Workforce Science
Delivering high performance. Inspiring enduring fulfillment.
Our Proven Approach to Delivering High Performance
High performance results from enabling leaders to unlock both the heads and hearts of their employees. The heart is engagement, motivating employees to want to work harder, stay longer, and care more. The head is operational excellence, ensuring employees are able to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
We’ll uncover the top one or two most important priorities for leaders to put laser focus on to ensure their teams are supported to deliver high performance.
Effective program design is both art and science.
We Start by Listening…
The Art
Mission, Vision, Values
Organizational Initiatives
Operational Challenges
Company Culture
HR Strategy & Goals
Listening Strategy
The Science
Proven Methodology
Validated Content
Global Top Drivers
Industry Factors
Geography Factors
New Research
The Art
We start by understanding the unique and relevant aspects of your organization through stakeholder input. This includes organizational initiatives, operational challenges, and your organization’s mission, vision and values. Knowing what makes your organization unique is important to ensuring we are measuring what truly matters to your employees.
The Science
WSA sits on one of the world’s largest databases of employee feedback. Our database consists of 10M+ surveys that include 150M+ responses across 200+ countries and every major industry around the world. This massive amount of data keeps our finger on the pulse of employee experiences globally. It provides us proven best practices that consistently move the needle. It helps us uncover new trends that lead to innovation, so we constantly evolve to stay at the forefront of high performance. Through it, we have developed the most proven and effective approaches to ensuring your employees work harder, stay longer, and care more.
We combine art with science, drawing from our massive database to ensure we are effectively measuring what matters most to your organization. The science includes proven methodology, validated content, relevant and robust benchmarks, global top predictors of your most critical outcomes, industrial and geographical influencing factors, and our latest research.
The result is a short, highly relevant, and highly effective survey instrument.
Proven Content
Every year, we refresh our three-year rolling research database. As part of this process, we conduct a thorough analysis of the data. One output is our annual State of the Workforce research report, which offers the latest employee experience trends and priorities.
Another output is a refreshed list of survey items reflecting the top global predictors of employee engagement. We conduct a deep dive analysis into the dataset that leverages advanced ensemble machine learning techniques including neural networks, clustering algorithms, linear support vector machines, and random forests alongside both backward and ordinal regression methods to determine the most important items to measure. While items tend to shift around in terms of prioritization, one constant we’ve observed over the past 40 years is that there are six consistent foundational tenants of the employee experience that always matter to employees:
Top Global Predictors of Engagement
These tenants are the foundation of a strong employee listening strategy.
Sr. Leadership
Trust in Leadership
Strategic Alignment
Managers
Communication
Feeling Valued
Everyone
Feeling Supported
Growth & Development
Trust in Leadership
The foundation of any strong relationship is trust between employees and leadership, and is the bedrock of engagement.
Strategic Alignment
Employees need to feel connected to the organization’s purpose. When they understand their role in the larger mission, their work becomes more meaningful.
Communication
Open, honest, and two-way communication ensures that employees are informed, heard, and aligned with the organization’s goals.
Feeling Valued
Acknowledging and celebrating employees’ contributions makes them feel valued and respected.
Feeling Supported
Feeling supported helps employees feel connected to their peers and the organization as a whole, fostering a collaborative and supportive environment.
Growth and Development
Providing employees with opportunities to learn, grow, and advance is crucial for maintaining their engagement and motivation.
Our Simple Yet Highly Effective Leadership Action Model
1
Understand
Focus on what is truly important vs. just interesting employee feedback.
2
Share
Hold a feedback meeting with your team to share and discuss the survey results.
3
Act
Build an action plan with your team, execute the actions, and communicate progress.
4
Commit
Commit to ongoing listening, refine the process, and stay the course.
Measuring what matters is just the first step. You also have to take the right actions to ensure sustained and tangible performance improvement. At WSA, there are four pillars to facilitating taking the right actions—understand, share, act, and commit.
- Understand your organization’s key priorities that will drive improvement to engagement, equip factors, and leadership effectiveness.
- Share the survey results with the organization and hold feedback sessions with each team to discuss the results.
- Act on the results by building an action plan and communicating progress, frequently.
- Commit to repeating and refining the process to continue improving engagement.
Motivated leaders who work within the understand, share, act, and commit framework contribute significantly to the success of increasing employee engagement—and your organization.
The Outcomes
Pulling the right levers leads to high performance.