Social Listening in the Workplace

Most conversations about social listening focus on using it as a way to understand what your prospects and customers are saying. But it's just as important to know how your employees feel about your organization.

Can social listening help? You bet!

The ways to listen for sentiment from your employees differ quite a bit from the commercial platforms used to track what consumers say about you and your brand.

It's simultaneously better and more challenging than you think. Read on to find out why.

What is social listening for employees?

Feedback from prospects or customers about your products, services or brand can be tracked using a variety of platforms that have been tailor-made for the purpose. You can read more about some of these platforms in my blog on social listening.

The data you'll be trying to get at includes:

• what employees are saying

• how often

• how they feel about your organization

Most internal employee platforms will be able to tell you what and how often employees are talking about your brand.

This last category, sentiment, is the hardest to get at as an aggregate piece of data because, as we'll find, most employee software platforms do not provide this kind of data at all.

Bear in mind that although there are artificial intelligence-powered products coming into the market, the field of sentiment analysis is a rapidly evolving space. 

When it comes to employees there are two areas you'll want to track: what's said inside your organization and what's said outside on social media.

What employees say inside your organization

Whether you can track what your employees say about your brand inside of your organization depends a great deal on how encouraging you are about participation.

Does your organization encourage employees to speak their minds?

If so, where do employees congregate and share their views? Companies that maintain a digital workplace where chat, posts or other social conversations may have access to metrics and analytics that help to see just how engaged employees are.

Ways you can begin to assess employee sentiment internally include:

• Posts on discussion forums

• Likes or comments on news items

• Survey responses

As I mentioned earlier, you probably will not have the capability to track social sentiment internally.

However, you may be able to export internal conversation data to a third party business intelligence analysis tool like Tableau, where you can manipulate and rate data for keywords, essentially setting up your own algorithm for sentiment analysis.

The key is to start tracking what employees say about your brand on a regular basis.

What employees say outside your organization

Getting at what your employees say on social media requires some work but it is definitely worthwhile. It can tell you a lot about how employees really feel about your organization and can point to opportunities for employee retention, recruitment, and better inclusion.

Keep in mind, however, that you need to be respectful of the boundaries employees need. You cannot stalk your employees inside of private groups, which may be construed as protected speech and cause you ethical or legal problems.

Anything an employee posts on a public profile on any social media platform is fair game for investigation.

The matter is not so much that you are playing Big Brother but that you are trying to understand attitudes and reactions to your brand that you might not otherwise get at.

Other places you can look include review platforms like Indeed or Glassdoor, where you can see what employees and even people who have interviewed with your organization say about their experiences.

Be careful how you respond to these public reviews of your company. Many CEOs and leaders want to charge in and demand to know who posted a negative comment, but here be dragons. The danger is your executive can appear thin-skinned and insecure. Developing a policy on whether and how to respond to a public comment about your organization will help. 

If there's a policy in place, your organization can respond when it makes sense to protect the organization's reputation. Reserve a response for cases where it's clearly a false or misleading statement about the company or its policies.

How much time should you spend tracking employee sentiment?

Allocate time for your staff to track updates to LinkedIn profiles and to check reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed at least once a month.

Depending on the size of your organization, you might track monthly changes to public LinkedIn profiles in a spreadsheet.

Some things you might hear as a result of a monthly tracking program include:

• An employee who is thinking about leaving

• A past employee who is on the market again and who might be re-hired

• A past employee who is now working for a competitor

• Interviewees who have had a positive or negative experience talking with one of your hiring managers

• Sentiment about what it's like to work for your company from anonymous current or former employees

What if I see concerning information about an employee?

Employees intent on leaving your organization will probably do so regardless of what you say or do. However, what you should NOT do is call them out for wanting to leave.

If you find out an employee is going to leave, you might let a direct manager know, especially if you note that he or she has experienced something that can be addressed.

Conclusion

It's better to know about what your employees are saying than not. Putting an employee social listening program in place (rather than just listening once) will help you get more candid and regular feedback than you’ll find in your annual HR surveys and exit interviews. 

If you don’t have one, consider having a digital commons, a place where employees are encouraged to speak their minds without reprisal. With the increase of remote work in response to the pandemic, chances are your organization has already invested in more ways for employees to digitally connect and collaborate with each other.

Providing a platform for social interaction doesn't mean that employees can just say anything. The freedom to express your opinions doesn't mean you have the freedom to shout the equivalent of FIRE in a crowded theatre. Employees have a responsibility too.

Finally, remember to track employee sentiment manually or use one of the many emergent tools. Some of these purpose-built sentiment analysis tools can be expensive, so you may need to begin with a manual tracking method until you’ve proven the value of the program.

If you’re looking for a deeper discussion about your options for employee social listening approaches, contact Kane Communications Group for a free consultation.