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Jan 14, 2024

Listening to your employee voice improves engagement and retention

Employee voice is a key enabler of effective staff engagement. Employees who feel respected, engaged with, listened to, and invited to contribute their ideas and experience are more likely to stay motivated and stay with you.

In the current context where labour shortages are inhibiting some businesses from growing and reaching their full productivity potential, it is especially important to engage with your employees to create a common purpose. This will help you to retain your employees and get the best from them.

If employees’ voices are heard and responded to, they are more likely to understand the changes you might propose and have ideas about how to improve the current processes. As a result, employees will feel valued, leading to greater job satisfaction.

This blog, initially published by the REC, looks at the employee voice and how you can make sure you benefit from the input your employees can give you and make sure they feel heard.

What is employee voice?

Employee voice is how people communicate their views to their employer and influence matters that affect them at work. It can include everything about the business, from organisational strategy, terms and conditions, to the working environment. It can also include telling you when something’s wrong.

It helps to build open and trusting relationships between leaders and employees and managers and their teams.

Evidence also shows that employee engagement can lead to workplace innovation and improved productivity. It is also vital to securing a safe working environment. If employees feel confident about alerting you when things go wrong – or are about to go wrong – they will help keep your organisation on the right path.

In a diverse workforce, it is essential that all staff feel valued

Research shows a strong link between how well organisations listen to their employees and how well they manage innovation in working, change, and creating a sense of fairness. For example, 57% of organisations say they use the information they get from listening to their employees to improve their performance. But this means that one in four businesses say they don’t make use of this valuable resource.

Critically, those who improve performance by listening show significant differences in their ability to generate good ideas to work effectively (38% more positive), manage change successfully (36% more positive) and treat everyone fairly (35% more positive).-

– Who’s Listening? From Measurement to Meaning, Krais, H., Pounsford, M., Ruck, K. Couravel, Spring 2021

How employee voice can be effective

To be effective, employers must listen, acknowledge, and respond. This requires recognition and respect to enable ongoing dialogues with staff to ensure every voice is heard.

A positive workplace culture allows employees to speak openly and honestly without fear of reprisal or victimising. It also requires effective internal communications. For example, employees can contribute to discussions when they are informed about the organisation’s plans, projections, and challenges.

It’s important to seek your Employees’ views early,make sure they are followed up and give explanations if ideas don’t move forward.

Mechanisms to listen well

Employee voice can be sought through collective mechanisms, where we hear it through representatives:

Trade unions – according to the 2020 Labour Force Survey, 23.7% of UK employees are members of a trade union. This model is most prevalent in the public sector. Working with trade unions can be highly effective, mainly where organisations develop a positive model of partnership working and mutual trust and respect. Some organisations work with both a trade union and an employee forum.
Employee forums or works councils – they offer representation for all employees.
Information and consultation bodies of elected employee representatives – they consult over changes such as redundancies or TUPE.
Self-organised employee networks – they can include groups for employees who are parents or carers, have a disability, are women, are from a minority ethnic background, or are LGBTQ+ to give a voice to minority groups and those with protected characteristics.

Case study: Employee voice in B&Q – the People’s Forum

The People’s Forum is a fully elected body that covers all B&Q colleagues. Each store elects a retail team representative, and there is a further election process for a regional representative for store colleagues to go forward to the National People’s Forum (NPF). Retail management colleagues also elect representatives for each region, and head office staff elect representatives from each business function.

Once elected, the National People’s Forum representatives receive independent training as part of a two-day induction meeting. In addition, the organisation provides equipment – an iPad – to help them perform their role and ongoing support from the HR Team.

The National People’s Forum meets regularly with the B&Q Board. The B&Q CEO says: “Through the support of the leadership team and sponsorship from the Main Board, representatives will be in a position to not just contribute to but also influence decisions that are being made.”

Set up mechanisms to hear from employees directly

You can also use mechanisms to hear from your employees directly. Here are some examples you could adopt in your workplace:

Employee surveys – management should take employee surveys seriously, share results with employees (including disappointing ones), and take action.
Focus groups or listening groups – employees can define issues, such as exploring the reasons behind employee survey results or examining organisational failures or challenges.
Skip-level meetings – they enable senior managers to hear the views of teams directly.
All-colleague briefings and leader-led town hall meetings – they should open to questions from the floor.
Open or guided access to internal communications channels – for example, an in-house intranet, eNewsletter or social media tool.
Line management meetings – managers can cascade information from leaders down and employee views and feelings upwards.

Confidential hotlines and whistleblowing policies

Research has found that surveys are the most dominant tool for listening, while people use numerous other valuable approaches much more sporadically. 59% of organisations still use a large-scale employee survey annually and consider surveys the most insightful listening tools. Organisations rarely use qualitative methods like interviews and focus groups (face-to-face or online), even though they could be helpful to get to know issues beneath the surface.

