seeing what works, what doesn't work. We haven't got every court case hasn't been heard, every concern hasn't been raised. There is still ethical issues that we need to consider. I mean, there are logistical issues we need to consider. And when we think about how we're traveling through AI for many suppliers, there's been a bit of a smash and grab approach, which has been we will shove as much AI into our platforms and solutions as we can, so that when somebody says, Do you have AI? The answer is, yes, we do have AI. And here it is bright and shiny, and they haven't gone through the, you know, could this cause a breach? They haven't gone through the ethical concerns that there might be there. They've gone through the sales barrier concerns. And I think for anyone who is at this stage thinking about AI, I would probably recommend reaching out to our own head of data science and AI, Luigi Ho Tien Ton, He's a specialist in this, and he is in control of our AI roadmap, which is slow and steady and very ethical. We have a governance committee in place, with the lights of Kate Griffiths-Lambeth sitting on it. We have external people who take control of the speed we go at and what we do. And I think that what AI will do is augment listening. It will help people take particularly unstructured text, unstructured voice, and help analyze it. But, and this is my warning, but if, if you want AI to tell you what to do, you are probably looking in the wrong places. What AI should do is make it simpler for you to see the data, see the themes, the sentiments, so that you can start to take action and make human decisions for your people, enabled by AI simplifying lots and lots of complex data into something that's more consumable, but buyer beware that AI has a has a pattern that we must be aware of, which is sometimes oversimplifying and maybe not letting everyone's voice get to the forefront, I feel like I've done the I've done the little bit of the bottom of any contract which says responsibility of all of this is yours, ultimately.

Mervyn Dinnen  29:10  
So gazing into your crystal ball, what do you think employee listening will look like in two or three years time, do you think?

Nick Court  29:21  
I think it's, I think what we're going to move to, actually, what do I think? I think where it's going to go will not be fundamentally different to where we are today, in terms of the questions will be asked, answers will be given. Personally, I think it's going to be what questions are being asked will be better, will be more relevant. People will not be asked questions that they do not need to answer, because the data is somewhere else. If we're going to listen to people, we should be listening actively. And I think those human skills are going to come to the forefront, enabled by. Technology. So I think the impact that technology will have is about, I don't need to ask if you've been recognized in the last seven days, because I have the data from our recognition partner in reward gateway, e zone red, someone like that. I have the data to see that you have been recognized. So I'm not going to ask the question, but the question I'm going to ask now is, how did the recognition feel for you? Did it land at the right time? Did you feel appropriately recognized? It'll now be about that, not about did you it'll be, how did that feel for you? Did we get it right for you? So fewer questions, but more relevant and more in the moment.

Mervyn Dinnen  30:40  
Nick's been a fascinating conversation. There's lots of stuff you've shared that I think you know, it really needs kind of people to think about and act upon, to be honest. So I suppose my final question is kind of the takeaway. So if an HR leader manager listens to this podcast, and hopefully a lot of them will be and they want to take, I don't know, one step towards becoming a listening organization or a better listening organization. What? What do you think they should do first? What are the first two or three things they need to be doing?

Nick Court  31:13  
So the first thing is, if not you who owns this, then find out who owns this and ask them the simple question of, can you sit down with your listening strategy and take me through it, and if the answer comes back, we don't have a listening strategy. We have an annual survey. Sit them down again, or sit yourself down and say we need to have a listening strategy. And this, if you put the word strategy against something, it feels big and cumbersome and a little bit too much. So keep it as it is, the strategy of how we listen to our people, serve our people, outcomes and our business outcomes. If we don't have one, you need to get one and look at what your tools are serving and probably go out to the other leaders in the organization and say, How often do you ask our people questions with the need for a response? What tools are you using to do this? Tell me why you're doing this, and then tell me how this is going to get moved into our listening strategy. Because if we have all those different tools and solutions, you're going to run into survey fatigue, question fatigue, and it won't feel like listening, because too many questions are being asked through different channels. And I think it is that be intentional in your listening and understand the skills gaps, the strategy and what it serves.

Mervyn Dinnen  32:51  
Okay. Nick has been great to talk to you. If anybody listening wants to kind of connect with you, maybe develop the conversation more or find out more. What's, what's, the best way to connect?

Nick Court  33:03  
Best place is probably LinkedIn. I mean, I'm always about and about LinkedIn is a great place, so just Nick Court at LinkedIn or the People Experience Hub as a company page, so head over there and connect. And you know, I will always up for having this conversation.

Mervyn Dinnen  33:21  
Okay, Nick, thank you very much for your time.

Nick Court  33:24  
Thank you Mervyn.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai