Prioritising employee voice? Here’s why you need to make sure you’re listening to your hard-to-reach audiences.

It’s not a radical statement to suggest that most organisations look to promote employee voice opportunities. Employee voice, it is suggested, means engagement – whether that’s in the form of participation in feedback sessions, completion of pulse surveys, annual reporting or even comments on intranet and internal social media posts. While others have linked it to increased organisational effectiveness.

Let’s start with a simple definition of employee voice: the expression of opinions or concerns that reveal content or discontent (Miles and Muuka, 2011). This can occur through formal and informal channels – some of which we’ve listed above, but which also includes instances ranging from the formal performance review process to spontaneous meetings or conversations with colleagues and line managers.

Employee voice and engagement

It stands to reason that employee voice is only a positive force for engagement if employees feel listened to and see value from their act of voicing content or discontent. That explains the shift from talking exclusively about employee voice to employee listening – an always-on process which captures and responds to feedback.

This is an additional nuance to the subject. What appears little more than a semantic shift will resonate for many IC professionals who have carried out time- and effort-intensive audits only to see recommendations for changes get stuck in decision-making purgatory. Employee voice alone can’t lead to the purported organisational benefits – it is a means to an outcome, action and ultimately change – not an outcome in and of itself.

Hearing all the employee voices

However, there is a challenge in listening to the employee voice of frontline or disconnected audiences, often bunched together as the ‘hard to reach’. There are two antecedents to employee voice, which I believe are heightened for frontline or disconnected workers: access to voice opportunities and psychological safety (I’ll cover the former here and return to the latter in future articles – though you can read 44 Engage’s Tom Abbott’s thoughts on it in the meantime).

Put simply, it’s harder to capture feedback from this audience for a range of reasons, including but not limited to:

  • Restrictions on their time
  • Lack of access to company email or intranets
  • Shift-working.

In one taxonomy of employee voice, the contribution to management decision-making exists as one of voice’s four core functions. This contribution often comes in the sharing of ideas or process improvements.

It’s here where employee listening can be enhanced by ensuring that frontline and disconnected audiences are in fact listened to. That’s because they can fulfil a dual role, bringing in their own experience, but, for those in customer-facing roles, also representing the voice of the customer, which allows them to bring insights and observations from these interactions into the organisation.

Going fishing for employee voice

The latter part of this employee voice equation is what researchers call ‘idea fishing’, where frontline employees ‘catch’ ideas in their interactions with customers and “reel the ideas in for their company”.

This is the development of work (particularly that of Amy Edmondson) which found that workers, such as nurses, were able to identify issues with processes, arrest errors and suggest improvements precisely because they were on the frontline.

The aim is to create opportunities where frontline employees are encouraged to bring business insight and improvements directly from customers, perhaps applying their own knowledge to the data received.

It’s about democratising the feedback process and ensuring that all employees have the same access to the suggestion box, whether that’s physical or virtual.

So that’s an example of the why… I’ll share some of the how next time. Of course, if employee voice is a live issue for you currently, drop me a line and we can schedule a chat.

If you’d like to learn more about the role that internal communications can have during a crisis or would like advice on how to prepare for the future, why not get in touch?