Listening to your employees and encouraging their share of voice is the best way to improve the overall employee experience in the workplace.
Without knowing how your employees think and feel, it is hard to motivate them, make them more productive, and gain their trust and loyalty.
On the other hand, the consequences of not listening to your employees can be drastic. From low engagement to high turnover, the costs of neglecting your employees’ voice should be concerning for employers across the globe.
Unfortunately, not many organizations are confident in their current listening strategy. According to research, only about 1 in 3 leaders in the organizations studied are very confident that their current listening strategy will help them address these challenges such as employee performance, well-being, safety, attrition, DEI, and safety.
Nearly 1 in 4 are unsure or don’t have confidence that these issues will be addressed in their current listening strategy.
In this blog, we will dig deep into why employee listening is critical for building a positive workplace culture and enabling your people to succeed.
Low Employee Productivity and Efficiency
According to UKG, listening and engagement affect each other. When employees’ voice is heard, the engagement levels soar, but it also works the other way around. When employees are highly engaged at work, they are three times more likely to feel heard. Furthermore, 74% of employees are more effective in their work when they feel heard.
When people are not given a voice and are not listened to, they naturally become disengaged at work. They feel like their ideas, opinions, and concerns are not valued or respected enough which is why their motivation and morale instantly drop.
The net result is reduced productivity and efficiency.
Employers need to do a better job of creating open and transparent workplace cultures in which employees’ psychological safety is of utmost priority. When there is psychological safety, employees feel free to speak up, and when they speak up, their leaders know exactly what they need to do to improve their overall experience and help them perform their best at work.
High Employee Turnover
34% of employees would rather look for a position on a different team or even at a different company than share their concerns and views with management.
This fact is alarming because it represents an extremely low trust employees have in their organization’s leaders.
Because employee-manager relationships are one of the most important drivers of positive workplace experience, it is not surprising that teams with poor manager relationships have high turnover rates.
In fact, one of the top reasons employees leave a business is because they have poor direct-manager relationships. According to an ADP Research Institute report – when compensation is excluded from consideration, the number one reason for an employee departure is a poor direct-manager relationship, with 36% of employees saying so.
To conclude, managers need to be great listeners to keep their people around and motivate them to be successful. Transformational, empathetic, and servant leaders are usually those who perform the best.
Lack of DEI and Sense of Belonging
One research showed that a shocking 86% of employees feel people at their workplace are not heard fairly or equally. And 47% of employees say that the voices of underrepresented groups in their workplace aren’t taken into account.
When people from certain backgrounds or groups are heard less than others, they feel discriminated against, and they don’t feel like they belong.
Naturally, employees who have a high sense of belonging are more than three times more likely to feel heard at work (95%) than employees who have a low sense of belonging (25%).
This is why many organizations have started implementing new DEI initiatives and are paying more attention to various employee groups in their organizations.
💡 If you also want to reassess your DEI initiatives, don’t miss our 10-step guide for implementing and launching a successful DEI communications strategy!
Lack of Buy-In and Low Participation Rates
When people feel they are not listened to, they may not fully support company initiatives and decisions. This can lead to resistance and reluctance to work on new projects, accept change, and push back on new initiatives.
If you don’t have your employees’ buy-in for these new projects, they are much more likely to fail.
Hence, including your employees in the decision-making process, asking them for feedback regularly, and encouraging their share of voice is critical for successful change management.
Furthermore, when there is a lack of listening, employees are also unlikely to participate in your organization’s daily projects, ignore important messages, and neglect critical updates resulting in significant information loss and lack of organizational alignment.
Mitigate the risks of poor employee listening with Haiilo!
Reduced Knowledge-Sharing, Innovation, and Creativity
When people don’t feel heard, they stop sharing their ideas with others. In a world where knowledge sharing and knowledge management are critical for business success, this is a big concern for many organizations.
Knowledge workers in organizations are often aware of new trends, technologies, or market shifts that the management may not be aware of. When people feel like they are not listened to, they are less likely to share this information.
Result?
One research showed that Fortune 500 companies lose an estimated $31.5 billion per year by failing to share knowledge across teams.
When there are knowledge silos, companies can miss opportunities to enter new markets and innovate. They can also be slow to act on potential threats which can negatively impact the business.
Furthermore, these people are less likely to share new ideas and suggestions, resulting in a lack of innovation and creativity within the company.
Damaged Reputation and Employer Brand
Dissatisfied employees are often much louder than happy ones, impacting their organization’s ability to attract and hire new talent.
A company’s reputation can be severely damaged when people don’t feel like they are heard or listened to. People may share their frustrations with others outside of the company. Spreading negative word of mouth about the company can have a detrimental effect on its reputation and can significantly impact its employer brand. This can deter new talent from joining the company and may also affect customer trust and loyalty.
How Haiilo Can Help You Listen and Understand Your Workforce
With Haiilo, employee listening not only enables targeted, effective, and dynamic internal communication but also makes a significant contribution to increasing employee engagement. It optimizes the return on investment for internal communication practices and resources.
The combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics offers companies the opportunity to precisely evaluate and continuously improve the success of their internal communication strategy.
Disclaimer: the image shows a prototype, the final product may change.
One proven method for employee listening is employee surveys. However, this does not mean a one-dimensional semi-annual questionnaire used in many companies. Instead, there should be feedback opportunities at each of the important moments of the employee journey. For example, feedback can be obtained on the onboarding process, the company’s new strategic direction, the product portfolio, or topics such as sustainability and diversity. With the help of continuous employee listening, every company or communication department can now tap into quantitative data from communication practices and collect qualitative metrics such as comprehension rates.
In short, Haiilo is the only platform that provides measurable benefits of employee listening for internal communication:
1. Reducing the flood of information
By using employee listening, communication is strategically designed to minimize flooding employees with information.
2. Personalization and increased relevancy
The key to successful employee listening is to personalize communication actively. When employees provide feedback on the information they receive, it automatically changes the amount and relevance of further communication on a given topic.
3. Employee engagement through feedback
When employees actively give feedback that they need more input, this not only shows an increased interest in the content, but also enables a targeted adjustment of the communication strategy.
4. ROI for internal communication
The success of internal communication can be measured by combining “reach” (quantitative metrics) and “impact” (qualitative metrics), with employee listening serving as the key methodology for “impact”.