If you’re regular followers of People Lab you might know that we go to the Greenman Festival in Wales every summer.
And we are lucky enough to be able to take our caravan which makes all the difference to the festival experience. It’s a long old drive from Hastings across to South Wales and towards the end of the journey, it’s fair to say that everyone is just desperate to get there. Last year on the drive down, our sat nav decided to reroute us due to an accident creating long tailbacks. It was a no-brainer to turn off from our usual route to avoid hours of delay.
The system had access to information we didn’t. It had spotted a problem before we encountered it. And often that’s incredibly useful. But this was not one of those times. We ended up navigating tiny lanes, with loads of twists and turns and seriously steep hills, that were really not suitable for a car towing a caravan. I think it’s fair to say tempers were pretty frayed by the time we arrived, not the ideal start to our holiday,
It’s in these moments that human judgement matters. Yes the sat nav provides intelligence, but we provide the context. Lesson learnt for this year!
And I think there is a bigger lesson in here, not least for where organisations find themselves with employee voice today. For years, employee voice has worked a bit like an old paper map. We run an annual survey, maybe a few focus groups, perhaps an engagement pulse. Then the report is produced and an action plan is created.
And then we do it all again next year.
The problem isn’t that surveys are bad, the problem is that they’re largely telling us what has already happened – they are our rear-view mirror.
Valuable? Absolutely.
Enough? Increasingly, no.
Because the world of work has changed, employees are sharing signals all the time:
- In onboarding conversations.
- In manager check-ins.
- In collaboration platforms.
- In employee communities.
- In open-text comments.
- In questions raised at town halls.
- In exit interviews.
- In the choices they make every day.
The challenge has never been a lack of employee voice, the challenge has been our ability to hear it. And that’s where AI becomes interesting. Not because it can write content faster, or because it can analyse survey comments in seconds. But because it changes what employee voice can become.
For the first time, organisations can begin to connect signals across multiple sources, identify patterns at scale and spot issues before they appear in next year’s engagement report.
Imagine being able to identify emerging burnout hotspots before people leave. Or spotting onboarding friction before attrition starts to rise. Or understanding which manager behaviours are having the greatest impact on trust, confidence and performance.
This isn’t about replacing surveys, it’s about moving beyond a model where surveys are the only meaningful source of insight. The annual survey shouldn’t disappear, but perhaps it’s time to stop treating it as the entire employee voice strategy.
Because employee voice was never supposed to be about collecting feedback, it was supposed to be about understanding people. And perhaps more importantly, helping people feel heard. For me thats the bit we sometimes forget.
Employee voice isn’t just an insight exercise, it’s a human one. People want to know their experiences matter and that their concerns are heard. And mostly that their voice makes a difference.
AI may help us hear more, but humans still need to decide what matters, what action to take and how to involve employees in shaping solutions. Just as we it’s not wise to blindly follow the sat nav, organisations shouldn’t blindly follow the algorithm, or take the findings at face value.
The future isn’t AI or humans.
It’s AI AND humans.
One helping us navigate complexity, and the other providing judgement, empathy and context.
Over the coming weeks we’re exploring what this means for the future of employee voice, internal communication and employee experience. Because if AI is changing how organisations listen, perhaps it’s also changing what employee voice can become.
And if you’re thinking about how to create a more human-centred approach to employee voice in an AI-enabled world, we’d love to be part of that conversation. Get in touch today.
