The journey of achieving and maintaining a vibrant employee engagement is dominated by a challenge of marrying feedback with action.
Companies invest efforts into periodic employee surveys in attempts to measure the level of psychological investment in the organization - this investment is often referred to as employee engagement. There are varying statistics (for instance
Gallup surveys) on the industry wide results. The status quo is that it is hard to achieve a level of engagement of above 70%. In this article we would like to challenge this status quo and suggest an approach that would allow any firm to achieve engagement levels closer to 100%.
Let's take a critical look at how the voice of employees is heard, interpreted and how it is used. This article proposes an approach to redefining the voice of employees and provides suggestions to recalibrate the approach to engaging the collective intellect of employees.
A straightforward definition of the voice of employees states - “it is a systematic process designed to uncover and assess employee concerns or problems that impact the total employer-employee relationship … so that the company can then act on the (employee) feedback, creating a better workplace for their employees with business goals in mind” - Gem Siocon, AHRI.
There are three key challenges with the voice of employees:
Let’s face it - it is not natural for a significant proportion of people to be transparent. There are three persona groups in each organization:
In addition, some organizations have a fourth minority group - “Influential unicorns”. This group of people can cause the firm to deviate from the right course (in hindsight) by a few degrees, which can lead to the company missing the target by miles (akin to an aviation concept called the
1-in-60 Rule). The value of surveys where these people are in unchecked power is negligible.
Doubling down on management communications, surveys or even Ai tools, will not improve matters in a meaningful way. There are two fundamental reasons for this:
Employee engagement that is over-reliant on annual or quarterly surveys does not make enough of a difference:
This statement may seem paradoxical from the perspective of a survey reliant approach - if you don't have to do many employee surveys, it means employees are likely having better experience. However, “research shows that people who report having a positive employee experience have 16 times the engagement level of employees with a negative experience, and that they are eight times more likely to want to stay at a company” -
McKinsey, 2021.
The world around us is complex because products, services and interactions between partners are increasingly based on continuous and incremental changes. The approach to hearing employees should reflect this evolution. Organizations that choose to stick with legacy feedback systems will fall behind due to the effects of Conway's law.
Does this mean that organizations should move away from surveys? A generalist HR professional would have two core concerns:
Each of HR concerns can be responded as follows:
Traditional HR approach dictates a waterfall set of activities : “gather feedback > process and examine feedback > represent feedback in management meetings > determine actions > planning of action > communication to employees > implementation > measure the impact of action”. In this system, “the why” is determined by a well-intended desire to identify actions that would improve the total employer-employee relationship.
Feedback systems that are over-reliant on traditional surveys have a fundamental data reliability challenge. Answers to questions might uncover perspective A and B, but true reality might be represented by perspective C that is born only through bridging perspectives and a joint brainstorming. Imagine this scenario:
Surveys can relay the heartbeat but not the voice of employees.
We can re-imagine the voice of employees as a continuously maintained backlog of reconciled and ready-to-execute actions that are linked to business goals. It is important to note that managers are an integral part of the brainstorming process - they are employees like everyone else.
By listening to employee feedback via incubated backlog of actions (as opposed to discrete survey answers), organizations can achieve following:
The answer to why organizations need the voice of employees can be answered as follows:
Because the mission is to maximize the “total employer-employee relationship” and “psychological investment”, it is necessary to look at the voice of employees as a total package of communications, action and the response back to action.
Three simple steps are needed to upgrade a survey based approach to a conversation focused feedback-and-action system :
The voice of employees is synonymous with transparency.
Transparency is significantly less about the “availability of information”. It is much more about the ability to have conversations that can challenge the status quo.
A tongue in cheek question - what does the voice of employees sound like in your company? Is it whispers, echoey sighs, church choir, or perhaps some rock band?