Give your employees a voice

‘If you want to know what’s going on in a business, ask the people on the front lines.’ I don’t know where I read it, but I think it’s true. As I have written elsewhere, I believe that a manager’s responsibility is to provide the practical and emotional resources for the people on his or her team to do their best. The only way I know of to find out if this is happening is to ask the people being managed how they feel about working for their manager and their employer. Most people will see their manager as their employer; after all, there is another famous saying: “People don’t leave organizations, they leave managers”!

So how can we find out how employees feel about working for us? Well, there are a number of tools available. Many large companies conduct regular employee surveys, and there are outsourcing companies that will conduct this exercise in strict confidence for you. Another great tool is to use 360-degree feedback throughout the organization, so everyone gets feedback on their performance from everyone else who interacts with them.

At a company I once worked for, the CEO and directors would host regular dinners for frontline people and support functions to get a chance to talk candidly about what was going on in the organization and how it was affecting the organization. Morale, Motivation and Customer Service. This company (I’ve written about them before, it was the GNER train company in the late 1990s) had made the link between employee engagement and customer service, and really understood how to get the best out of their people.

It’s comparatively easy to conduct an employee survey or 360-degree feedback exercise. What is not so easy is to act on the results. It takes great humility on the part of business leaders to take feedback from their employees and admit that they have to change their behaviors if the company is going to be more successful. So giving employees a voice is great, but totally counterproductive if you don’t take the survey results into account.

Another company I worked for conducted an employee survey three years after I joined. They had a new CEO and he was determined to turn things around. To my knowledge, some of the results of that survey, which was carried out three years ago, have not yet been applied. Consequently, employee turnover remains high, and few if any of that company’s employees are reaching their full potential. Therefore, the business is not as successful as it could be. People come to work and do enough not to get fired.