A CIPD report released earlier this year touched upon the growing emphasis on the concept of employee voice. The idea is rooted in the early beginnings of staff engagement strategies and centres on the belief that colleagues at every level should have some say in how the organisation is run. Companies quickly realised that giving staff a degree of autonomy, and a voice in how changes are rolled out encouraged loyalty and enhanced service and nowadays most organisations seek to implement some system of internally influenced policies wherever possible. Despite this, there remains some scepticism towards the efficacy of this tactic; isn’t it time we shredded the survey forms and replaced them with something more tangible?
The dreaded feedback form; it may have its uses when tasting the latest cheeses at your local farmer’s market but it serves little useful purpose in the workplace. The practice has become widespread because it is cost and time effective; however, I’m dubious about its ability to extract any pertinent insight from employees by ticking a box marked one to ten, or really feel that their voice is valued.
Our recent research into employee engagement levels in the UK found that nearly over two thirds of workers were never educated about their company values nor were they aware of them being part of their performance strategies. How can employees expect to properly grow and represent an organisation when they don’t know enough about their place of work and its messaging to begin with?
To ensure real organisational improvement businesses need to take a continual and symbiotic approach to the appraisal process. Feedback shouldn’t be something that’s elicited once a year, or even once a quarter, it should be a continual dialogue between colleagues to allow problems to be identified, challenged and improved.
The rise of social media offers internal engagement teams the chance to extract immediate and constructive feedback, given that most workers are already comfortable using the platform to express their opinions using similar forums in their personal lives. However, it is important that employers marry the flexibility of sites like Twitter and Facebook with a degree of regulation. The danger of such open channels of communication is that the lines between personal and professional often become blurred but it would be parochial to think that banning the in-house use of social media prevents workers from talking about their employers. In many cases it can provoke quite the opposite reaction. Taking elements of social media that are best suited to the workplace: its immediacy and the feeling of community that it provides and structuring a system of appraisal around this seems like the most logical step for the future of employee voice and administration-heavy appraisal process.
Offering workers a stake in the business in this way means more than just a check-in at year end; it allows them to offer insight into how the organisation could grow and develop and what is preventing it from doing so. Once people feel listened to they feel a sense of belonging and ownership and therefore drives engagement, gives them a vested interest in sharing their opinions and the business a valuable source of data.
Employee voice is both individual and collective and, if extracted in the right way, it can help drive the growth of your business more effectively than anything else.
