The Time for Agile Employee Insights

The GRIT report survey was fielded in early Q2 2022, a seemingly distant time in which the Great Resignation was atop every mind and employers made desperately high job offers to candidates who had multiple options. Now, as I write this in early Q3 2022, the Great Resignation has decelerated, recessionary fears are ever-present, and wage growth has moderated. Among nonfarm employees, the number of employees quitting jobs has returned to 2019 levels (source: Federal Reserve Quits Rate). The whipsaw effect is real!

Changes in employment trends, including in the insights industry (both among supplier- and buyer-sides), are not new and will likely persist into the future. A recent study published in the Sloan Management Review found that management consulting (they don’t call out market research specifically) had the highest average attrition rate of all knowledge economy jobs, with 16% attrition from Q2-Q3 2021. Looking forward, we should expect increased competition for skilled labor resources as The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a decreased labor force participation rate in coming years, including below average growth in the pool of knowledge workers, which accounts for our employee bases.

Suffice it to say, changes in employment trends are endemic and pressure on insights firms to acquire and retain talent will be high. But predicting the macroeconomic conditions environment managers will be operating under in the next few months or years is a near-futile exercise. In the era of constant change, how can management teams maintain stability within their employee base?

The only sustainable method to increase stability in employee relations is for management teams to measure and act on employee insights. In other words, the same practices applied by market researchers to study customer needs ought to be adapted for employees. The intent is to act on employee insights to design incentive packages, cultures, and working environments that produce positive benefits to the business.

At Fuel Cycle, we see increased interest and adoption of employee insights communities. While employee research is not new, management teams have found that outdated models of once- or twice-a-year employee surveys are no longer sufficient to drive employee engagement. Instead, avant-garde leaders are transitioning to agile employee research. These leaders embrace frequent employee feedback and iterative approaches to building incentives and cultures that drive positive results.

There are tangible benefits to acting on employee insights. Companies with engaged employees tend to grow faster and have stronger profitability than companies with less engaged employees, according to Dr. Paul Turner of Leeds University. They also tend to have longer employee tenure and better customer experiences than industry peers.

 

The insights industry ought to embrace agile employee insights as much as we encourage our stakeholders to do so. After all, the best way to generate confidence is to validate decisions with your key constituents.