Evolving the Way We Listen

Maren Dollwet Waggoner, Ph.D. Senior Vice President, End-to-End Operations People, Walmart US

For People teams around the globe, listening has never been more important. The workforce is changing. Today’s employees have different challenges, different aspirations, and different expectations of their employers than ever before. To understand what our employees want and need, we must build a holistic listening ecosystem that synthesizes internal, external, and implicit feedback from our frontline and beyond. When we get this right, we generate timely, actionable insights at an enterprise level. The outcome is engaged employees, empowered leaders, and a stronger connection between employees and the People teams that support them.

Ultimately, it’s our job to demystify what employees expect so that we can better serve them. How we go about that today is dramatically different than how we went about it in the past. For larger companies like Walmart – we have approximately 1.6 million employees in the U.S. – scale is a challenge, and technology continues to be the solution. It helps us the most in three areas – expanding our reach and understanding of our employees, soliciting their ideas, and generating insights about what they think and feel.

It starts with reach. A year ago, Walmart distributed over one million free smartphones to our frontline employees. Each of these phones came equipped with Me@Walmart, a consumer-grade super app that centralizes all the resources and functionality an employee needs at work. With this technology in place, prompting feedback is as simple as a push notification. But this is only a small part of how the app helps us listen – it also gives us observability. By following the way an employee interacts with the app – their preferences, their likes, their dislikes – we can make inferences about their experience and how to improve it. When we see a pain point – implicit or explicit - we can solve for it. When we use observability to catalogue employees’ skills and interests, we can increase their career mobility. Our employees are at the center of how we’ve designed this application, and the end goal of our listening efforts is simple - good jobs, great careers, and a better life for our people.

“It’s one thing to listen. It’s another thing entirely to communicate the results of your listening to your workforce. Your employees want to know what you’ve heard, what you’re doing about it, and when it will be done. Being intentional with this communication is the key to ensuring our employees feel heard”

We can also make an impact with listening in the ideation space. The notion of generating ideas from the frontline isn’t new – for Walmart, it goes back 60 years to our founder, Sam Walton, touring stores, yellow pad in hand – but today associates don’t have to wait for us to ask – they can submit ideas when and how they want. This past year, Walmart launched a self-service, digital platform called MyIdeas. It lives inside Me@Walmart and allows our people to submit their ideas for our business at the press of a button. This is a valuable internal channel for generating ideas, but internal channels – ideas for work at work – is only one side of the coin. It’s equally important that we listen externally. That’s why, as part of our holistic approach, we also aggregate data from external channels for what our employees are suggesting about a given topic. By synthesizing our employees’ internal and external ideas, we constantly improve.

Let’s revisit scale. When large companies receive thousands and thousands of responses from their engagement surveys, parsing that data is a challenge. How do we glean actionable insights using technology? For Walmart, the answer is NLP – Natural Language Processing. We conduct sentiment analysis using this technology – it automatically synthesizes and summarizes open text comments across various inputs like our open text on our annual engagement survey, as well as external sources. . TNLP allows us to summarize all the voices across these channels, creating an executive summary and clear action plans, along with a deeper dive on themes specific to each.

With the technology in place to expand our reach/understand our employees, solicit impactful ideas, and generate actionable insights, two new questions present themselves – what do we ask, and how do we share what we’ve heard? For that first item, I believe in focusing on your company’s workforce journey and your company’s culture. When I refer to the workforce journey, I’m referring to key touchpoints where we should ask an employee about their experience. How was their onboarding? How were their first 90 days after a promotion? It’s even worth asking about the offboarding experience of departing employees. By doing so, we enhance our understanding of pain points at every step of the employee journey and equip ourselves to improve engagement and reduce turnover. With culture surveys, I’m referring to prompted feedback that digs into the kind of environment we’re creating for our people. Are we building belonging and inclusion? Answering that question is invaluable for setting People priorities.

A commitment to listening is a must for People teams around the globe, and so is a commitment to action. One thing I learned from my team’s listening efforts at Walmart is the value of transparency.  It’s one thing to listen. It’s another thing entirely to communicate the results of your listening to your workforce. Your employees want to know what you’ve heard, what you’re doing about it, and when it will be done. Being intentional with this communication is the key to ensuring our employees feel heard.  As our team looks to the future, we plan to build on our past listening efforts by evolving the program and making it even more automated, easily accessible, and embedded in our business. To drive this, we’re focused on enhancing our survey deployment capabilities, updating our survey strategy, further automating through NLP, and creating a one-stop-shop reporting tool that has all the relevant business and people data integrated in the backend including action planning and tracking resources.

With the ongoing evolution of the workforce, all People teams – whether you support a smaller company or an industry giant – have an increased responsibility to gather feedback, generate insights, and counsel our business partners on what we’ve learned. Nothing can replace one-on-one communication between employees and their leaders, but when we use evolving technology to bring our People commitment to life, it drives a better experience year after year.

Natural Language Processing