Identify and Align Your Stakeholders

Stakeholder buy-in, especially Executive support, can help ensure the success of your listening program. According to our research, companies with executive buy-in score higher in maturity than those who do not. These same mature organizations are more likely to hit financial targets, retain talent and achieve high levels of customer satisfaction, therefore demonstrating the importance of stakeholder buy-in for your listening program. We highly recommend actively pursuing and nurturing executive buy-in.

This article walks through:

• Identify Your Stakeholders
• Gain Stakeholder Buy-in

Identify Your Stakeholders

Based on our experience, a Customer team that maximizes value is usually one that includes an executive sponsor, a partnership lead, and a survey lead. Each stakeholder and role is defined below.

• Executive Sponsor
  Provides insights on the overall organizational goals and direction for the Employee Listening Plan. This person is usually a senior Executive that has overall accountability for the organization's Employee Listening Strategy. 

• Partnership Lead
  Collaborates to develop the Insights and Action Strategy, drives progress against the success plan, and tracks KPIs. This person is usually a Senior Leader responsible for championing the Insights and Action Strategy and secures buy-in from cross-functional leadership teams.  
  
  

• Survey Lead
  Works to implement Employee Listening surveys. This person is usually a HR Program Manager who leads the day-to-day operational aspects of the Employee Listening surveys. 

The team may also include individuals within the organization who focus on specific elements of the survey process. These roles and responsibilities are defined below.

• IT
  Members in this role are focused on employees’ access to the survey (SSO, access to the survey instruments, reporting portal, HRIS data file needs, etc.).
  
  

• Internal Communications
  These team members support development of survey messages from senior leadership as well as messaging 1) to employees for survey administration and 2) to managers for roll-out of survey results. This team often also supports linkage of the survey programs to the organizational EVP or brand identity.

• Learning & Development or Talent Development
  This team supports the roll-out of training for managers for the survey program, linkage to internal LMS resources, and action planning objectives.

• Employee Relations
  In unionized environments, especially in the EU and other regions, adding a key labor relations staff member to the team can be helpful in the process of gaining approval for the survey instrument and for communicating with collective bargaining units and/or works councils globally.

Note: Depending on the focus of the organization and visibility of the survey programs, members from legal, quality, and Research & Development departments are occasionally added to the team.

Extended Survey Implementation Team

At key points in the survey process, especially for large global companies, it is useful to engage a broader team to assist. These field HR representatives of core business lines (or functional units or locations) can help with global implementation as well as with issues specific to local communications, fieldwork in remote locations, translations and review, headcounts, organizational structure mapping, Works Councils, data privacy issues, etc.

Gain Stakeholder Buy-in

There are several ways to gain stakeholder buy-in to your Insights and Action strategy. Some of the ways Perceptyx customers have found successful include:

• Include stakeholders in the process.
  Interview stakeholders during the item/survey design phase to understand their key business and talent priorities. Involving leaders early in the process ensures the listening program and feedback will meet their needs and helps them feel part of the process, and aligns the Insights and Action Strategy to the overall business goals.

• Communicate early and often.
  Especially in the case of changes, any information you can provide to stakeholders will help them feel informed for their employees. Q&A lists, long-term strategy plans, timelines for listening events and results rollouts will all help them be experts for the process.

• Help stakeholders recognize the importance of not only listening, but acting upon employee feedback. 
  Encourage them to model appropriate behaviors for holding feedback meetings and sharing results.