The same research found that digital listening appears to be overlooked and needs to be used more. For example, although 53% of respondents thought employees were more comfortable sharing ideas on digital platforms, only 26% thought managers were comfortable listening via digital platforms. In addition, 58% of organisations using listening methods never or rarely monitor discussions on digital platforms.

Other examples of direct employee voice mechanisms

Examples of direct employee voice mechanisms organisations are using:

Online employee engagement surveys ask employees what they think about the organisation and aspects of working life, often with an option to include text comments.
Regular face-to-face meetings, where senior leaders tell groups of staff about changes and developments in the organisation and invite them to ask questions, express concerns, share their ideas and ask for volunteers to be involved in further thinking and discussions.
“Ideas Street” is a more modern version of the suggestion box. Employees can post their ideas online so all colleagues can see, comment and vote on them, which progress to further consideration if they attract enough support.
“Big conversations” invite the whole organisation to discuss a topic in small groups through an organised series of conversations based on questions that all staff discuss. Comments and ideas are collected, and the conversation develops in response to the feedback received.
“Graffiti walls” – official ones, opened for a period which invite views and comments on a particular theme. Staff can write what they think, and colleagues can see what everyone has written and add their comments.
“World Café” events invite attendees to hold a conversation over a series of tables. First, attendees discuss one topic, where one or two facilitators help keep the conversation flowing and take notes, often on paper covering the whole table so that everyone can visualise their contribution. Then, at regular intervals, attendees move round the room to another table and another part of the conversation.
“Frontline Forum”, where a senior leader gathers a representative group of frontline staff to listen to issues that concern them and discuss and work through possible solutions.
“Solutions Groups” draw on employees’ experience to empower them to develop solutions to a problem or challenge.
“Employee Engagement Supporters’ Networks”, where interested employees play a significant role in supporting their managers and colleagues in engaging activities to improve collaboration.

Employee voice represented at board level

There are mechanisms specifically designed for employee voice to be heard at the Board level, as required by the Financial Reporting Councils UK Corporate Governance Code for FTSE350 companies:

Employees appointed to the Board of Directors (also sometimes called Worker Directors).
Non-Executive Directors (NED) tasked to understand and report to the Board on employee views.
An Advisory Panel drawn from employees across the organisation and often reporting to the Board through the designated NED.

The role of leaders

Successful leaders demand to know as much about how their employees feel as they do about investors.

Leaders need to know the temperature of the organisation and the hot topics. Therefore, it’s a key responsibility for line managers to cascade views up and information down. Make sure you have mechanisms in place to make sure the communication is a two way process. Leaders need to know what’s happening in the organisation before anything goes wrong. It is good to know the reality within the organisation before it appears on Glassdoor.

Leaders are significantly more important than line managers when delivering outcomes from listening. Line managers may not have it within their remit to resolve an issue, whereas leaders are able to make sure feedback is followed up by the right department. Research that asked employees to evaluate how responsive their managers were, and how responsive leaders were, found a much stronger association between leaders’ (vs line managers) responsiveness and key outcomes.

Why is trust important?

Remember, employees will not give their views honestly and openly if they don’t trust the recipient, whether it’s their line manager or a senior leader. Encouraging employees to speak up should be seen as part of the day job for managers and leaders to keep the organisation honest and authentic.

Organisations need to create a culture where speaking out is the right and safe thing to do for the good of the organisation and all its employees.

Your employee voice is the cheapest smoke alarm you can have in your organisation. But unfortunately, things often go wrong in organisations; the issue is whether you catch them before they build up to a major crisis and do significant or lasting damage. Recently, we’ve all witnessed important private and public sector organisations rocked very badly by disclosing issues which could have been dealt with if caught earlier.

Are you listening to your employee voice?

Unfortunately many organisations think they listen better than they do.

For example, more than 70% of respondents to a recent research study agreed that their organisations take employee views seriously, have open mindsets when listening and are willing to listen.

And yet, when responding to practical questions like planning to listen, ensuring leaders listen, and responding to feedback, the responses fall well below 50%.

Conclusion

Listening to employee voices is crucial to the success of any type of business, large or small and in any sector. In the current labour market with businesses struggling to recruit to key roles resulting in stalled growth plans, it is especially important to engage with the employees you have to create a common purpose. Not only does it help retain people and but you’ll get the best from them too. Many employers say that their employees are their greatest asset, but they don’t always listen to what their people have to say. So this blog is a good reminder of why it is ‘important to put the people stuff first’.

