Research Topics

Mission and vision statements often lose their impact when they are simply imposed by the executive suite. Instead, we can facilitate online collaborative sessions that incorporate group discussions, image sourcing, storytelling, projective techniques, and ranking exercises to engage a diverse range of employees in crafting a reimagined mission and vision. By attributing authorship to the employees, there is a significant increase in their sense of pride and ownership in the newly developed statements.

The “open strategy” approach is becoming increasingly popular among forward-thinking companies. Instead of solely depending on the C-suite to develop the organisation’s strategy, a cross-section of the workforce is asked to contribute to the formulation of a new strategy. An effective projective technique to employ is the “nightmare competitor” scenario — a fictional competitor with all the resources necessary to destroy your business. Given a 12-month head-start, employees are asked to take the steps necessary to not only defend the business but beat the new competitor. This approach can jolt businesses out of complacency.

Culture is one of the primary levers leaders have to maintain organisational viability and competitiveness. Listening exercises can provide invaluable feedback on employees’ day-to-day experience of an organisation’s culture. Does the culture influence decisions? Are leaders embodying the core values? What are the unspoken cultural norms shaping employee behaviour? By regularly surfacing the answers to these types of questions, the C-suite can ensure that the health of the organisation’s culture is maintained.

We run inclusive research programs that enable employees to identify barriers to growth or opportunities for expansion. We can seek ideas for top-line revenue growth, increasing customer loyalty, launching new product/service lines, or profitable market segmentation. As leaders, you get the advantage of your employees’ insights along with the benefit of higher levels of employee engagement and commitment towards achieving your growth objectives.

Transformation programs are complex and challenging undertakings that require careful planning to ensure success. However, many organisations rely solely on the C-suite to drive the change agenda, which can result in blind spots and insufficient buy-in from the broader workforce. One tool that can help leaders improve their chances of success is the use of listening exercises. By actively seeking feedback from employees, leaders can engage them in identifying the need for change and use their inside knowledge to map out a more effective transformation plan. Regularly scheduled check-ins with employees can also help ensure the transformation remains on track.

Typically, leaders use the first 100 days of their tenure to listen, formulate a new plan, gain stakeholder buy-in, and then move to execution. While face-to-face listening is vital during this period, complementing it with an online listening campaign can enable new leaders to hear from many more voices, including the quiet ones. If planned to occur in the first few days of a leader's arrival, the insights gleaned from this online listening exercise can inform the questions a leader asks during their face-to-face listening tour. Furthermore, by guaranteeing employees’ anonymity, leaders can benefit from hearing the unvarnished truth – the type of feedback that employees are typically wary of sharing with someone unknown to them.

Your employees are smart; they know what's happening and why. However, like all of us, they can resist change driven by other people's agendas. Asking employees to provide feedback on an issue at the top of the management team's to-do list can deliver a clear mandate for change, signed off by the people you might expect to resist it. For example, imagine an organisation needing to rapidly digitise its business to keep pace with a fast-shifting competitive market. We can run a “Blockbuster” session that asks employees to imagine the threat of a faster-moving competitor that digitises its business model (e.g., Netflix). Employees are asked to provide feedback on the speed of response required, decisions on which parts of the business to jettison, and where to reallocate scarce resources. Employee feedback can set the agenda for change and deliver commitment and buy-in.

Complexity can hinder productivity and increase costs, making it crucial for businesses to identify and eliminate unnecessary complexity. A listening exercise can engage employees in streamlining overly complex processes and reducing low-value activities that are ingrained in the business. This process should be guided by an agenda that prioritises what's important, especially from the perspective of customers. As new ideas and suggestions are identified and implemented, the program can build momentum and delve deeper into the business, making continuous improvement a core value. This tactical approach to listening can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the overall customer experience.

The emergence of remote and hybrid work patterns has challenged traditional assumptions about what constitutes appropriate work arrangements. Leaders can re-energise and transform their culture by engaging employees in defining the future of work. Asking the right questions can promote a dialogue that delivers the optimum solution for all stakeholders. For example, how can we make sure promotions are fairly awarded, regardless of in-office attendance? Or what skills, tools, and support do managers need now that they are managing a mix of people working remotely and in the office? By involving employees in the process of shaping the future of work, leaders can foster a sense of ownership and commitment, which ultimately leads to greater job satisfaction and productivity.

