There’s a big difference between satisfied, engaged, and inspired.

To manage the employee experience, leaders must deeply understand employees’ perceptions, feelings, and desires and respond thoughtfully. This is particularly crucial when immense resources are invested in gathering employee feedback through pulse surveys, town halls, and data scraping from internal communications. But leaders are often overwhelmed by the data and struggle to translate it into actionable insights. The authors conducted detailed interviews with executives and HR leaders from more than 20 multinational companies in sectors such as technology, financial services, and consumer goods. Their work reveals that although technology has simplified the collection of data, the real challenge lies in making sense of it and integrating it into a coherent strategy.

Learning to navigate conflicts is not really a choice in today’s organizations. It’s an imperative. In this article, the author explains what conflict resolution is, why it’s an essential skill, and how to approach the conflict-resolution process. She offers four steps: 1) Try to see the situation from the other person’s point of view; 2) Pinpoint what the conflict is really about; 3) Think about your primary goal; and 4) Decide how to proceed. Mastering all of this will not absolve you from having conflicts at work. But that isn’t the goal. You may on occasion still react in a way that you regret. But by following the advice above, those occasions will be fewer and less painful — for you and your colleagues.