A continuous dialogue and feedback loop between employers and staff should help stem disputes and create a sense of empowerment and ownership around driving success and overcoming challenges. Keeping staff by listening to their needs and attracting sought-after talent to your organisation by being an employer that listens to its people is an easily attainable win.

Source: Data taken from REC

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Spring is that time of year when managers will be preparing to conduct their annual performance reviews for their teams. We share some useful tips to help your employee evaluations go more smoothly and run more effectively. While performance reviews take some time, regularly reviewing the work your team members are doing can have a big impact on their performance as well as the overall goals of your business. A typical employee evaluation will cover the following: performance; whether goals have been met, not met, or exceeded; and feedback on how your employee works with others. Employee evaluations are the ideal time to offer positive and constructive feedback on an employee’s work and how they interact with others day-to-day. Here we take a look at why annual performance reviews are so important and what steps you can take to make them as successful as possible. Why are annual performance reviews important? There are lots of reasons why annual performance reviews are important. Regular performance reviews: Improve the overall performance of your team members Help you to identify the areas you need to improve. By looking at the work of your team over an extended period of time you will find solutions to help them improve in those areas Increase engagement of employees, which will lead to happier employees and better employee retention Regular performance reviews help employees to get a better understanding of how their position contributes to company goals and helps them feel more invested in the success of the organisation. Help you identify training needs and plan further professional development Identify employees who may be ready to take on additional responsibilities and opportunities for promotion Plan your professional development for the coming year Regular performance evaluations help you identify areas where team members need additional training. It also gives you the opportunity to identify whether team members are interested in specific types of professional development opportunities that could improve their performance. By investing in training to improve your team’s performance, you increase their engagement and loyalty to the company. Improve engagement loyalty By setting aside time annually for a one-on-one conversation with each person you manage, you can strengthen your relationship with them. It gives you the opportunity to praise their efforts, reward them for their hard work and dedication and listen to any concerns or complaints they may have. This regular communication helps your team members feel their opinion matters and that their company is invested in their growth. Increasing engagement can have a positive impact on retention and performance. Identify opportunities for promotion Meeting with employees regularly helps you better understand their strengths and weaknesses as well as their specific interests, which can help you identify promotional opportunities they may be suited for. How to conduct an annual performance review Research shows they have lots of benefits for you and your employees, so here we share the basic steps to take to carry out your reviews: – Start to prepare for the review Start by reviewing the employee’s performance review from the previous year and any mid-year check-ins that you may have conducted. Review the employee’s self-assessment as well as any notes you made throughout the year about their performance. Make note of specific progress they made towards goals, accomplishments, areas where they exceeded your expectations, additional responsibilities they took on, challenges they encountered and any areas where they need to further develop and improve their performance. Also, make a note of any specific information you want to share during the performance review, perhaps giving an update on how the company’s doing, plans for the future and feedback on how the team is helping to deliver the company’s plans. – Discuss the evaluation with the employee in advance Before beginning the review process, let the employee know about the review, tell them how you will be assessing their performance and what their role will be in the process. Ask them to complete their self-evaluation. Speak to your HR team about any paperwork you should be using to evaluate performance and record future training needs. A good approach is to get employees to give written feedback in their own words to assess how well they think they are doing. This can be done through a questionnaire on aspects such as an employee’s contribution to the team, role development and effectiveness. Your team members will approach this in different ways. Some employees will be very positive and may tend to enhance their ratings through self-promotion or ingratiation, others may underplay their achievements. – Write the review Next, write the employee’s review. You can use bullet points if you prefer. However, it’s important to use clear and concise language and provide examples of their strengths and opportunities for improvement. Include specific examples of successes to praise their hard work and position any challenges or shortfalls as opportunities for growth. Make sure the feedback you give is positive, constructive and actionable, where ever possible, so they can start working on making improvements right away. – Always prepare conversations in advance Always take time to prepare for the one-on-one conversation with the employee. By preparing in advance and making note of key messages you want to talk about, you can feel confident that you won’t miss any opportunities for feedback and improvement. The most important step in the annual performance review process is the one-on-one conversation you have after preparing the review. Taking the time to prepare for this conversation will help you make sure it’s productive and runs smoothly. Take some time to consider what you want to communicate and what feedback you would like from the employee. Plan to review the employee’s accomplishments, strengths and areas they can improve. Plan to discuss their interests, goals and what training they may need to reach those goals. Plan how much time you will need to have the conversation and where is a good place to do the review. – Review the performance evaluation with the employee Meet one-on-one with the employee, reviewing successes since you last spoke and identifying specific results they achieved for the organisation. Discuss