Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future
Hosted by Maureen Metcalf
Conversations with global thought leaders on leadership, culture, and innovation—designed for executives navigating complexity and building resilient organizations.
What Your Team REALLY Thinks…in Real Time!
Episode Description
Annual engagement surveys capture a snapshot, but by the time results arrive the moment has often passed. Greg Moran makes the case for real-time listening, citing Gartner data that 82 percent of employees want to be seen as a person rather than just an employee, and research showing human-centered work design can lift performance by as much as 54 percent. He explains how emerging platforms analyze the natural conversations already happening in tools like Slack and Teams to surface authentic sentiment continuously, catching emerging issues before they escalate and reaching disengaged employees traditional surveys miss.
Key Takeaways
- Point-in-time surveys cannot capture emerging issues or reach disengaged employees before problems escalate.
- Gartner data shows 82 percent of employees want to be seen as a person, not just an employee.
- Human-centered work design can increase employee performance by as much as 54 percent.
- Real-time sentiment analysis, kept separate from toxicity monitoring, offers continuous authentic insight.
- Analyzing existing conversations avoids survey fatigue while surfacing issues as they arise.
Why This Episode Matters
Executives come away seeing how continuous, real-time listening can replace stale surveys and turn authentic employee sentiment into a genuine competitive advantage.
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Episode Content:
Understanding Employee Experience in Real-Time with Aware
Greg Moran, a C-level digital, strategy, and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience provided this article as a companion piece to his podcast What Your Team REALLY Thinks…in Real Time!
Current Challenge
Most companies have no way of understanding how topics, messaging, internal/external events are truly impacting our employees and culture. According to Gartner, 82% of employees agree it is important that their organization sees them as a person, not just an employee. In order to illuminate this topic, ILI has asked me to provide an overview of Aware’s approach to addressing the challenge of listening and giving a voice to employees.
Why This Matters, Now.
Gartner recently stated that human-centered work design can increase employee performance by as much as 54%. The market is quickly shifting to leverage human analytics to inform practices like performance management, building engagement, enhancing culture and experience, and improving retention.
Current Gaps
Traditional engagement questionnaires and pulse surveys only provide point-in-time insight on specific questions or topics. Without additional solutions, companies will continue to fall short in their ability to understand employee experience in a fully comprehensive and real-time manner. In order to drive faster response and more proactive change, companies require new solutions to close these gaps:
The challenges with a survey-based approach:
- No comprehensive understanding of what employees are currently talking about and how they talk about specific topics.
- No ability to look at toxic or disgruntled behavior separately from sentiment (negative sentiment is not always a cause for concern in the enterprise).
- Lack of data to inform an approach to employee experience
- Inability to capture a silent majority or know if an issue is brewing before it turns into a larger distraction.
How Innovative Companies are Closing the Gap
Forward-thinking, global companies go beyond pulse surveys, performance reviews, and focus groups. They augment the information derived from traditional sources with a real-time, continuous understanding of employee voice and experience. These companies use technologies that derive authentic insights from conversations already happening naturally within platforms like Slack, Workplace from Meta, Teams, and others. In the words of one of Aware’s customers “The ability to understand and listen to our partners, and look at sentiment differently, be clear on where we’ve missed something and where we need to lean back in has been incredibly important this last year. Giving this glimpse into how [employees] are humanly responding to things … has been really supportive of a broader enterprise goal of ‘it’s not an us and them’ piece.’ This is a way we can help them see each other as people.”
The Aware Solution
Your company needs a system in place to understand real-time employee engagement, so you can authentically say, ‘We hear you’. Innovative companies who do this well are adopting platforms such as Aware, which offers best-in-class technology to understand and make sense of employee signals:
- Derives continuous, authentic insights from conversations, without relying on surveys
- Understands and treats sentiment and toxic behavior independently
- Offers automated reporting and alerts that fit within your existing business review framework
- Provides controls to align with existing data privacy and compliance frameworks
- Does not require IT resources for implementation and can integrate within minutes
What’s in the Box?
Aware offers a robust platform that solves additional challenges you may face across your business, including eDiscovery, retention, legal holds and compliance monitoring. Aware is committed to providing leading security, compliance, and analytics for collaboration, no matter which tool you use to get work done, now or in the future.
Intelligent Data Fabric
Aware’s data fabric is built to capture unique collaboration characteristics. Securely “listening” to all posts, messages, and shared files, and preserve revision and deletion histories.
Data Retention and Destruction
Reduce the liability of litigation by systematically purging stored conversation data. Apply records retention policies and automatically purge select content from both the collaboration platform and the data fabric.
Data Holds and Search & Discover
Preserve and protect data from spoliation. Create legal holds, quickly search held data by custodian, date range, and/or keyword.
Privacy and Compliance Monitoring
Confirm that employees remain compliant with industry regulations when communicating on your collaboration platform. Easily fulfill data subject access requests and the right to be forgotten.
To learn more, please visit www.awarehq.com.
Resources:
The website for Greg’s company, Aware, is: http://www.awarehq.com.
Greg’s blog is at https://www.awarehq.com/blog/author/greg-moran.
Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can follow her there at https://www.linkedin.com/in/maureenmetcalf.
She’s also written several award-winning books on leadership development. You can peruse and purchase them here: https://amzn.to/3C4eSX0.
Other episodes you’ll enjoy
- Getting Positive Results from Hard Conversations with Dr. Marcia Reynolds
- Turning Conflict from Avoidance to Advantage with Mike Morrow-Fox
- Leading with Care in a Tough World with Bob DeKoch and Phillip Clampitt
Guest(s):
Guest(s) Bio:
Greg Moran is a C-level digital, strategy and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience. He led corporate strategy for Ford and designed the plan that Alan Mullaly used to turn around the company. Greg held C-level IT positions in app dev, infrastructure, and core banking applications at Ford, Nationwide Insurance, and Bank One/JPMC, respectively. He began his career in consulting with Arthur Andersen Accenture, working across industries with 100 companies over the course of a decade. He is passionate about leadership and culture, and displays that passion as COO at software company Aware – and shares it by teaching part time at Ohio University.
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Our Podcast Team:

Maureen Metcalf
Podcast Host

Dan Mushalko
Editor & Producer

Jenna Reik
Podcast Manager
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