Capturing the employee voice to reshape reward policies
Unilever found that its policy for international assignees was lacking and wanted to gather employee feedback to help shape it. However, rather than use traditional surveys, it wanted to collate and analyze data more efficiently and with greater impact. Its answer: to design and create Opinion Space, an interactive social media tool that innovatively examines and displays feedback. Peter Newhouse tells us more.
Organizations in the fast-moving consumer goods industry are often described as "marketing companies with production facilities". It is, therefore, no great surprise that corporate functions in businesses like Unilever are ahead of the game in learning from their marketers. Within Unilever, cross-functional collaboration has seen HR and internal communication tapping on the shoulder of marketing experts to have a peek at their skills and expertise - particularly in research and analysis.
This project represents a new dawn for employee and internal communication research that has profound implications for how social research will be conducted
This case study outlines a groundbreaking research project, building on techniques emerging from consumer research that employ social media principles and the latest data visualization technology. Forget your surveys and discard your focus group discussions - this project represents a new dawn for employee and internal communication research that has profound implications for how social research will be conducted. Before we go on to outline the business challenge faced by Unilever, it is worth briefly reviewing recent advances in the field of employee research.
New developments in employee research
The first of these developments is the relentless advance of social media. As organizations become more dispersed, social media is allowing some of them to rediscover the benefits of social interaction that occurred before a lot of work became largely solitary and desk-bound. Internal social networking platforms are growing in prominence and provide a burgeoning list of data streams for HR to analyze.
However, social media is edging into many HR tools and communication processes, including employee research. It's very powerful for obtaining feedback and sophisticated collaborative platforms are emerging. The crucial thing here is that employee research is becoming multi-directional - it's not just about employees filling in surveys in isolation, it's about them collaborating with each other, harnessing the wisdom of crowds and then distilling the essence of those conversations and interactions to achieve a level of insight that hasn't been previously possible.
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