© 2013 Towers Watson. All rights reserved.
Explore the Possibilities
2013 HR Service Delivery Forum
Your Employees Have Something to Say:
Active Listening as a Sensing tool at Cisco
Agenda
The need to gather input from your workforce
What is Active Listening and how does it work?
Case Study: Employee Sensing at Cisco
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Companies need input from their workforce to inform a
broad range of decisions and HR programs and processes
35%
Management at my
organization does a good job
of involving employees in
decisions that affect them
41%
My organization does a good
job of seeking the opinions
and suggestions of
employees
35%
My organization does a good
job of acting on the
suggestions of employees
Towers Watson 2012 Global Workforce Study — U.S.
What is Active Listening?
Active Listening is a process to monitor the pulse of a workforce
Captures issues as they naturally occur, in context
Aggregates views across a large, diverse population
Can be employed on an ongoing basis
Is minimally disruptive to the organization
It involves an open-ended survey of employees to assess either:
General concerns and issues
—
What would you change to make this company more successful/a better place to
work?
Or, reactions to a particular event or issue
—
What are the greatest opportunities in our upcoming merger?
—
What can the company do to help you drive better sales?
Results inform the design and execution of a broad range of
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The value of Active Listening
Active Listening meets the growing client need for ongoing, continuous
measurement of employee views as a complement to a more in-depth
annual employee engagement survey
Using qualitative data more intelligently
Building a more social organization
Tapping into the Wisdom of Crowds
Keep track of employee sentiment and measure progress through the
change curve
Reinforce communication on hot topics
Quickly identify areas where progress is being made in order to
communicate quick wins
Identify potential “hot spots” where additional support might be required
Better understand emerging priorities across the organization
Measurement is a critical lever in a comprehensive
change management approach
A powerful way to involve
employees in key elements of a
managed change initiative
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How it works
Active Listening is designed to analyze employee-written comments
and identify key topic areas and their prevalence among employees
Based on a software tool called VERA
Built specifically to analyze employee-written comments, using a lexicon of
thousands of words and expressions in 20 languages (and growing)
Displays results in intuitive “concept clouds” that reflect key themes
Demographic segmentation to discover “hot topics”
Powerful multi-criteria search engine
Ties results to any quantitative questions included in the survey
Sample analysis
…and provides
comments
specific to that
topic for chosen
demographics
…down to a detailed concept cloud for key trends…
Analysis starts with a high level word cloud…
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Case Study: Employee sensing at Cisco
Cisco’s goals:
Improve the employee experience in order to:
—
Maintain/improve employee engagement, and
—
Maintain/improve Great Place to Work ranking
Better understand and improve ROI from the “Total Offer” (EVP)
Towers Watson’s plan to support:
Review various existing sources of employee and management feedback (e.g.,
surveys, comments, idea “jams,” external comment sources)
(Re)analyze data from these sources using new processes and tools
Suggest new ways to report data that:
—
Better engage leaders and managers to enhance their decision-making and action-taking
—
Enable focus on important segments of the employee population (e.g., millenials, engineers,
women and minorities), rather than focusing exclusively on solutions that follow an “80/20”
principle
Evaluate and suggest ways to link various sources of data to important outcomes (e.g.,
employee engagement linked to actual turnover)
Getting from “data” to “experience”
From IQ
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Deeper understanding of experience
What drives me?
What do I value?
I work because…
I feel successful when…
I’m disengaged when…
My productivity would
be higher if…
I’m optimistic about the
future when...
I feel valued when…
I take pride in the Cisco
brand and understand
my role to drive it…
Current Research: Employee
Perceptions of Working at Cisco
New Research: What Makes
Our Employees Tick?
Process steps to a GPTW Position & Engagement Plan
Pulse/FOTP/LQ mtg/Jams/Glassdoor/Vault
• Data sources
Segmented Groups of Interest
• Driver analysis: engagement &
retention by country
Profiles
• Differentiation from country norm
• “Experience” statements
Personas
• Personas by country and other
demographics
Solutions by Persona
• Solution opportunities
• Total Offer comparison
Solution “Sweet Spots”
• Solution trends
GPTW Position
• GPTW position options
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What is the value of Persona Research?
Empathy:
It “humanizes” our data. We connect to “experiences” — not
just numbers
Relevancy: Experiential data will increase relevancy of our employee
engagement strategies and solutions
Research ROI: It increases the ROI of the employee surveys we
implement each year, including Pulse
Actionable: Personas provide insight that sensitizes leaders to better
ways to connect to their key audiences
Results-driven: By learning from positive segments and addressing
negative ones, leaders can create the conditions to enable overall
Pulse score averages to rise
What is the State of Employee Engagement at Cisco
Report?
Specialized report for executive
business and HR leaders to better
understand our strengths,
challenges and opportunities in
driving employee engagement.
The report includes:
Sustainable Engagement Data (Global trends vs.
Cisco)
Cisco Pulse Engagement Driver analysis (Global, U.S.,
U.K., and BRIC countries)
A new form of data analysis called Personas
A persona is a story that describes the experience of
a specific segment of the employee population
derived from data and employee comments
The personas were created for segments of the
employee population that were disproportionately
positive or negative compared to the average of
Cisco's Pulse scores
The report includes:
—
Persona Executive Summary by Generation
—
Detailed Personas Organized by Generation
—
Detailed Personas Organized by Global and
Countries (U.S., U.K., BRIC)
FY13-15 Employee Engagement Plan (Draft for
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