Giving Your Employees A Voice

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Giving Your Employees A Voice

‘If you want to know what is going on in a business, ask the people on the front line’. I don’t know where I read that, but I believe it to be true. As I have written elsewhere, I believe the responsibility of a manager is to provide the practical and emotional resources for the people in their team to give of their best. The only way I know to find out if this is happening is to ask the people who are being managed how they are feeling 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 organisations, they leave managers’!

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

At a company that I once worked for, the Chief Executive and Directors held regular dinners for people from the front line and support functions to have the opportunity to speak frankly about what was going on in the organisation and how this was affecting morale, motivation and customer service. This company (I have written about them before, it was the train company GNER in the late 1990’s) had made the link between employee engagement and customer service, and really understood how to get the best out of their people.

It is comparatively easy to carry out an employee survey or a 360 degree feedback exercise. What isn’t 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 behaviours if the company is going to be more successful. So, it is great to give employees a voice, but totally counter productive if the results of the survey are not acted upon.

Another company that I once worked for carried out an employee survey three years after I had joined. They had a new Chief Executive and he was determined to change things. As far as I am aware, some of the results of that survey, which was carried out three years ago, have still not been acted upon. Consequently, employee turnover remains high, and few if any of the employees in that company are achieving their full potential. Therefore, the business is not as successful as it could be. People are coming to work and doing just enough not to get fired.



Source by Graham Frost

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