Voice of Employee

What voice of employee is

Voice of employee (صوت الموظف) is a management concept in human resources. It means that an organisation gathers what its workers say about their work and its environment, understands it and responds to it, through announced and varied channels, instead of assuming how they feel. The raw material is what the worker says, whether the worker was asked or spoke unprompted. What turns it into a management practice is that what was said reaches someone with the power to change things, and that what was decided comes back to the person who spoke.

The meaning here is the management concept that applies to any organisation, not a particular platform.

How voice of employee differs from employee engagement

Voice of employee is what workers say. Employee engagement is the degree of attachment that moves them to give effort beyond what is required. The first is material that is gathered and examined, and the second is a state that is inferred from behaviour. A leader may hear from the workers and find their engagement still low if nothing changes after what they said.

Voice also differs from any single one of its tools. A survey is a channel, an interview is a channel, a suggestion box is a channel, and the voice is the system that gathers what all the channels carry and examines it together.

What each channel hears and what it misses

An organisation does not hear the same thing through every channel, and each channel has people who speak in it and people who stay silent. An organisation that relies on a single channel hears a single voice. The following shows what each channel hears and what it misses:

• The short survey. A pulse survey is a few questions sent at close intervals, so the organisation hears a direction of movement between two points from large numbers. It misses the reason: it knows that the indicator moved and does not know why.
• The recommendation score. The employee net promoter score (eNPS) is a single figure drawn from a single question, which makes it easy to follow from one round to the next. It misses what lies behind the figure, because one figure can come from different distributions.
• The submitted idea. A suggestion system is a channel in which anyone who wishes can submit an idea for improving the work, so the organisation hears the person who takes the initiative. It misses the person who does not write.
• The individual meeting. A one on one meeting is a regular conversation between an employee and a manager, in which detail and context are heard. It misses what concerns the manager personally, because the manager is the listener.
• Access without an appointment. An open door policy is an announced commitment that an employee can reach a manager, or the manager’s superior, without a prior appointment, so the organisation hears the person bold enough to knock. It misses the quiet person who will not knock.
• The formal objection. A grievance is a recorded complaint with a route and a written reply, so what has reached the point of objection is heard. It misses what has not reached that point and what accumulates before it.
• The detailed interview. A stay interview is a conversation in which a person who does not intend to leave is asked what keeps them, and an exit interview is a conversation in which a person who has left is asked what led to it. The first makes it possible to listen before time is lost, and the second makes it possible to listen to someone who no longer has anything to lose. Both miss the breadth of a survey, since each is limited in number.

All the channels share a condition that comes before them: the employee believes that speaking is safe. This is psychological safety, the employee’s belief that a question can be asked, a mistake admitted or an objection raised without it being counted against the employee. If that belief is absent, answers may arrive polite, while what workers say to one another stays outside what the channels gather.

How the loop is closed

The loop is closed when the employee knows what the organisation did with what was said, even if the answer was a refusal. The loop consists of gathering what is said, reviewing it and sorting it by topic, deciding on it, and returning the decision to the people who spoke. It may break at the last step, because the first steps take place in the office and the last takes place in front of the employees.

Imagine a hypothetical organisation that gathered 25 comments in one quarter from all its channels. Of these, 10 were carried out, 5 were declined for a reason that was announced to the people who raised them, and 10 were left without a decision. The comments whose answer returned to their owners are 10 + 5 = 15 out of 25, which is 60%. The other 40% have no answer. For the remaining ten, the organisation writes down a date for considering them and announces it, because a comment whose fate is unknown may be taken as neglect.

The time taken to reply may be counted as well. An organisation that replies in two weeks differs from one that replies in a year, even if the number carried out is the same. That time is written into the rule for closing the loop, together with the person who holds the decision.

How the people who do not speak are identified

An overall participation rate hides those who stayed silent. Take a hypothetical organisation of 240 employees in three departments: sales 40, operations 120 and administration 80. In the survey, 12 answered from sales, 96 from operations and 52 from administration. Overall participation is 160 ÷ 240 = 66.7%. In sales, though, it is 12 ÷ 40 = 30%, in operations 96 ÷ 120 = 80%, and in administration 52 ÷ 80 = 65%. The overall figure suggests broad participation, while the sales department speaks through only 30% of its people.

