Founder of the Virgin family of corporations, Sir Richard Branson has been quoted as saying, “The best way to take care of your customers is to take care of the employees who take care of your customers.” As per Branson happy employees will result in good customer service, this will help companies thrive in business.
Employee retention and training is a key part of successful business. Low employee retention will result in loss of corporate memory, cost in training a new employee and reducing work efficiency. Training a new employee will cost three times as much as retaining an employee.
That is why it is so important to understand the “Voice of the Employee” (VoE).
VoE Program is?
A VoE program is designed to increase employee engagement and identify the areas to improve. Also, this will help you identify root causes for existing issues that matter to your employees and possible solution for the problems.
Collection of information like this makes it easier to increase employee engagement, develop better performance reward programs, identify areas to improve, reduce attrition and gage overall satisfaction of the employees.
As per the latest studies, benefiting employees in their daily life is the key, which means that the employees care more about the benefits that they see on a daily basis and the employee voice is been heard over their size their paycheck.
Benefits of a VoE Program?
- Higher retention rates
- Lower development cost
- Feeling appreciated
- Feeling understood
- Happy and engaged staff
- Higher employee morale and fewer complaints
- Higher ROI
How to Start a Voice of the Employee System
1. Start at the Top
The value of the employee engagement program should be understood by the CXO level, especially the chief people officer of the organization. This would be the primary step towards implementing a successful VoE program. Once the leadership understood the value of the VoE program they can drive and convince the project owner to drive the project aligns to the company’s strategic interests and the underline employees will be motivated to drive VoE as a project. When the CEO is on-boarded the rest of the team automatically start focusing and supporting the VoE program.
2. Analyze Existing Programs
Most of the workplaces have lengthy employee feedback programs. You should analyze the existing programs and identify the objectives of the program. These employee feedback systems can come in the form of annual employee surveys, suggestion boxes, and other employee feedback systems. You can analyze the past data and identify trends and areas to target in your new employee engagement program.
3. Set Your Target
By analyzing the past data and targeted workforce you should be able to set your goals for each campaign. For an example, the goal can be to capture 50% feedback of the total blue-collar staff. This will help you to identify the scope of the Employee engagement program. The only thing worse than too little information is too much information.
4. Ask the Right Questions
Ones you have identified your target you should come up with non-bias question which is written in a manner that your employees understand. In other words, keep it simple and non-bias because results can be skewed by how the questions are asked, at times, even the order which you ask the question can affect the results.
5. Test the campaign and Rollout planning
Perrier to the rollout of the employee engagement program you should test run and identify whether the data is captured as your expectation. Then analyses the test data through the management dashboard to create a dashboard view, which can easily reflect the results to the management. Ones you have completed the testing, you should create a rollout plan to identify how you can roll out the employee engagement program within the company or multiple companies and identify at what point will you capture the feedback. Ones you follow the above steps you will be ready to launch a successful employee engagement program.
Ones the program is completed, by analyzing the data you can expand your view and have a better understanding of where the company is headed. This gives you the opportunity to make the changes to effectively guide the company to its goals.