I started with simple questions: What are people experiencing as they move through key HR processes? Can we better understand it by listening closer to the experience itself? Why not look at the specific moment employees and managers were navigating, rather than relying only on broader periodic measures of employee sentiment?
I expected to learn where the processes were working and where they needed improvement, and we did. But I also started to see that the same interesting themes kept appearing in different places. Questions about clarity, the role of managers in translating expectations, perceptions of fairness and, of course friction between what a process was designed to do and what it felt like to navigate.
Individually, each signal could reasonably be treated as feedback about the process where we heard it. But holistically, there was another thread.
The process may be where an experience shows up, not where it starts
Organizations naturally divide work into processes, programs, systems, and teams. But employees don't experience it that way. A process problem can create a frustrating experience, but it may also reflect a history of unclear expectations. Difficulty navigating a talent decision may point to a technology issue or to a manager being asked to translate something they don't fully understand themselves.
It's an important distinction, because how a problem is framed shapes what we try to fix. If feedback is collected and interpreted in the silo of a single process, the natural response is to improve that process. Sometimes that's exactly what's needed, but sometimes it isn't.
SSON has explored a similar idea in HR service delivery: the experience isn't just the process or technology behind an interaction, but how that interaction works for the employee. Looking across experiences, not individual processes, can help us see what might otherwise stay hidden.
Listening for connections
The shift for us was subtle: from looking primarily for problems to looking for patterns. Where else are we hearing this? Does this signal appear at other moments? What do employees feel is connected but may seem unrelated to the organization?
The answer is unlikely to be another enterprise survey alone. Different forms of listening can give us different signals, but the value comes from connecting those signals to understand the problem more fully.
How might we make better use of the listening already happening? Get closer to meaningful moments, connect signals across them, and stay curious about what sits underneath the feedback.
Sometimes the value of listening is a better question
I found the most useful outcome was not finding a solution to a problem, but instead realising that our questions could be bigger. Not, "How do we improve this process?" but instead "What is this process revealing about how the work is experienced, and what might be creating that experience?"