Qualitative online listening exercises are, for some organisations, a valuable alternative to traditional engagement surveys. For smaller companies, the intimacy of a qualitative investigation can help the team to focus on the unique and specific issues it is confronting. Meanwhile, for larger organisations, online qualitative sessions can be a highly effective alternative to traditional face-to-face action planning sessions, which can become tiresome when repeated after every survey. This approach can also speed up the time between listening and acting, which ensures changes are visible to employees ahead of the next survey.

Qualitative research is ideal for conducting research with discrete employee groups. Graduates, high potentials, and working mothers are all examples of employee segments that merit conducting a tightly focused research study that explores their experiences at work. However, it may be the burnt-out middle manager cohort that is most in need of support at this very moment. This group has borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting upheavals in the workplace. A research exercise could help establish their current thoughts and feelings, and identify ways that the business can not only reduce their burden but also re-energise them. Transforming the role of middle managers should be a priority for all leadership teams.

Leaders often find themselves ill-equipped to make decisions during a crisis. They may rely on unhelpful heuristics and biases that are ingrained in their thinking, making it difficult for them to see all the potential risks and opportunities and determine the best course of action. However, by conducting an online listening study, leaders can gain timely access to diverse voices from across their organisation. These voices can challenge their assumptions and help them see through their blind spots. This type of study can increase leaders decision-making confidence as well as engage employees in confronting the challenges that lie ahead.

Research shows that both mergers and acquisitions can negatively impact employees, particularly in areas such as involvement in decision-making. Running an online qualitative research program before, during, and after the merger can increase your employees’ sense of participation in shaping key decisions. At the same time, sharing the findings from the research more widely can help to assuage unease about an uncertain future.

To improve service levels, leaders need unfiltered feedback from the people on the frontline about the actual customer experience, both positive and negative, and ideas about how to improve the offering and the company's internal processes. However, research* shows that many leaders are not receptive to hearing bad news, which causes employees to withhold information. This can leave leadership teams with a significantly distorted view of the customer experience. Our tools provide frontline teams with the air cover that enables them to speak truth to power and provide candid feedback that can drive competitive advantage.

*Detert and Edmondson (2007). Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak. Harvard Business Review.

We can conduct listening studies that capture robust insights into the employee experience around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. The highly-personal narratives that emerge — good and bad — add meaning to the anonymised data from the annual DEI&B survey. The findings we deliver, while highlighting successes, inevitably point to potential areas for improvement.

There are times when it makes sense to conduct a departmental deep dive on a single high-stakes issue. For example, the study can aim to identify major roadblocks hindering productivity or enable the department leader to rally their team around an upcoming project. These types of localised listening studies can generate quick results because the team's intimacy allows them to implement remedial actions promptly or rally around a project’s potential.

Effective internal communication is a crucial aspect of organisational success. Conducting a listening exercise can help leaders understand their employees' experience. Are employees receiving too little or too much communication? Are they receiving information through their preferred channels? Is the communication one-way or two-way? Does the communication they receive instruct, inform, influence, or inspire? The findings we deliver can assist in refining a company's communication strategy.

What do employees truly think about the leadership team? What are the team's strengths and weaknesses? Are they perceived as being self-serving or focused on the company's values and goals? The feedback obtained from a listening exercise can be used by a CEO to ask for improvement from their team, or an OD leader can use the findings to inform the development of a new leadership development program.

In certain companies where work involves inherent risks, safety is a top priority. Leaders often establish a comprehensive workplace safety program that includes identifying and cataloguing risks, establishing a safety culture, training and development, communication, knowledge measurement, and regular audits. However, conducting an independent listening exercise can provide employees with an opportunity to highlight any safety issues that the program may have overlooked. When people's lives are at stake, this last check seems only sensible.

Leaders can benefit from running a listening exercise with the sole purpose of checking the climate inside their department or organisation. Questions such as, 'What's the biggest barrier to you doing your best work every day?' can help leaders better understand their employees' experience at work. Similarly, leaders can ask employees, 'Is there anything you think I don't know about that you believe I should know?' These types of scans can provide leaders with serendipitous insights that avert disaster or point to previously unseen opportunities.