Leadership plays a crucial role in promoting employee voice by creating a supportive and inclusive workplace culture.
Through encouraging open communication, actively seeking and valuing employee feedback, and making relevant changes, leaders can increase employee engagement, retention and performance. There’s not a reason we can think of for not promoting your employee voice. And this needs to start right at the top and feed its way down into teams.
Seeking employee feedback
As a leader, whether you’re part of the senior management, or a line manager, you should be seeking employee feedback on things such as:
- Your performance as a manager
- The overall employee experience
- Their personal development needs
- The culture at your organisation
- Their levels of engagement
- Effectiveness of employee rewards
To show you’re seeking feedback, making sure employees know their thoughts are wanted and valued is a must.
Believe it or not, according to Sidney Yoshida only 4% of problems are known to executives.
Which is why as a leader, allowing your people to feel supported and comfortable to speak their mind is crucial, because it’s not always easy to do so.
And you can do this by promoting that no topic is off-limits and emphasising that their feedback is taken seriously. You’ll find you begin to receive insight that could transform your organisation.
Even just having the right tools in place like an Employee Voice Platform, and driving your employees to use this is the first step to empowering your employees to speak up.
Taking action on feedback
Taking feedback is one thing. But what are you doing with it?
As a leader any feedback you receive should be reviewed and addressed. We’re not saying when someone suggests that everyday should be pizza day in the office that you have to say “YES!”.
But what we are saying is that, if there are suggestions made that just can’t be catered to with logic and reason behind, tell your people. Let them know you’ve considered their suggestions, you’ve thought about ways to make it work, but it’s just not feasible or best fit for the organisation. 9 times out of 10, they’ll understand and feel valued and heard.
Platforms like Hive offer tools such as Hive Surveying, where employees can feedback on your questions, and Hive Open Door, where employees have around the clock access to anonymous feedback that goes straight to HR leaders. So your people have different methods of using their voice, and you can either reply directly to any comments on a confidential 1-2-1 basis or include them in any company wide communications.
Don’t stop making changes
The world as we know it is constantly changing, which has a knock on effect on the working world. And with changes comes concern, uncertainty and lots of questions.
So with that in mind, when you’re promoting employee voice, this needs to be ongoing. Because nobody’s perfect, and you can never stop improving.
Ensuring you’re carrying out regular surveys, and encouraging your people to use their
feedback tools to share their thoughts and suggestions for improvement around the organisation and their environment will ultimately make your organisation a better place to work.
‘Better places’ to work tend to have:
People Science Commentary
Are there really any reasons why you, as a leader, shouldn’t be investing in and promoting employee voice? Our People Scientist, Francesca doesn’t think so. Here’s her insight into why leaders should be promoting their employee voice:
Start promoting your employee voice today by actively seeking and valuing feedback from your employees, and making relevant changes. Encourage open communication, emphasise that no topic is off-limits and that their feedback is taken seriously.
Ready to take the next step? tools like our Employee Voice Platform can help to empower your employees to speak up. Speak with our experts today!
