Harnessing employee feedback to create thriving workplace culture with ADP Voice of the Employee

Harnessing employee feedback to create thriving workplace culture

Business Challenges

Although these three clients operate in diverse industries, each has grappled with similar challenges related to managing their workforce. And while all three clients have benefited from ADP’s robust HR and payroll technology for years, each has until recently searched for an integrated approach to gather and analyze employee feedback and sentiment.

Some of the common challenges faced by these clients include:

• Challenge in creating an environment where employees feel valued and engaged with their work
• Issues with retention and maintaining high productivity across the workforce
• No consistent way to easily gather employee feedback and analyze sentiment
• Lack of clear, actionable data to drive decision making around employee performance
• Process challenges attributed to non-secure, non-integrated solutions

Business Solutions

With ADP Workforce Now® and the Voice of the Employee, these clients can:

• Create custom surveys
• Rapidly collect employee feedback
• Accurately analyze employee sentiment and respond quickly to maximize engagement
• Rely on trustworthy data to drive benchmarking and decision making
• Ensure security and confidentiality within their HR and payroll solution

Child Development Centers, Inc.: Leaders who listen

The childhood educators at Child Development Centers, Inc. have physically and mentally strenuous roles—much like the children they look after, the educators are constantly on the go. This makes it difficult for Marie Kuhn and her team to capture employees’ attention for extended periods of time, especially because they are spread across 15 locations, often moving from site to site.

Kuhn needed to find a standardized way to engage employees, regardless of location. The company she contracted with to conduct annual engagement surveys was unable to deliver the experience she was envisioning; the surveys were generic, not customizable, and very costly.

Simultaneously, she was attempting to address the company’s biggest HR challenge—retention—by creating a supportive and engaging environment for employees, from hire to retire. That’s where ADP Workforce Now and Voice of the Employee came in.

Now, Kuhn and her team use ADP Voice of the Employee to support employees throughout their journey. They are able to conduct 30- and 90-day reviews to ensure employees receive the support and education they need to be successful, launch company-wide engagement surveys to gather feedback and customize surveys to target areas previously identified for improvement.

“By using Voice of the Employee, we stopped contracting with an outside vendor and are saving $8,000-$10,000 each year, which is huge for a not-for-profit organization,” says Kuhn.

Investar Bank: Using constructive feedback to inspire

For Investar Bank, keeping employees engaged is a key pillar of their Human Capital strategy. It has also historically been one of their greatest challenges.

Tom Aldrich and his team were using ADP’s employee engagement solution, StandOut, to provide managers with insights into their employees’ strengths and performance. While StandOut allows leaders to check in frequently with their employees and get a pulse on engagement, Aldrich desired more feedback and sentiment data.

Aldrich explains, “We were contracting to have employee surveys delivered via multiple third-party companies. One of them—Survey Monkey—was used to produce aggregate data for our overall company sentiment, however it wasn’t the most straightforward of processes, or bulletproof. Anytime data is exported from one company system to an external platform, […] there is the opportunity for error. And we’re all about eliminating risk.”

With ADP Voice of the Employee, all of Investar Bank’s employee information and survey results are housed in a single, secure platform, with real time data syncing enabling the HR team to view results as they come in and take action quickly.

“Our employees feel confident the valuable feedback they’re giving isn’t being aimlessly shipped off somewhere into cyberspace, but directly to our HR and senior leadership team,” says Aldrich.

Cornerstone Chemical: Strengthening culture through heightened employee experience

Employees at Cornerstone Chemical, whether on breaks at work or at home, regularly check in via their ADP mobile app to keep apprised of schedule updates, benefits and pay-related information. For Traci Sanderson and her team, it just made sense to introduce ADP Voice of the Employee—an employee engagement tool embedded in the platform Cornerstone’s workforce was already accustomed to using on a daily basis.

Sanderson’s team uses Voice of the Employee to ensure employees feel heard by HR and by the company’s leaders. Some uses include sharing individualized recognition for birthdays and milestones with company-wide notifications, identifying areas for increased education and conducting surveys and exit interviews, especially for employees working early morning and late night shifts when the HR team may not be on site.

“We’ll often see an employee decline a face-to-face exit interview to later complete a Voice of the Employee exit survey, providing honest, detailed and candid responses. It empowers employees to want to be part of change,” says Sanderson.

As a former Survey Monkey subscriber, Sanderson has also seen a marked improvement in the questions she asks employees and the quality of responses received. Furthermore, Voice of the Employee enables Sanderson and her team to track participation in company-wide health and wellness initiatives and ensure that employees are properly rewarded while also retaining a clearer understanding of program success.

From a benefits perspective, Voice of the Employee has been a gamechanger for Cornerstone Chemical, with the added benefit of helping to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by eliminating as much paperwork as possible. Sanderson is able to leverage Voice of the Employee to remind employees of important deadlines and provide easy access to benefits information, resulting in higher participation in benefits plans across the organization and fewer questions directed to the HR team.

Driving the employee experience to the next level

Kuhn and her team at Child Development Centers, Inc. recently added the Voice of the Employee exit survey to their offboarding process in an effort to gain additional insight into employees’ reasons for leaving the organization and to drive company-wide improvements.

“I’m all about utilizing ADP to its full ability because it really does offer everything HR and payroll-related that a company needs. Having [so many] options integrated into ADP Workforce Now makes our lives easier and allows us to focus on what impacts our business the most. I always know that ADP is there to assist us in every step of our growth,” says Kuhn.

At Investar Bank, Aldrich’s team plans to implement Voice of the Employee to capture training survey data and to support company-wide fun and entertainment initiatives. His HR team is also looking forward to the forthcoming Voice of the Employee upgrade, which will allow HR teams to broadcast notifications via text message.

This enhancement will prove extremely valuable for Investar Bank, as they operate in a region often hit with serious weather conditions and need a way to reach out to all employees with broadcast messages, streamlining the employee experience during bad weather.

The HR team at Cornerstone Chemical is looking forward to tackling some of the same issues, since operating across Louisiana means having to deal with the odd weather disturbance. Sanderson is looking to eventually enhance the company’s emergency weather response program by disseminating updates on weather and plant conditions using Voice of the Employee for the ADP Mobile App, as well as text notifications in the future.

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