Establishing A Culture Where Employees Feel Able To Speak up

Enlightened organisations know that listening to their employees is an essential activity.  Employees need to be encouraged to speak up.  If necessary their voice needs to transcend hierarchies. The reasons are clear – an open culture is good at uncovering & addressing employee fears & concerns early, and also benefits the organization with feedback & new ideas. While the premise is clearly sound, establishing a culture where employees feel able to speak up across the organization is challenging.

Key Challenges

The key challenges are common in most organisations

• Trust is paramount to sustaining a speak-up culture and it will become mainstream only if there are sufficient positive experiences within the organization.
• In the case of large organizations, if this represents a significantly new way of working, it is a mammoth change and will take time to percolate, requiring significant leadership involvement & support.
• Many employees harbour fears on consequences of voicing feedback that challenges opinions or practices.
• Ensuring reach across all employee segments can be difficult at times due to the limitation of technologies & tools.
• Employees may hold themselves back if the process and actions which will follow are unclear.

Propagating a Speak up Culture

Several elements need to combine together in order that a culture where employees feel able to speak up pervades the entire organization.

Leadership Involvement

It is important that leaders reinforce the expectations to catalyze or sustain a speak-up culture. Leaders should demonstrate responsiveness by acknowledging, reviewing and setting in place actions for matters needing their involvement. A best practice is obtaining feedback from skip levels now and then.

Structure & Processes

A published organization structure & processes on how employee feedback is acted upon is critical for success. Solving problems or pursuing ideas may require communication, investment in people & resources, further brainstorming, and implementation actions.

Guidelines

While the intent has to be to keep things simple, guidelines on how employees can express themselves helps. 

Templates & Samples

 It can be helpful to develop a template that employees can use to record their feedback.  Recording feedback is crucial.  It’s also very good practice to record the agreed action to take in response to the feedback. 

Technology Platforms

Enterprise social platforms and survey platforms are emerging as the predominant sources for employee inputs. Social platforms provide invaluable insights on talking points across the organization at any point in time. The yearly surveys are giving way to more frequent and focused surveys and are good sources of specific employee inputs. However, verbal feedback will continue to play as important a role as those received from technology platforms. Both channels need to be open and acted upon similarly.

Recognition

The best way to reinforce the intent of the organization is to recognize great feedback and ideas from employees. Experiences circulated within the organization as stories (articles or videos) are very powerful and energize other employees to follow the example.

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