By: Sentry Marketing Group

June 30, 2015

If you read our earlier post on listening to the voice of your employees, then you know how important developing this aspect of your business can be for your bottom line. But what exactly does it mean to listen to your employees? How do you go about seeking out that voice? And what should you be listening for when you do?  Here we offer some tips on getting down to the doing of valuing the employee voice.

How to Get Your People to Talk

These are just some of the ways we’ve heard of companies providing a space for the Voice of the Employee (VoE).  We suggest you try one or two and see how it goes, then introduce others as it seems useful.

1. Create an open door day

Establish certain days of the month when employees – any employees – are invited to visit with upper management.  This can be an in-store event at each location every couple of months or it can be a social event outside of work.  You can also host meetings in your office if it is nearby most of your locations.  What is important is that you make yourself as accessible as possible so that it is clear to employees that you genuinely hope they share their ideas with you.

2. Conduct internal surveys

You probably already have some sort of system in place collecting customer feedback.  Set up something similar to collect employee feedback.  Perhaps a survey with a few consistent key questions could be sent to all employees on a monthly basis.  It may take a couple of months before responses really start to yield usable data, but as staff get used to completing them, they will likely begin to think more about the areas covered during their daily work and start to keep track of things they want to make sure and mention.

It is essential, however, that such an approach not be an empty gesture.  Have a system in place for ordering and analyzing the data and take action on employee suggestions.  Seeing that their feedback is being heard and taken to heart can go a long way toward building employee engagement, but the opposite will be true if the same issues are raised over and over but no changes are made.

3. Identify key observers

Ask your store managers to look around and identify a few key people who seem to relate to their fellow employees especially well.  These individuals can serve as conduits to help you better understand your frontline employees.  Check in with them regularly, in person, to find out how things are going and to ask specific questions that may be on your mind.  This will become a two-way street – they will let their fellow employees know that there is someone further up the chain of command who cares what they have to say and their colleagues will likely feel somewhat more comfortable being honest and forthright with them, as peers, than they might with people who can promote or fire them.

4. Establish and make easily available clear lines for feedback

As you may have noticed, consistency is the name of the game here.  Make sure that every employee knows who they can go to with concerns or suggestions – whether that be their immediate supervisor or the CEO.

What’s more, make sure that those people are equipped to handle feedback – of any kind – and act on suggestions appropriately.  No employee should ever feel that their words are falling on deaf ears.  If they speak to their supervisor, their supervisor should get back to them in a reasonable amount of time with a fully-formed response.

If management at a certain level is not able to act on the feedback directly, they should know who can and have a clearly established channel for sending suggestions up the line and retrieving the responses that will flow back down.  If the system becomes too cumbersome, with too many cogs and wheels, remove some of the steps.  The goal is to create a free-flowing stream of ideas and information.  If it becomes a series of rocky waterfalls, you need a new system.

5. Recognize helpful ideas

As you start to implement employee feedback systems, you are going to start getting a lot of creative and innovative ideas.  When a suggestion or request leads to change, make sure everyone in the company knows where the idea originated.  This kind of acknowledgment not only reassures staff that their feedback is being considered, but generates even more engagement as they see positive changes being implemented from the ground up.

6. Host focus groups

This can be a great way to gauge and increase employee engagement and to identify experiences that are common across employees and even across locations.  These discussion forums may focus on a particular role, such as hosting or serving, or it may focus on a particular goal, such as increasing beverage sales or reaching a younger customer base.  Remember – your frontline staff know your customers best.  Draw on their expertise whenever possible.

7. Be creative

Every business is different and every set of employees is best reached in a different way.  A small business with just a few locations will collect and respond to employee feedback much differently than a corporate chain with hundreds of locations.  Do some research, check out what is working for other businesses like yours.  Try different things and – you got it – ask your employees to pitch in.  What better way to get everyone on board?

What to Get Them Talking About

Obviously you don’t want a Voice of the Employee program to become a complaint box or a channel for employees to gossip about one another.  Whatever methods you choose to employ, you want feedback to be guided so that you don’t encourage a culture of complaint and so that you don’t get bogged down in a flood of information that is not really helpful to you (or them).  Here are some areas where your frontline employees are going to be able to offer the most invaluable insight:

Customer experience insight

No one has more direct access to customer experience than the employees who interact with them, even the customers themselves. While a customer may be able to tell you what happened on a particular visit, an employee can often tell you why it happened and whether it happens often or has happened to other customers.  Setting up a system by which employees can report and elaborate on complaints or requests they hear from customers or observations they make of things customers like and dislike can help to complete your picture of how your business is running.

The feedback you get can then be used in concert with data from your mystery shopping program and customer feedback surveys to better revise company policy and offerings and to identify additional or modified training that will help employees deal with situations before they become problems.

Workplace improvement suggestions

If you find the customer experience feedback you receive from employees helpful, you may wish to take you VOE program a step further and actively seek suggestions from those same employees about how certain recurring issues, for customers and colleagues, might be resolved.  This not only gives you access to idea from people with practical knowledge of the situations and circumstances you are dealing with, but it can be a great way to identify outstanding employees who might be good candidates for promotion to managerial positions.  Further, as employees see that a company values their insights and trusts their judgement, they will be more and more eager to actively seek ways to improve the business, becoming engaged champions of the company rather than passive employees counting minutes on the clock.

Employee engagement feedback

This takes us to another important area on which to seek feedback.  It is often difficult for management, especially upper management that may not spend a lot of time on the floor, to gauge the sentiment, satisfaction, and needs of employees on the front lines.  While it can be a good idea for owners and managers to visit locations from time to time and meet and talk with employees, for a company with more than two or three locations, regular visits quickly become impracticable.

This is an area where the approach of identifying a few key employees who have proven adept at observing and assessing situations may be especially effective.  Keeping a regular channel of communication open, not just for feedback to flow up, but for questions to flow down, can be an invaluable way of keeping a finger on the pulse of your business.  When a new idea comes to you that will effect employees or customers, run it by a few key people from the office to the counter to get a better idea of what would really be involved in making the change.  When something is happening in the company that has you excited, find out through these channels if your people on the ground are excited, too, and, if not, what you can do to get everyone on board.  Getting a view from every angle of the business will help you build unity and loyalty within your organization, loyalty that will spread through your customer-facing employees to your customers.

Well-employee check-ups

It is common practice to interview an employee upon their departure from the company – to find out why they are leaving, what could have been better, and to try to calm any ill feeling that might exist.  But what about checking in with employees that are sticking around?  What about finding out what your company is doing right to keep employees loyal and happy so you can do more of it.  Consider establishing regular company reviews to balance out the employee reviews that everyone has come to dread so much.

Find out what has your longest-standing employees staying with you.  You may discover that people with certain traits or lifestyles are especially well-suited to certain positions and adjust your recruitment and hiring accordingly.  You may find that there are certain benefits that are more valuable to your frontline employees than you realized and others that really only seem to benefit those in office positions.  This may invite a flexible benefits schedule that allows employees to choose the things they value the most.  And, as time goes on, you can add and leave off things as you gain greater insight into what actually has your employees stick around.