Customer Service Glossary
What Is Voice of the Employee?
Voice of the Employee, or VoE, is the process of allowing employees to provide suggestions, feedback, ideas, and grievances at their workplace. Employees may express themselves to various individuals, including members of management teams, human resources professionals, or other direct reports.
Regardless, employees should have the freedom to speak in a non-restrictive manner. At the same time, management should accept feedback and work to address employee concerns or suggestions.
Voice of the Employee is a critical aspect of organizational culture. VoE enables businesses to understand their employees. Further, Voice of the Employee can help companies improve their employee experience, increase productivity, streamline operational processes, and strengthen organizational culture.
Why Is Voice of the Employee Important for Businesses?
Voice of the Employee is important for businesses for several reasons, as follows.
1. Increased Employee Engagement
When businesses embrace the Voice of the Employee process, they take the first steps toward a happy, productive, and engaged workforce. Employees feel like their thoughts, opinions, and concerns are valued by their employers. As a result, employees are more likely to provide honest feedback and share ideas that could improve operations.
2. Improved Job Satisfaction
Employees that feel seen, heard, and valued are more satisfied with their jobs-and more productive. VoE directly corresponds to job satisfaction, as it empowers employees to directly impact their work experience.
Through regular meetings with management, employees can give and receive feedback, work cooperatively to improve workforce productivity, and contribute to the business’s success in a meaningful way.
The boost in job satisfaction impacts customers, too. Studies show that VoE improves the customer experience. Simply put, happier, more productive employees create happier, more satisfied customers through positive interactions, cooperative problem-solving, and empathetic care.
3. Better Employee Retention
90% of employees agreed that they would stay at a company that values, accepts, and acts on their suggestions, concerns, and feedback. However, only 43% of employees believe that their company is “okay” at taking employee feedback, while nearly 25% feel that leadership is “horrible” at acting on feedback.
Optimizing the Voice of the Employee process enables businesses to avoid employee churn and improve retention rates. By implementing multiple communication channels for employees, companies can create high-touch, engaged environments, resulting in increased loyalty, better performance and productivity, and improved retention rates.
The Voice of the Employee Process
The Voice of the Employee process features three broad steps, including:
1. Collecting Voice of the Employee Data
Begin the VoE process by collecting feedback from your employees. Some companies prefer to do so through in-person interviews. Others use identified or anonymous surveys to obtain closed or open-ended responses from their workforce. You may also choose to use a web-scraping tool to pull feedback from workforce review sites, online forums, and social media platforms.
2. Analyzing VoE Feedback
After gathering data, analyze the feedback for patterns, shared concerns, and overall workforce feelings. Text analysis tools can break down VoE feedback to create actionable data, while Excel or another spreadsheet can quickly organize quantitative feedback from surveys.
3. Taking Action
Finally, use the information you’ve gathered to create actionable steps and show your employees that you value their feedback. In some cases, you may only need to thank your employees for their feedback and follow up with regular meetings to gauge how your employees truly feel.
On the other hand, you can use feedback to implement training, new operating procedures, or changes in workplace culture to improve the overall employee experience.
The Important of Voice of the Employee for Businesses
Voice of the Employee is more than a buzzword for forward-thinking organizations. Instead, the process allows each employee, regardless of their rank, to make a meaningful contribution toward the overall culture and success of a business.
Management can work to implement and encourage Voice of the Employee by using convenient tools to gather feedback, incorporating new communication channels for easy access, and following up on feedback for a closed-loop system.