Can Brands Afford To Ignore The Importance of Voice of the Employee in EX?
Your company and your business processes are running smoothly. Your employees are doing what you expect of them. So does the voice of the employee importance really apply to you, you may ask. The answer is yes if you want to sustain a profitable business. Just as Maslow’s motivation theory suggests, once human beings have had their basic needs fulfilled, they have an innate desire for something higher such as the need for recognition, reward, self-esteem. In organizations, this translates to a desire for employees to be heard, to feel important, and to feel a sense of community.
That’s why happy employees almost always lead to successful business ventures, simply because they feel a sense of belonging. It’s crucial that you give your employees a voice in an environment that encourages openness, honesty, and transparency. And when you analyze their feedback, you get invaluable insights that you might have not even noticed before.
This post, therefore, focuses on the importance of voice of the employee and how it contributes to a more productive and more efficient organization.
What Is the Importance of Voice of the Employee in Improving Employee Experience?
There’s arguably no better way to improve your employee experience (EX) than listening to and understanding your employees’ feedback and opinions. Voice of the employee importance plays an extremely pertinent role especially when brands give employees a platform to voice their opinions and give feedback consistently throughout their tenure at the organization. This, in turn, branches out into several other benefits that allow companies to:
-
Build a nurturing work culture built on trust, not only between employees and their peers but also between employees and the organization
-
Check employee satisfaction levels through data that shows exactly where brands need to pay attention
-
Identify behaviors that lead to higher employee turnover and take proactive steps to reduce them
-
Create meaningful strategies to improve managerial efficiency
-
Identify areas that employees find unproductive and work towards better time and workflow management
With that in mind, let’s look at the importance of voice of the employee in different areas of a brand’s business life cycle. VoE helps:
- Make Organizations Flexible and Dynamic
In a post-Covid world, voice of the employee importance has grown to be more relevant than ever before. This is simply because the pandemic emphasized the need for brands to be able to adapt quickly and efficiently to evolving government requirements, consumer demands, and changing market conditions. Almost all brands felt the shortage of labor, especially with delivery companies like Amazon, UPS, national postal services, all taking the hit from the high demand of no-contact purchases, where customers were left waiting for double the time for simple purchases.
On the other hand, there was a sudden spike in food delivery apps as restaurants could no longer have customers in closed-door settings. The importance of voice of the employee shone through during these hard times when organizations had to keep a close eye on day-to-day operations and make sure that employees were not burnt out, and were safe.
- Identify Problem Areas
One of the main benefits of VoE is that it allows you to identify problems and issues in your business processes that disrupt your efficiency. This is a significant problem considering that inefficient business processes take up nearly a third of employees’ time. Here, voice of the employee importance allows employees a platform where they can express their concerns and communicate with their managers and business leaders if they feel the need for process improvements to work more efficiently.
When you then have this feedback, you’ll be able to implement the necessary strategies to resolve issues in your workflow management. And in turn, your workforce will be more productive, more satisfied, and your organization more efficient.
- Avoid Negative Impacts of Employee Dissatisfaction
Let’s face it, dissatisfied employees are not motivated to make your company a success. If they are unhappy with their workload, their manager, or teammates, or their work conditions, it’s hardly surprising that they will harbour anger and resentment. Here, giving employees a platform to voice their concerns or opinions is invaluable. In fact, when employees are given a chance to express their concerns through feedback mechanisms, and more importantly, that feedback is genuinely analyzed and given attention to, unable to give their feedback, they feel seen, and in turn, it leads to a boost in employee morale. This is an undeniable benefit of the voice of the employee. As a result, it protects against the far-reaching impact of these negative emotions which allows you to increase employee Well-being.
- Maintain a Competitive Edge
A key advantage of voice of the employee is that you get to learn a lot about not just yourself but also your competitors. This could be by analyzing VoC data in surveys and comments, or video-based interviews, or even through search inside video techniques amidst seemingly generic video comments but that casually mention a competitor name along with certain keywords that you specify like “better pay”, “open culture”, “open door policy”, etc.
A clever sentiment analysis platform can easily showcase voice of the employee importance by analyzing thousands of such videos and comments for insights, which would otherwise be neglected.
- Improve Employee Retention
Another major benefit of voice of the employee is that it allows you to know what motivates your star employees, what training employees need overall, and what keeps your employees from moving on to a competitor. In turn, you keep the continuity that keeps your company efficient, productive, and successful. Just as an example, websites like Glassdoor are full of comments in which ex-employees state very clearly why they left an organization. Sometimes, reasons can be as simple as having to struggle to get parking space. Here, I would also like to state that having a really good, reliable VoC data analysis platform is extremely important because AI-based algorithms bypass human biases in analyzing feedback even if it’s in video formats through natural language processing and video content analysis techniques.
