Intuit’s ‘head of employee listening’ talks about the science of worker feedback—and the art of asking the right questions

Companies love worker feedback more and more these days, but many struggle to keep up with the sheer amount of paperwork, let alone leveraging surveys into clear action items.

Some companies are tackling the problem by recruiting research experts who analyze worker input and help the organization make better decisions based on that research. Enter Emily Pelosi, who was given the title of “head of employee listening” at software giant Intuit in 2022.

Pelosi has a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology, and has worked in HR research and analytics teams at places like Amazon and CenturyLink. She leads a team that gathers employee sentiment data, analyzes it to produce insights from workers’ experiences, and then works with HR and other teams to help formulate talent strategies.

Her role may sound unusual, but she says it’s not as rare as one might think; and more companies are hiring these experts as talent attraction and retention continues to be a top priority.

“I do think it's something that is a little more cutting-edge and has grown in popularity,” she tells Fortune. “I noticed more and more of these types of roles emerging during the pandemic, and after, when employers realized we have to listen differently, we have to act differently, to navigate the first of many unprecedented global crises.”

She sat down with Fortune to discuss why Intuit decided to create her role and how she helps the company’s leaders make the best decisions for them based on data.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Fortune: What does “employee listening” mean? What prompted Intuit to create this role?

Emily Pelosi: At a high level, employee listening is made up of many activities that companies, including Intuit, have been doing for many years. Pulse engagement surveys, onboarding surveys, exit surveys, things like that. However, the pandemic ushered in a new way of working, a new pace of work and change, and many global challenges which created a need for more real-time insights. For that reason, Intuit and other companies have evolved to include mechanisms for more continuous listening that provide more frequent touch points. For example, we have a survey called “Always On” that lives on our homepage that employees can participate in once a week to tell us what's on their minds.

What does your role entail? 

I'm managing a couple of things. I lead our enterprise-wide listening program, which is made up of our surveys. [I also lead] our “voice of the employee” analytics program, where we're gathering data using listening channels that are used between our big company-wide pulse surveys that happen roughly twice a year. We're working directly with our HR business partners to hear what challenges they're working through with their leaders, and how we can support them. We also look at some passive data sources as well, such as help tickets that employees submit, to see where employees need the most support.

I also lead a small people research team designed to take those survey insights, go deep into the data, and uncover new unique insights that ultimately help our leaders empower our employees to do the best work of their lives.

What functions do you work most closely with? 

I partner closely with our talent development team, helping inform how we can support our managers, measure their capability, and develop that further. In the last couple of years, we've been partnering closely with our hybrid work team, informing the way our return to office policy looks. We also partner closely with D&I. Many different groups across our HR organization are primarily my key customers.

Do you work with Intuit’s CEO, Sasan Goodarzi?

I do actually meet with our CEO at least twice a year. He's heavily involved in our biannual company survey. We partner with him and our chief people officer Lauren Funnel to make sure we're asking the right questions. We align with them upfront on what we're asking, how we're asking it. And he's the first person we meet with when the survey closes, to talk through what we learned, what our key areas of opportunity are, what we want to focus on as a company, and then we go from there.

What previous career or education experience do you think best prepared you to take on this title and responsibilities?

My background is in industrial and organizational psychology. I like to define it as the science of the workplace. It's a little bit of data analytics, research, methodology, survey design. All the things that would help you scientifically explain what's going on in a workplace, specifically with employees and their interactions.

For example, my dissertation was on employee engagement. Understanding the drivers of engagement, some of the outcomes, and what that can look like helps inform the way you measure things and explain to your leaders what it means.

I also see a lot of overlap with people in similar roles to mine, having a background in people analytics. At the end of the day, this job can be a little bit of everything: data analysis and research, survey design, measurement, even data engineering and product management, because once you're gathering the data, you have to find a way to effectively store it, ensure confidentiality, things like that. It really can be a mixed bag.

What do you consider the most challenging part of your job?

An ongoing challenge for anyone in this type of role is learning how to ask the right questions. We're continually iterating on the ways we gather feedback, what we're asking. Because a lot of companies, Intuit included, are investing in AI and using that to help us glean more meaningful insights from employee data. But even with that technology, you have to consider what questions you're asking. That frames up employees' responses and impacts what they say or don't say. That's something that we're always thinking critically about. That's not something everyone realizes, that there's an actual science to employee surveys.

Can you give an example of that?

A team might come to us and say, ‘Hey, we launched this new event with this initiative, and we want to see if it made a difference on XYZ. Did it improve belonging for employees? Did this make them feel more connected?’

We'll start the conversation by asking: What were the goals of your initiative? We will take them through breaking down those goals into specific outcomes that you would expect to see because of this particular action. Sometimes, that's a level of granularity that people haven't thought about before. Drilling down something to a specific behavior can be challenging. But it's always fun to walk alongside that journey with our partners and help them identify: This is what people are doing differently, because they did our program. Or, this is what they're not doing differently, let's go back to the drawing board.

How do you handle complaints or negative sentiments shared by employees?

Something we talk about a lot is that it's important to distinguish questioning from asking questions. What's super interesting is, just having the nature of an open-text question or asking: What could we be doing differently? You're literally asking for criticism. You're gonna get more negative sentiment.

One of our principles toward approaching these situations is leading that conversation with data. Some of the AI models we use, we're able to take a bunch of comments and say: How many people brought up XYZ? How many people brought up that topic? How negative was the sentiment? That helps inform the magnitude in terms of the emotion behind it, and what percentage of people might be feeling that way. Once you can distinguish between a situation that’s a very small group of people with very negative sentiment, versus a larger percentage, that changes how you respond to that.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com