The Power of Employee Voice
Given the benefits, why wouldn’t you engage with employees?
In today’s workplace, employee voice – the way individuals express their views, raise concerns, and contribute to decision making – is increasingly recognised as essential for creating an engaged and high-performing workplace.
But its potential extends beyond wellbeing or welfare – when embedded effectively, employee voice becomes a potent resource that can enhance innovation, boost resilience, and usefully inform strategic thinking.
A critical aspect is the flow of information between employees and leadership. In well-functioning organisations, this flow is a regular, dynamic exchange, not one-way, and where word from the bottom, where employees interact with customers, suppliers or processes, is actively sought and brought into strategic thinking – leading to agility and better informed decisions.
This approach can be transformative, as it shifts a traditional top-down structure into a more participatory and collaborative environment where employees and leaders become co-creators of the company’s future. In an employee-owned business, there is the added incentive of sharing directly in the company’s prosperity.
Communication
For employee voice to be truly effective, it requires more than just people speaking up or being left to generate ideas. Leaders must ensure communication from the top is meaningful and the pretext for it is clear – there could be many different reasons why people need to know something: is it to solicit feedback, to broaden awareness, to reassure, or to galvanise effort? There should always be a conscious purpose or desired effect as a result.
The conversation up and down the organisation needs to be in ways that are timely, accessible, understandable and useful so that people are inspired to think and engage. Excessive, irrelevant or ill-thought communication can be as harmful as too little, and it is only by leaders routinely opening up to share what is on their minds that employees can calibrate where they may have insight or ideas that might be relevant, information that might be important, or areas where they can help.
Leaders are sometimes reluctant to share difficult information, fearing it will create panic or disengagement. This presents a further problem if only good news is ever communicated, and then communications dry up. Withholding information can often lead to worse outcomes such as speculation, mistrust and anxiety – reinforcing a them and us scenario.
Concerns about leakage of bad news are also real, but again need to be rationalised. Difficult news, when shared openly can actually trigger resilience, creativity and problem solving among employees who all have the same vested interests in the company’s survival. It genuinely treats employees as partners and shows them to be valued, trusted and respected, and a supportive response can help lift some weight off leadership shoulders.
If sharing company specific news is difficult, share concerns as sector or market challenges. Seek employee insights, suggestions and ideas on how to withstand external pressure, or move out of downturns quicker than competitors. Take it away from being company specific and draw on employee expertise in a more generalised approach, preferably when the need for these insights isn't critical.
Harnessing Employee Voice
A common question when considering employee voice is whether a permanent employee council is necessary. Whilst they can be a consistent platform, an employee council may not be the best fit or agile enough for every organisation if only meeting quarterly or semi-annually. Equally, if they lack purpose, or their output isn't welcomed, they can become a dry talking shop with no purpose or business benefit.
In some cases, smaller, bespoke committees or working groups set up temporarily to focus on specific issues may be more effective, operating in parallel with an everyday rhythm of communications up and down the functional chain and allowing a broader range of individuals to engage with different aspects of the business as and when appropriate.
Regardless of the structure chosen, skilled chairing and facilitation are crucial for these forums to be productive. They need clear standing agendas and terms of reference, or specific questions to answer, and agreed timelines and deliverables.
In summary, employee voice should be seen an everyday, natural part of the fabric of an organisation, not just as listening to employees for the sake of engagement. Harnessed correctly, it generates a positive impact that becomes real business intelligence, agility and advantage.
When utilised positively, it can help businesses backfill the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit that often drove their founding success. As ownership shifts, it can help to drive continued growth, navigate change, and remain competitive.
In conclusion, employee voice is not an activity, it is a strategic resource.
This article was written by Simon Carter an experienced IDT independent trustee with content crafted from his own experiences and his attendance at sessions on the topic at the EOA Conference in 2024.
