Every employee must feel valued in a business. The best way to achieve that is by amplifying their voices.
After all, their contributions build the workplace culture and make your company a great place to work. Nevertheless, many workers feel uncertain about speaking up, fearing it will land them in trouble. Everybody’s cards need to be on the table, and every problem should be discussed respectfully.
Still, even if you intend for your employees to speak up more often, they don’t always feel compelled to do so. Some of them need the right encouragement and resources in place before they can make that move.
You can do many things here to give your employees a voice. Let’s explore what they are.
Educate Your Employees
Business is a constant education. The rulebooks sometimes change, and there are always new milestones to reach and concerns to address.
Firms recently called upon the new Prime Minister to bring stability to the economy. A sense of growing unease is one of the ways employees can be silenced, as they can feel powerless and insignificant in such chaotic times.
Keeping your employees informed will empower their voices during these challenging times. Disclose performance updates through multiple challenges, from email to staff room notice boards. Adopt an open-door policy and clear parts of your schedule for face-to-face consultations. The more forthcoming you are with the firm’s prospects, the more employees will feel equipped to discuss them.
Training materials can also renew employee confidence. They’ll expand their awareness, bolster their skills, and feel qualified to help others in their roles too. Materials could cover cybersecurity, regulations in your sector, and even management techniques, giving workers more control of their careers.
Develop Employee Engagement
Once employees are suitably informed, they’ll feel more invested in the firm. It’s a great way to encourage their engagement, but there are other ways to facilitate it as well.
Welcome feedback from your employees. They may feel more confident about using their voice if they know their business is not above scrutiny and their ideas are valued. They’ll understand that they can influence the business and have an opportunity to make working conditions better for themselves and their colleagues.
The live polling and Q&A tools from Vevox can send engagement levels soaring. Users have rated the service highly for many good reasons. The tools can be integrated into some programs you already use or used as a standalone feature. Crowdsourced word clouds can also be utilized, and workers can be anonymous as they engage. The support team can guide your use of Vevox too.
It’s important to understand how your employees truly feel about matters. There are some workplace conversations where decorums are enforced, and messages become muddled as people depend on jargon and subtle hints of their real issues. Using a dedicated platform where workers can participate anonymously means the truth of matters can be at the heart of every dialogue. It’s a forum for them.
Act on Feedback
Heeding feedback is one thing, but acting on it is another entirely. Workers may feel disheartened if many of their ideas don’t become a reality.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to change everything about your business on the whim of your workers. That said, there are other ways you can incorporate their ideas into the fold. Break them down, interpret their ideas differently, or even build upon them to ensure that something is learned from their critique.
Compromising and meeting employees halfway is better than nothing. If they wish to work from home, a hybrid work scheme can ensure they split their time fairly between the home and office. If they want more time off, easing some deadlines and workflows may make the need for days off less pressing.
There’s power in saying ‘no’ to unreasonable demands, but it’s also important to be open-minded and flexible where you can be. Instead of declining requests, you can often find ways to fulfill at least some items on your employee’s agenda. It will help them feel truly seen and heard and encourage them to speak up again in the future if they can think of ways to improve the working conditions of themselves and others.
Embolden Employee Representatives
Some workers have pressing issues they’d rather not discuss directly with their superiors. You should endeavor to respect those wishes.
Still, this doesn’t mean that you’re powerless in these situations. You can instead invest more time and resources into the representatives of your workers; the HR department, social media workers, and consultation groups. That way, your employees will know they have other channels and safe spaces to utilize.
Many employees want to use their voices but fear escalation. While you shouldn’t come down hard on anybody, you should understand that some issues are private and that not every problem is for you to fix. You can still give employees a voice, even in a more distant capacity.
Featured Photo by Christina Morillo: https://www.pexels.com/
