A Software Founder’s Story

You might be wondering (and rightfully so), how does a guy that spent 25 years of his life in Audiology pivot into creating Enterprise Business software?

The answer and parallel between the two careers boils down to one word: Listening. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to help people listen well to the voices around them. Notice the word I used is “listen” and not “hear”. There is a difference, and it is an important one that applies to both audiology and the workplace.

Audiology

When someone has hearing loss and is fit with hearing aids they can always hear the sounds around them louder. But hearing and listening are two very different things. Hearing means you can perceive that a sound exists, but it does not mean you understand the meaning behind that signal. Listening is converting what you hear into meaningful information. Information that your brain can interpret and do something constructive with. This is a much more difficult task than just hearing sound because the way people listen is different from one person to another. We must pay careful attention to how the acoustical signal is collected and processed by the brain in order for that sound to be transformed into something meaningful.

The Workplace

I also learned the hard way how corporate America “listens”, or rather does not. Most organizations attempt to listen to their workforce by employing the “Annual Employee Survey”. This survey asks a few questions about how the employee feels about their work experience. The employee is asked to answer standardized questions by scoring it with some numerical value in a range, such as 1 to 5. But they are never asked, “Why do you feel that way?”. I understand why organizations don’t ask that: it's very hard to process a load of open-ended input from the workforce. It opens up all kinds of pandora’s box of ideas, observations and concerns that HR has little time or context to deal with. Therein lies the problem. These employee surveys only gather the noise. There is no deep understanding of the perspective of the employees. In the end they just provide a number, a benchmark against last year’s number. But no one is truly listening.

Lyssin

That experience with employee surveys is the inspiration for Lyssin. Just as those with hearing difficulties must truly listen to grasp the full meaning of conversation, businesses must also truly listen to understand the depth of their employees' insights.

Instead, the annual survey is just noise. And not even noise that can be measured over time, but just a snapshot in time. Yes, there is some value to this score, as the satisfaction of the workforce is an important metric about the employees. But why are we not truly listening to what the employees have to say about the business? No one knows the business better than the workforce that lives and breathes it every day, day in and day out. Let’s give the employees - our most valuable intelligence resource - an open conduit to share the valuable intelligence they have about the business whenever they have insights to share.

Let’s gather and process all that open feedback the workforce has to offer, using AI technology to not just hear the noise but to truly understand the meaning behind the sound. Let’s listen to the workforce in an intentional way. Let’s give the team the opportunity to freely and safely share the ideas, observations and concerns they have about the business to the ultimate benefit of the organization.

The Power of Listening

Just like with hard of hearing people, we need to be sure that there is a concerted effort to “listen” and not just “hear” the sounds coming from those around us. The resources companies use today only hear the incoming signals from employees, and only rarely at that. We need to leverage technology to truly listen and understand the conversation, to extract the rich, meaningful insights that come from truly listening well to those around us.

If you are interested in learning more about how to truly listen, and learn from, your organization, contact Lyssin at: lyssin.com or email Josh at josh.frantz@lyssin.com