Future-fit employee listening

A smarter approach to listening with actionable insights for the moments that matter. Combine robust listening tools with Mercer’s extensive normative database, adaptive approach and deep expertise across HR, reward and transformation to evolve the employee experience.

Stay connected to what matters to your people

Whether it’s issues related to Good Work, pay transparency, diversity, equity and inclusion, or sustainability, employees have found their voice on what matters to them. And they expect employers to come off mute in the same way.  

Workforce listening opens up this dialogue, helping employers stay in tune with their employees, craft compelling employee experiences and intentionally engage with their workforce. Yet 42% of employees (a percentage that has more than doubled since 2022) say their needs are not being met. 

Organisations are trying to nurture an engaged workforce with the will and skill to transform, yet 42% of employees say that their employer is not meeting their needs (significantly worse than the 19% in 2022).
Source: 2024 Global Talent Trends
Addressing persistent unmet needs starts with employee listening. But moving from insight to action requires making the right connections throughout the employee journey. Only then can employers meet people where they are and create a thriving workforce for the future.

Employee listening challenges facing employers:

  • Low or declining employee engagement levels 
  • Keeping people productive and connected when working flexibly 
  • An abundance of listening data but no clear strategy  
  • Employee investments falling short of achieving the desired impact  
  • A lack of actionable insights 
  • Low participation in listening or improvement activities 
  • Inefficient processes/technology acting as a barrier to listening activities  
  • Low data quality due to focusing too much on achieving high participation rates

Engaging employees with future-fit listening:

Reveal the underlying drivers of human behaviour using employee experience insights and human capital metrics to align employee listening to your strategic business priorities.

What people want isn’t necessarily in line with what they say they want. A multi-method approach addresses this say-do gap, building on traditional engagement surveys to combine workforce analytics and normative data. This holistic data keeps you intimately connected to what matters to your people.

Gain the actionable insights you need to outpace the competition. Foster employee advocacy by creating a lasting culture that attracts future talent through a blend of employee listening tools and support from our experts.

Identify and solve pain points with Mercer’s network of expertise spanning the depth and breadth of HR (including talent, rewards and HR transformation).

Why use Mercer’s employee listening solutions?

  • Deep insights and flexible service:

    Our expertise can scale across a variety of research methods and tools and is driven by the workforce insights you need to advance business priorities. 
  • Human-centred, tech-enabled philosophy:

    We help businesses choose the right technology platform for their listening needs and embed tech advances — including AI — into the EX journey.
  • Enablement at scale:

    Our global network of HR experts can partner with you to solve even the thorniest of questions and ensure that you move from insight to impact in a sustained and scalable way (e.g., career pathing, total rewards, DEI, and more).
  • Best-in-class global normative database:

    Our global employee listening database is based on responses from 8.4 million employees across 805 companies, resulting in 65 country and 16 industry benchmarks, to ensure you have access to the most up-to-date and robust proprietary database.

Move the needle with multi-method employee listening

Our approach keeps the bigger picture front of mind while staying close to the details, including different listening tools, the frequency of listening and the governance behind a scalable strategy. This concept is grounded in the reality of business priorities and people’s needs while maintaining an adaptive and flexible approach.
The multi-method employee listening framework is based on discovering how is the listening strategy aligned with business priorities, designing a method, developing it as part of a programme and deploying it with measurable actions.

The approach sets the foundation for

Exploring emerging issues Conducting deeper analysis Gaining scalable insights Measuring fixed concepts
Detailed data to pull apart thorny issues and make them more understandable. Deep analysis to understand the nature of an issue and how it is emerging. Data to understand the prevalence of an issue - and when and where it occurs. Monitoring and improving on the issues you are already familiar with, backed by a clear taxonomy.

Mercer’s employee listening tools

A “smarter listening” approach leverages multi-method listening, backed by external expertise, for an intentional cadence of listening for maximum impact — even when budgets are tight.
  • Digital focus groups
    Crowdsource insights from your people on a wide range of topics through scalable, open and interactive dialogue.
  • Employee surveys
    From enterprise employee engagement programmes to targeted pulse surveys, our solutions are designed to meet your needs, from measuring the impact of organisational changes to conducting detailed, strategic analysis. Our experts are tech-agnostic: for example, we can support implementation and advise for our tech partners, Glint and Qualtrics, as well as our own platform that supports multi-method listening across the talent lifecycle and the EVP.
  • Continuous listening
    Tap into the employee experience with ad hoc surveys, an annual census, and recurring pulses and listening programmes for “moments that matter” — all optimised for fully managed and self-service platforms.
  • Preference research
    Understand what your people value — their preferences, priorities and expectations — to sharpen and personalise the employee value proposition.
  • 360-degree feedback
    Experience effortless deployment powered by deep expertise. Actionable insights highlight the way forward for individual and group development.
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