24th January 2012
The IPA and Tomorrow’s Company have joined forces to explore the
importance of voice. In this article. Nita Clarke, Director IPA and Tony
Manwaring, Chief Executive Tomorrow’s Company discuss how engaging employees’
voice will help the country in the current economic climate.
Voice matters hugely in today’s world. South Africa, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more recently the Arab Spring: the demand to be able to speak out honestly and without fear, to be listened to and taken seriously as an individual, lay at the heart of the uprising and change, as it has time and time again. Having a voice is a key aspect of being human – and a diverse combination of many voices is vital for a free society.
Having a voice at work is just as crucial, for the organisation as much as for the individual employee. Feeling listened to is consistently cited as the most important factor in determining how much employees value their organisation. Voice is a key enabler for employee engagement, reinforcing the powerful sense of enablement, involvement and participation that underlies true and sustainable engagement.
For the organisation, listening to employees is vital. Firstly, in that voice will lie the solutions to the challenges the organisation faces, whether it is cutting costs, reconfiguring processes or services, improving customer relations or defining new markets. After all, at the heart of techniques such as kaizen is the simple truth – if you want to know how to do something better, ask the person who is doing it. Secondly, embedding voice at the heart of an organisation’s culture ensures openness and transparency. It is the best guarantee of organisational integrity, or keeping it real, ensuring that the values on the wall are reflected in day to day behaviours, which is fundamental to establishing and maintaining trust.
Thirdly, employee voice is of course operating in every organisation, whether managers like it or not, or are prepared to listen. As a result of information technology, the traditional – and effective - focus of the water cooler or coffee machine is now supplemented by a plethora of internal conversations via Facebook and the other social networks, all of which may be below the official radar – but are none the less powerful for all that.
Fourthly, a powerful, diverse employee voice is the best guard against reputational risk –more effective than a team of lawyers or a highly paid PR company trying to clear up after the event. Every report into a manmade disaster – whether it be an oil rig blow out, a poorly built building collapsing, a failure in child or social care, or a hospital putting lives at risk – comes to the same conclusion: some-one within the offending organisation always knows. But the dominating culture of the organisation means they are either unmotivated, unable, or afraid to speak out before it is too late..
The case for employee voice is overwhelming – so why do so few organisations ensure they listen? The figures are startling. The NHS is one of the largest employers in Europe; according to the latest annual staff survey only 28 per cent of employees thought managers involved staff in important decisions; in the private sector the number reporting that their manager encouraged them to develop their own ideas declined from 48 to 38 per cent from 2008 to 2009 according to research from Corporate Leadership Council.
Too often employers appear to believe that surveying employee opinion – often via an on-line survey – constitutes listening. While surveys are useful for internal and external benchmarking, the snapshot of opinion they provide cannot get to the all-important reality of why employees feel the way they do. That is why organisations such as O2 which are really concerned with voice as a key element of engagement now find far more sophisticated ways to listen to staff, through face to face meetings, 360 conversations, and deep dive focus groups.
Others believe that having an effective internal communications department constitutes listening, whereas most often it is simply disseminating to employees the corporate message – and if that message does not appear to coincide with reality as perceived by the employees themselves only leads to cynicism and disillusionment.
Collective voice – the wisdom of crowds matters too. Trade unions can have a powerful role in ensuring workplaces engage effectively, that structures are in place for listening and dialogue, that the prevailing consensus is stress-tested to ensure it is fit for purpose, as well ensuring that the hygiene issues that underpin engagement, such as fair systems for performance management or bonuses, and safe working conditions, are properly dealt with.
Listening to others – particularly those lower down the organisational ladder – is hard. But sighing for the good old days of command and control will not change reality. Generation Y and the ones that are following believe in communicating to their peers, and expressing their views – at work as well as at play. They are not deferential to power, and nor do they automatically trust it, whether it resides in politicians, journalists, chief executives, bankers or other traditional leaders of the pack. Only authentic adult-to-adult relationships with peers, managers and leaders will convince them of an organisation’s integrity and open the door to their whole-hearted engagement with it
This is an imperative for UK companies and organisations as we seek to make our way in the new world order– not some fluffy nice to have, or pandering to ‘yoof’. Engaging with the workforcewillbe the best way of out the current economic difficulties, whether it be producing goods and services quicker more cheaply and at higher quality, anticipating shifts in customer demands or producing world-beating innovations that will secure the future of UK plc.
And maybe only a more distributed leadership model based on a belief in the power of employee voice will help us avoid the catastrophic errors perpetrated by the leadership-clique approach in so many sectors, in banking, and manyotherexamples,
We have given a number of reasons why Voice matters: each is important, cumulatively the case is surely overwhelming. All of these arguments in turn reflect the new dynamics of value creation. Value is co-created through complex supply chains and relationships which span cultures and borders. Sustainable value is best secured by recognising the combined impact of economic, human and social and environmental value drivers. It is not accident that institutional investors are increasingly looking at companies’ human capital metrics and their employee engagement levels when making investment decisions.
The IPA and Tomorrow’s Company have therefore joined together to explore in more depth the nature and importance of voice, working with some of the UK’s leading organisations. This is a topic with a growing salience. The Coalition Government has asked David Macleod and Nita Clarke, the director of the IPA, to build on their work on employee engagement in their 2009 report ‘Engaging for Success’ with a national taskforce to further develop and spread the engagement message.
Attitudes to ‘human capital’ are beginning to change. As processes become standardised, it is increasingly clear that it is the employees in an organisation who are the difference that make the difference. Releasing the power of people at work is what employee voice is all about.
Nita Clarke Tony Manwaring
Director, IPA Chief executive, Tomorrow’s Company
The IPA and Tomorrow’s Company are working together on the project Rethinking voice:
For sustainable business success. You can find out more at
www.ipa-involve.com
If you would more information on the Voice Project please contact Nita Clarke at
Nita.Clarke@ipa-involve.com
