Your Employees Have Feelings Too

Emotional engagement is a key tenet of most branding efforts (see: every TV ad during the Olympics). And no successful marketer would launch a product or service without considering its emotional benefits.

Yet, when it comes to conducting research among employees, our clients are often surprised when we recommend asking people how they feel. It could be as general as asking employees how they feel about working for their company (proud, secure, indifferent), or as personal as asking how they feel when they receive their performance evaluations (nervous, hopeful), but asking these questions provides important context to any problem we’re trying to solve. 

As the Great Resignation has spotlighted, many organizations view their relationship with employees as primarily transactional, causing them to overlook the very real emotions that motivate how their employees behave. (Including whether or not they decide to show up for work tomorrow, or if they will begin a search for other opportunities.)

We recently worked with a client looking for new ways to build its company culture. This company had already invested heavily in ways to measure employee engagement and processes to ensure that leaders were held accountable when employees were struggling. 

We conducted focus groups with managers across the company’s multiple divisions, roles, and tenures. We asked about everything from time management to perceptions of executive leadership, but the question that ultimately provided some of the greatest insight was “How do you feel when you receive the employee engagement survey results for your team?” 

While seasoned managers who were leading engaged teams expressed anticipation and even enthusiasm for understanding what’s going well and where they could improve, newer managers or those with less-engaged teams, expressed fear and anxiety about receiving these results. 

This emotional insight sparked further exploration into opportunities to provide specialized support to new managers, including forums where they could learn from more experienced leaders. We could not have uncovered this insight if we hadn’t sought to understand the emotional context these managers were operating within.  

Asking how employees feel about your brand is important, but it puts the brand at the center of the conversation. Asking employees how your company makes them feel is a different question – and it can uncover opportunities for improvements in everything from retention and recruitment to internal communication and HR processes. 

Looking for help with employee insights? Let’s talk.