The average answer given by sales was 4.1 out of 5, but that is the average of 12 voices out of 40. If the 28 who stayed silent felt as the respondents did, the average would remain 4.1. If they felt 3.0, the average would become (12 × 4.1 + 28 × 3.0) ÷ 40 = 133.2 ÷ 40 = 3.33. This is an assumption and does not establish what they actually feel. It shows only that an average resting on 30% of a department cannot be used as a judgement on the whole department.

Participation is therefore examined by department, by manager and by role before the average of the answers is examined. The questions to ask are which departments are not speaking, and whether they lacked channels or lacked trust.

Whether the identity of the speaker is hidden

That depends on what the organisation wants to hear. An anonymous answer makes frankness easier, but it prevents a reply to the person and prevents asking for detail. An answer attributed to its owner allows further questions, but it may push the speaker toward flattery if the speaker fears being held to account for what was said.

In both cases the speaker is protected by a minimum number of respondents before the result of any group is shown. Picture a team of 8 employees, 3 of whom answered, and all three chose the lowest score. Showing the result for this team would reveal the view of each of the three. If the organisation set a minimum of 5 answers, the team would be merged with a neighbouring team from which 6 answered, so the answers number 3 + 6 = 9 and the views stay protected.

How open comments are examined

Open comments are examined by sorting them into topics and then counting what falls under each topic, and not by picking out a sentence for its impact. Suppose 40 open comments in one round were sorted as follows: 14 about tools, 10 about the allocation of shifts, 9 about how clear the manager’s wishes are, and 7 about pay. Together they come to 14 + 10 + 9 + 7 = 40. Tools are 14 ÷ 40 = 35%, shifts 25%, clarity of the manager 22.5% and pay 17.5%.

The count shows how many times a topic was mentioned and does not show how severe it is. A single comment about a danger to the safety of workers may deserve priority over a topic mentioned fourteen times. The order is therefore judged by the count and by what follows if the topic is neglected, and the differences between the two are noted when the results are presented to the people who decide.

Who owns listening inside the organisation

The human resources department owns the design of the channels, the gathering of what they hold and its presentation, and the manager to whom a comment relates owns the decision on it. Separating gathering from deciding is deliberate. A manager who reads the team’s comments about the manager personally may read them defensively and not to understand. The results also need someone with the authority to raise them to the people above the manager, since a comment that revolves around one manager is examined by another.

A responsible party and a date are written for each topic, or the topic remains without an owner. A comment about tools has an owner in systems, a comment about the allocation of work has an owner in operations, and a comment about pay has an owner in human resources.

How often voice of employee is examined

The rhythm varies with the channel. A pulse survey is examined after each round, and the results of exit interviews are gathered over a period so that a pattern appears and not an individual case. A fixed time for examination is written for each channel, with the people who attend it, and one summary that brings together what all the channels carry is presented to senior management, so that no channel is seen apart from the others. If one topic appears in two different channels, such as the survey and the interviews, that convergence deserves attention before others, and it does not remove the need to look for its cause.

How voice of employee is misunderstood

Misunderstanding arises when the voice is taken for something it is not:

• Treating it as a vote. The voice is information to be examined with other information, not an election whose result is carried out. The loudest voice may be a remark made by a few people, and it is weighed by what it indicates and not by the number who said it.
• Loading it with what it does not say. What an employee says about a feeling may not match what the employee does, so the voice is examined together with indicators of behaviour such as departures and absence, and not in place of them.
• Repeating questions without a reply. An employee who was asked many times and saw nothing change may learn that answering has no effect and stop answering.
• Collecting the figures and neglecting the sentences. An open comment carries the reason that a figure does not carry, and it is examined by sorting into topics and not by picking the best phrased sentence.

What participation rate is sufficient

In the sources we reviewed, we found no reference participation rate that we could adopt for any channel of voice, and we do not propose a figure of our own. The rate varies with the type of channel, the size of the organisation and the spread of workers between head office and the field. The rate of each department is examined before the overall figure, and each is compared with its own rate in the previous round.

Voice of employee remains a tool for examination and not a tool for judgement. It points the organisation to places that deserve attention, and what is decided afterwards rests on this voice and on the data of the work together.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.