Our Services
Anthropology at Work specialises in qualitative research to give you a holistic understanding of how everything fits together and unearth the real reasons ‘why’ in your employees’ worlds.
From an anthropological perspective, we know that nothing exists in a vacuum and as we say, “Numbers have faces, statistics have stories.”
We’re all about real, meaningful interactions to understand your people, their worlds and the challenges they face.
Employee Listening
Businesses often think of leadership visibility through the lens of leaders being seen by their employees. But we think there’s another side to this: when leaders look at their employees and their companies, what do they see?
Issues that affect the frontline and what’s important to them are often unseen by leaders and managers. And while there’s certainly an industry around employee engagement, surveys are limited by design. They’re meant to capture a 30,000-foot view and map trends, but as research tools, they’re not meant to get into the details and the deeper ‘why.’ We also hear more and more that people don’t really feel listened to or heard by surveys or AI-powered tools, but appreciate taking part in a conversation with real people.
That’s where employee listening and insights come into play, and we think this is an essential step for every business. Whether it’s regular avenues for listening to pulse check the organisation and identify issues within your workforce, or if it’s to inform larger projects and campaigns, we think it’s an absolute must.
Whether it’s informing an EVP (Employee value proposition), developing and testing your values, exploring and articulating your culture, or checking the performance of your employee communications, we’ve used employee listening with a range of premier organisations, from MBB and Big Four consultancies to FTSE100 leaders as well as smaller, regional businesses.
From design to delivery, analysis and playback, we do end-to-end employee listening to get the pulse and their perspective on what matters to them.
Team ETHNOGRAPHY
Ethnography is a unique skillset anthropologists use to get into the world of your people as they experience it in order to see their goals, challenges, relationships and team dynamics from their point of view.
For example, what gets in the way of great collaboration or people getting the job done? What does great look like when it comes to communication within that team?
It’s best used in smaller-scale settings to understand team dynamics, especially when you want to optimise or re-organise your team to remove their challenges and obstacles that prevent them from doing their best work.
We know that sometimes people can get a bit funny about a trained researcher shadowing the team around for a few days, but we’ll never forget the team member at a leading bank who exclaimed to her team after meeting Dr Alex: “Guys! He’s not here to spy on us! He’s here to be our therapist!”
Survey Review
Employee engagement surveys are a staple for many organisations. But the unfortunate reality about most large-scale survey tools is that they give you a lot of data without offering a lot of meaning, much less practical guidance on what you can meaningfully do off the back of the data.
We go through thousands of free-text comments in employee surveys to explore more of the ‘why’ between wide-scale trends to help clients make sense of what people are saying, provide some evidence to validate and demonstrate attitudes, and give guidance on next steps of what you can explore and do differently.
It makes a real difference to have an expert go through the data with a fine-toothed comb, and we’ve done it for the annual engagement and pulse well-being surveys for some of the UK’s leading brands.
Leadership and Team Workshops
We understand the pressure that leaders and managers often find themselves under. But we also understand that the quantitative, financial metrics they often use can lead to a detached mode of decision-making we call ‘management by spreadsheet.’
The thing is, if you’re going to lead and inspire your people to get engaged and get behind what you’re doing, you can’t make acontextual and detached decisions that have seemingly small effects on a spreadsheet that cause total upheaval and disruption in people’s established ways of working.
We partner with leadership coaches to train your leaders and managers to make decisions with ‘numbers have faces, statistics have stories’ in mind. Only then will your leaders and managers have a truly people-centric perspective that inspires employee engagement and produces a world-class employee experience.