any obstacles they may have encountered and what they can do to overcome them to improve their performance in the future. What goals can they work on over the next year? Goals should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. It’s a good idea to set some short term and well as longer term goals. To set objectives: Identify key areas of responsibility – think about particular priorities for the coming period. Consider what result is realistic to achieve for each area of responsibility during the review period. Think about how to measure achievement of an objective and then set standards based on quality, cost and deadlines. – Document throughout the year To make a performance most effective, it’s best to document positive and negative events throughout the year. This makes it easier for you to give a thorough evaluation that examines your employee’s performance throughout the entire review period, with specific examples. It also makes it easier for you to make notes of accomplishments and obstacles when you’re preparing the review. – Get feedback from colleagues Request feedback from other managers and co-workers who worked closely with the employee during the review period. The review needs to be balanced, and you should avoid bias with employees that you naturally get on with more than others. Getting feedback from others will help you get a balanced view of how well the employee works with all team members with examples. – Consider giving the employee their review in advance If there is a form you fill out as part of the evaluation or if you have a written document detailing their performance, consider giving it to the employee before meeting them in person. This will give them the opportunity to review and process the evaluation in advance before having a conversation with you. This will help make the conversation go more smoothly and be more productive. We provide examples of forms you can use in our Performance Review Toolkit. – Focus on accomplishments and growth The majority of the conversation should focus on the positive aspects of the employee’s performance and their accomplishments, as this will motivate the employee and make them feel rewarded for their efforts. If you’re meeting with an employee who consistently performs above-average, the discussion should centre on steps they can take to grow professionally and further improve their performance. – Encourage the employee to talk The best reviews are those in which the employee spends a large portion of the conversation talking. Encourage them to talk by asking lots of questions. Question about what they expect to be most challenging, what they hope to accomplish in the coming year and what you could do to be a better manager will encourage them to talk about their aspiration and how you can work better together. – Reward and recognition Discussing pay and performance in the same conversation as your performance review can compromise honesty, company culture, and the ability to grow. That’s why it’s becoming more popular to separate performance reviews from conversations that lead to pay or promotion decisions. By separating the two and having an alternative framework for determining pay, companies can maintain a pay-for-performance culture without sacrificing opportunities for employee development. However, if you do discuss pay as part of your review, remember there are other rewards that you can offer employees, particularly in an environment where companies are struggling to manage spiralling costs. You may want to think about giving a low cost reward. Remember to consider the tastes, and values of the person you’re recognising when deciding which low cost reward will deliver the highest impact. Here are some examples used by other companies: Buy them breakfast, surprise employees with pastries, or a breakfast bap in the morning as a gesture of appreciation. Give away company merchandise such as water bottles. Provide educational rewards, for example sending them on a course lets employees know you’re invested in their long-term success and continual development. Boost mood with plants – plants in a office also help increase productivity and happiness. Buy new office equipment, upgrading their lap top or providing an ergonomic keyboard and mousepad are easy and low cost. Recent surveys have indicated that people are seeking other work-life balance benefits from their employees too and these can help offset restrictions on pay increases. Download our salary guide from the toolkit for some alternative options to pay reward such as hybrid working. Use the guide to compare how competitive your salaries are in the local areas of Staffordshire and Cheshire. – Follow up Plan to check in with the employee at a later time to see if they have questions or want to discuss further. Follow-up conversations also give you the opportunity to check on the employee’s progress working towards goals. Share notes from the review with your employee after the review, so they have a copy to review before next year’s review too. Although Annual Performance reviews are a really valuable tool for managers, they shouldn’t be used instead of more regular conversations, catch ups and reviews with your employees. There’s good evidence that shows it helps to give frequent and immediate feedback throughout the year to keep your employees engaged and striving to improve their performance. Top Tips Do… Take notes on performance throughout the year – it’ll make it easier Prepare notes for the review and what you’re going to say Focus on being positive Try making negatives into areas to improve Choose a suitable place with no interruptions Get employees to review themselves Listen and show you’re listening to the employee Share the review notes beforehand, so there are no surprises Get feedback from others for a balanced view Ask lots of questions to encourage the employee to talk Be responsive Recognise your own blind spots and prejudices Make new objectives during the review Share notes of the discussion after the review Don’t… Focus entirely on the negative Don’t associate constructive feedback with specific individuals Don’t spring the meeting on your employee Don’t interrupt or show impatience Don’t take over the discussion, it’s a conversation not a dictation Forget to follow up More Support If you’re planning reviews, use our Performance Review Toolkit to help you prepare. Check out our salary guide which will help you assess how competitive your salaries are in Staffordshire and Cheshire. The guide also gives you suggestions of other benefits you can offer employees. Download our It’s not all about the money infographic , which shares what benefits are valued by candidates and how businesses are responding to retain their talent. Give us a call on 01782 338787 for more support or email contact@appointmentspersonnel.co.uk.