We talk about about employee voice in organisations and , specifically this involves how we listen to our people – listening strategies, listening channels, listening tools, listening programmes. And of course, listening to our people matters.
But just maybe the best employee voice strategies aren’t actually built around listening? For me they should be about creating opportunities for people to influence their experience at work, to influence changes, to make a difference otherwise what’s the point?
Many organisations approach employee voice as a series of disconnected activities. The annual engagement survey or quarterly pulse, a suggestion scheme or a town hall with a Q&A at the end. The assumption seems to be that if we create enough channels for people to speak, we’ve somehow solved employee voice.
But have we?
Because having a voice and being heard are absolutely not the same thing. And being heard and influencing decisions are not the same thing either. The reality is that most employees don’t experience voice through a survey. They experience it through their day-to-day interactions.
Through conversations with their manager.
Through team meetings.
Through onboarding.
Through projects they work on.
Through employee networks and communities.
Through opportunities to contribute ideas, challenge decisions and shape how work gets done.
In other words, employee voice is happening all the time, whether organisations are intentionally designing for it or not. That’s why I think we need to stop thinking about employee voice as a channel and start thinking about it as an ecosystem.
An ecosystem made up of formal and informal opportunities for people to contribute, participate and influence. When we take this broader view, some interesting questions start to appear.
- Where do employees currently have opportunities to share their views?
- Which voices are being heard most often?
- Which voices are missing?
- What happens when people raise concerns or ideas?
- How easy is it for someone to influence decisions that affect them?
And perhaps most importantly:
What happens next?
Because one of the biggest risks in employee voice isn’t that people don’t have opportunities to speak. It’s that they stop believing it’s worth speaking. This is something we see so often in organisations, not least in feedback in the regular survey. People complete the survey, do some action planning, and then they report back on the ‘you said we did’ but it often feels so superficial, like a tick box exercise.
Trust isn’t built because an organisation asks for feedback, it’s built when people can see their feedback leading to action, decisions or change. That’s why the organisations that are strongest in employee voice aren’t necessarily the ones asking the most questions. They make it easy for people to contributes and create environments where people feel safe to speak up. And crucially, it’s clear that something changes off the back of this. Not in a once a year response stop the survey kind of a way, but in an ongoing, all year round way.
In my experience, that’s where the real opportunity lies, not in collecting more data or launching another survey. But in stepping back and asking a different question:
How do we create more meaningful opportunities for people to shape their experience at work?
Because the ultimate purpose of employee voice isn’t to gather opinions.
- It’s to improve experiences.
- To make better decisions.
- To identify problems earlier.
- To involve people in shaping the future.
- And ultimately, to build organisations that work better for everyone.
And of course listening has to be a part of that, but it is only the beginning.
The organisations that will get employee voice right over the coming years won’t be the ones with the most sophisticated listening tools. They’ll be the ones that recognise employee voice is an ongoing conversation between people and the organisation they help create every day.
#EmployeeVoice #EmployeeExperience #PeopleFirst #Leadership #OrganisationalCulture #EmployeeEngagement #FutureOfWork
