If you thought that internal communications (IC) was just about sending out the odd newsletter or writing a press release to send internally about an upcoming staff party, then you couldn’t be more wrong.  IC has become one of the most important functions of growing businesses and, like the wider world of communications, it plays a pivotal role in managing stakeholder expectations, with employee voice being a pivotal tool to utilise.

For many years, businesses committed to huge spend on resources to manage their external communications but neglected to consider the impacts on the lack of communication with their own internal stakeholders – employees.  

Why is ‘Employee Voice’ so important?

By employee voice, we mean involving people in the way the business is run, as businesses with an effective and empowered employee voice make sure that people at all levels have the chance to give views, submit ideas and raise questions.

Working in this way helps everyone see the bigger picture and fosters an environment of listening.

There’s several ways to approach this in any business including:

• Encourage employees to make suggestions of change
• Running regular engagement surveys to gain vital feedback
• Building comprehensive questioning into exit interviews for future change
• Teach managers on how to become great listeners, proactively starting conversations with employees

Put simply – If an employee voice is ignored, you’ll end up driving focus in lack of motivation and resignation when your best talent will move to a competitor.

There’s lots of benefits of employee voice too:

• Listening to your employees drives positive cultural change and brings about higher levels of efficiency, when they’re willing to partner with you to make changes that will significantly impact the productivity of not only employees but the wider business too
• By communicating in this way, employees become more focused on their role and no longer lost in objectives. Often we hear of employees not understanding their role in the wider business, however they’re shown how much of an impact they make then motivation and desire to achieve rises significantly
• From the very start of employment, or even before, if communication is embedded into your pre-boarding/on-boarding processes, the turnover of staff will decrease and high performance will start to become ‘the norm’ at earlier stages of the employee lifecycle.

The importance of engaging employee voice into your business can’t be stressed enough.   

As a people consultancy we offer many ways to engage your employees in a bespoke way for your business.

Get in touch about employee engagement.

Last Updated on 9 months by Hannah Ingram

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