Building culture through the employee voice

In June 2019, Wayfair employees in the United States walked out in protest of their employer selling goods to border detainment camps, while airline food workers walked out calling for higher wages.

Examples like these of employees speaking out against employer actions have seemed never-ending, even prompting the government to step in and ensure they’re able to voice their opinions, when federal regulators in the U.S. ordered Google to assure employees they are allowed to speak out on political and workplace issues.

What’s more, corporate shakeups, layoffs or executive transitions — such as the departure of Google’s head of HR — can cause even more uncertainty among employees and raise questions about their overall job satisfaction.

While these situations can seem damaging, they also offer an opportunity for HR professionals and company leadership to turn the negative into a positive by dedicating time and resources to rebuild their culture through the voice of the employee (VoE).

What is the voice of the employee?
Similar to the voice of the consumer (VoC) — where companies take steps to gather input and understand customer feedback about their technology, solutions and overarching brand — VoE asks employers and leaders to invest time and energy in gathering feedback from employees to understand how workers feel about their workplace and culture.

Companies need to foster a work environment that encourages employees to speak their minds in a constructive way, and to do so, employers need to communicate with employees, not at them. Employees hear from their employer all the time, whether through town halls, company-wide meetings, email updates, internal newsletters or social tools, but these are all one-sided communications. Proactively seeking VoE builds a culture of feedback where employees feel safe and empowered to express their honest opinions, concerns, problems or feedback with managers. Seeking this feedback provides company leaders and HR professionals with insight into the workplace environment, enabling them to take action to improve employee engagement. 

What happens without the VoE?
Employers that don’t seek the VoE could miss out on achieving true employee engagement. Even worse, they could be unaware of larger, systemic workplace problems such as cultural misalignment. For employees to feel engaged and happy at work, they must gain meaning from their work, which is driven by understanding and believing in the employer’s vision and values.

When employee and employer values aren’t aligned, it’s detrimental to employee productivity, engagement and happiness — consider unengaged employees have been shown to have higher absenteeism, lower productivity and lower profitability.

While nice to have at work, posters on values in workplace hallways or biannual culture awards are both one-way activities. Alignment to cultural values is about developing two-way channels. This means holding both employees and the organization accountable for celebrating achievements and actions that live up to corporate values.

That’s why it should be a common practice to actively seek VoE, to determine whether there’s a cultural misalignment and, if so, to take corrective action to proactively build a positive company culture.

How can employers seek the VoE?
To capture the VoE, companies need to formalize their data collection process. Once done through tools such as SurveyMonkey and executed on an ad hoc or annual basis, employee surveys are inconsistent and informal feedback channels. These are ineffective methods of creating a culture of feedback. Annual survey data can easily fall into an administrative black hole where HR professionals develop program recommendations upon which executives may not act.

Instead, companies must formalize feedback methods through a holistic approach.  Employers have many options for capturing employee feedback regularly and enabling managers or leaders to take immediate action. Always-on digital channels can provide real-time feedback directly to managers. In addition, quarterly or annual surveys paired with these channels and one-on-one meetings create additional avenues for employees to provide feedback.

Just as culture-building and retention efforts are continuous, seeking the VoE is an ongoing process. Incorporating technology and setting up multiple feedback channels captures employee feedback any time and anywhere.

Taking action
Beyond simply listening to employees, employers have to take action. Almost all (90 per cent) of workers say they’re more likely to stay at a company that takes and acts on feedback, yet 23 per cent say their employers are “horrible” and 44 per cent say their employer is just “OK” at acting on feedback, according to a 2020 survey by Achievers.

Inaction directly impacts employee retention, as 44 per cent of employees who say their employer is horrible plan to look for a new job. At a time when employees already see themselves as somewhat or even completely disengaged, employers failing to take action on feedback can be detrimental to overall employee disengagement and retention.

Nearly half of the respondents (45 per cent) say leadership is “minimally” or “not at all” committed to improving culture, so this inaction plays into employee perceptions of leaders falling flat on culture. Absent leaders or nonexistent action are huge business threats — the culture and values of an organization and the quality of senior leadership are the top two factors of employee satisfaction, according to Glassdoor Economic Research. Committing to seeking the VoE is one way leaders can put their actions behind their promises to build and improve workplace culture.

The power of recognition
To activate company culture that drives employee performance and engagement, employers need to look at the power of recognition in the workplace. A lack of recognition can be detrimental to overall engagement — it’s the third most important reason employees cited for staying at or leaving a particular company, according to the Achievers survey.

Positive recognition for behaviour and achievements can motivate employees to work hard, which builds strong company culture. Celebrating milestones and publicly acknowledging good work makes employees feel valued, but it also leads to repeated actions. The same report also found that 92 per cent of employees agree that, when they’re recognized for a specific action, they’re more likely to repeat the action. Rewarding behaviour aligned to a company’s values creates a ripple effect that moves across the organization.

With employee activism trending and the workforce showing a strong desire for their opinions to be heard, employers need to step up. Beyond simply setting up channels to actively listen to employee feedback, they must also be prepared to act on the feedback — and technology can help­. Showing a willingness to listen, investing in the right technology solutions and acknowledging feedback can go a long way with employees to improve their workplace experience — but the key to improving employee engagement is acting in the moment.

Employers that do this can succeed in improving company culture and navigating tricky cultural shakeups, ultimately creating a better place for employees to work.

Vanessa Brangwyn is the chief customer officer at Achievers in Toronto. For more information, visit www.achievers.com.

CULTURE COMES FIRST FOR CANADIAN WORKERS

2 in 5
Workers who wouldn’t accept a job that wasn’t a perfect match if the corporate culture clashed.

9 in 10
Workers who said a candidate’s fit with the employer is equal to or more important than their skills and experience.

1 in 5
Workers who would take a 10-per-cent pay cut for an employer that cares more about their health and wellness.

8 in 10
Workers who say that sharing a similar work ethic is something they look for when considering a new job.

Sources: Achievers, Staples