Employees are among the top stakeholders in any company. When they feel their voices are heard and valued, it increases their overall engagement, job satisfaction, creativity, and decision-making ability. This, in turn, propels superior organizational growth.

These benefits and the competitive advantage from ensuring employee voice is heard are confirmed by reputed research sources such as McKinsey’s article titled: The next competitive advantage in talent: Continuous employee listening. Similarly, a Harvard Law School Forum and Corporate Governance publication also iterates on the importance of employee voice in forming a cohesive human capital management strategy and enhancing innovation and customer intelligence. In addition, the same report also underlines the importance of every organizational board's exposure to employee voice. 

With these facts in mind, focusing on amplifying your employee voice as an internal communicator or an HR manager is a must. This blog explores actionable ways you can follow to amplify employee voice in your organization. 

Here’s how you can amplify employee voice in your organization

1. Ensure you are aware of employees' needs

The foremost step to amplifying employee voice in your company is by implementing suitable structural and cultural measures to ensure employee needs are heard.  Harvard Business Review research echoes that a company culture that underlines the importance of employee choice goes a long way in unfolding long-term organizational success.

For gauging your employees’ needs, you can use feedback forms, surveys, or group discussions and events to figure out precisely what is most pressing for them. By understanding this, you can validate and acknowledge their issues, making them feel valued and more engaged.

Read More: Strategies For Improving Employee Engagement

However, what’s also critical is ensuring any issues that you discover are communicated to the right decision-maker and addressed timely. If needed, you must also create a negotiation mechanism whereby your employees' needs are satisfactorily met without compromising on corporate or business interests. 

Finally, for measuring the efficacy of this process, ensure using tools that monitor employee satisfaction metrics and strive to improve in those respects continually.

Read More: Measuring Employee Engagement: Key Metrics

2. Encourage two-way communication

According to a Forbes Advisor survey, employees spend nearly 20 hours weekly on digital communication tools. The same study outlines that this has led to 60% of workers experiencing burnout-related symptoms. To address common organizational problems like this, you must quit monologues and implement two-way communication mechanisms. For this,

• Urge your employees to speak fearlessly and ensure that your internal communication campaigns aren’t top-down. In turn, create content that stimulates feedback or response from your employees. 
• Encourage group discussions to make employees comfortable sharing their concerns and problems with different decision-makers. According to research, 85% of employees do not speak up because they fear negative judgment. This means no matter how engaging your employee communication campaigns are, your efforts go down the drain if your employees aren’t speaking up.
• Implement a feedback mechanism on both team and private channels, as everyone may not be comfortable opening up quickly. Allow room for anonymity in these. This is particularly important to bring instances of sexual harassment and discrimination to light and ensure enhanced Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace.
• Identify areas where some employees may better know specific business processes, especially frontline workers who interact with clients and customers. Reach out to them to ensure their inputs are heard to navigate better business decisions.
  

3. Empower employees with an easy-to-access communication platform

According to the Forbes Advisor survey, ineffective communication reduces worker productivity by 50%. 42% of workers experienced stress while figuring out how to respond in the wrong tone. To address common problems like these, you must provide employees with a suitable, unified employee communication platform to express themselves confidently. For this,

• Encourage messaging in informal formats. Some employees, especially those employed at the front line compared to a white-collar in-office job, may struggle to write formal emails to express any concerns or difficulties. Enabling easier ways to share thoughts via text or voice can be helpful in getting them to speak up.
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• Some employees may need help communicating with senior leadership and feel more comfortable with someone who acts as a communicator. You can use employee communication platforms that allow people to speak with an intermediary. 

Bottom Line: Employee voice amplification starts with embracing & facilitating dialogues 

You must ensure employee voices are heard and acknowledged to create a healthy, productive working atmosphere and ensure your staff feels energized. For that, it’s imperative to be aware of employee needs, refrain from engaging in monologues, and create a culture and mechanism for knowledge sharing. Providing employees with a suitable and convenient medium to voice their thoughts is also essential. 

Specialized employee communication platforms such as Speakap are tailor-made to simplify the internal communication process and ensure employee voices are heard at all times. The app supports text, voice, image, and video-based communication, which is helpful for both in-office and frontline employees to voice their thoughts. Speakap also comes with the ability to track engagement metrics to optimize internal communication outcomes. 

Contact us today to learn how we can help you encourage dialogue and meet your employees' needs best at the right time. 

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