There are many situations where brands tend to think of an ex-employee’s feedback as unimportant because, well, they’re an ex-employee. This is a huge mistake. By logic, had the issues the ex-employee had with the organization been fixed, or at least paid attention to by the management, that star employee would still be working with them. This customer success story reiterates the point of how machine learning platforms outshine human intervention by removing prejudice from analyzing employee feedback and adding efficiency to the process.
- Better Branding That Attracts Better Talent
Another advantage of voice of the employee is that it reduces risk by allowing you to address employee issues and grievances internally and privately. Social media, online forums, and review sites are the norm to share opinions about products, services, and companies. So, it’s more likely that if employees don’t find that release within an organization, they will air their grievances on external websites, sometimes anonymously. Social media listening can help you keep a tab on your online reputation and take action accordingly. But this negative feedback would have damaged your brand reputation nevertheless by putting up a red flag over your name amongst the talent pool.
Employee burnout is a real thing and if companies are able to figure out how to handle this, it can not only help in employee retention but also make competent candidates compete for you more seriously. Read this great list of companies with the best workplace environments and the employee remarks that say why they’d never leave their organization for greener pastures. It really is a testament to the voice of the employee importance in the dynamic business environment we live in today.
- Increase Transparency
Modern times have lead to increased transparency in companies. Whether it’s gender balance, equal pay for equal work, or issues surrounding paternity leaves for men, LGBTQ+ and diversity staffing, organizations have to keep up with the changing times and adapt. The only way you can do this is by making sure there is absolute transparency between management and employees. Therefore, another advantage of voice of employee importance is that the insights from your data will show you where you stand in terms of employee expectations on such important and sensitive matters.
- Enhance Opportunities For Collective Learning
Another advantage of voice of the employee is that it enables teams to experience the benefits of collective learning through inter-team training and collaborations. Having stellar human resource strategies and policies that keep employees first in terms of engagement, training, learning and growth opportunities, and work satisfaction are reasons why companies like HP, in particular, are known to have very low employee attrition despite difficult times. An organization that understands voice of the employee importance and that continuing academic and talent-oriented opportunities lead to better-honed employees, knows that its investment in human capital always delivers rich dividends.
- Increase Overall Job Satisfaction
A vital benefit of VoE is that when you give your employees a platform to share their opinions on your business processes, it fosters an environment that promotes trust and belonging. That’s why when you consider their feedback when developing and improving your business processes, your employees feel like part of a team and not just passengers along for the ride. Aspect-based sentiment analysis of VoC data is instrumental in getting you the right insights into what can increase your employees’ overall job satisfaction significantly. This means they’ll be more productive, your business will be more efficient, and you’ll increase your employee retention levels. This is probably one of the foundations of the importance of voice of the employee.
- Improve Employee Policies
The larger question about company policies is whether these policies take into account how employees really feel about their jobs, whether they think they are overdue for promotions, what skills and knowledge employees need, and what tools they need to be more productive. Human resource departments need to have the right ML-based platform and proceeding insights to ensure that employees, organization-wide, are taken into consideration while making company policies.
Here, text analytics of VoE data gives you indepth insights into these aspects which, in turn, allows you to create and improve employee policies that promote growth, increase employee satisfaction, and optimize efficiency.
- Promote Employee and Organization Growth
A great benefit of VoE and voice of the employee importance is that in a nurturing work environment, where employees trust the organization, they will be open to feedback and new company policies. It’s key that feedback you give should not only relate to the tasks employees do on an everyday basis but should also be towards a future growth trajectory for them. This is especially important because when employees feel that you care about their future in the company, they feel needed and this, in turn, strengthens your relationship with them and fosters a culture of growth company-wide.
- Reward Employee Participation in Feedback
Another great benefit of VoC is that it encourages employees to share their thoughts, opinions, and feedback if they know that you recognize and reward them for doing so. Survey fatigue is real, and so is employee cynicism when it comes to giving feedback because they believe that their opinions are not important. This way you get consistent insights into what employees’ opinions are, where you need to put effort into, and how you can improve productivity and ensure your business is running smoothly. This aspect certainly highlights the importance of voice of the employee.
Repustate IQ For An Enhanced Employee Experience
Repustate’s recently launched enhanced sentiment analysis platform, Repustate IQ, gives you and your HR team the insights you need to thrive employee experience. Repustate IQ brings to the forefront voice of the employee importance by giving you all the data from your VoE applications so you can nurture employee engagement, performance, and retention.
-
Repustate IQ helps you:With sophisticated video AI that gives you deeper insights into employees’ opinions so you can use videos for job satisfaction surveys and employee interviews
-
Gain insights from social media platforms and review sites
-
Engage with employees all over the world, regardless of language.