10 Actionable Strategies for 2020: Listen to Employees and they will Stay
If you’re interested in outperforming your competition by retaining amazing talent, listening is critical. Engagement data consistently aligns with this basic fact: an engaged workforce is one that feels heard. Certainly the most well known data comes from Gallup’s global study of ten million workplace interviews. The pioneering study identified 12 statements which best predict employee and workgroup performance. One of these 12 statements, Item 7 is “At work, my opinions seem to count”. Gallup’s data reveal that just three in ten US workers strongly agree that at work their opinions seem to count. However, Gallup suggests that by doubling that ratio to six in 10 employees, organizations could realize a 27% reduction in turnover, a 40% reduction in safety incidents and a 12% increase in productivity. Surely a worthy organizational investment for 2020.
But what is an “engaged workforce” really?
Within the word engagement is engage: to participate in; join; become involved; share in; play a role in. To engage by definition is an interactive process. With the current 50 year low in unemployment, the HR and organizational development field has bombarded management with strategies for improving engagement, retention, and performance, so it’s hard to know where to place organizational energy. If I had to pick a key element which connects the dots between engagement on one hand, and a productive and healthy culture, it would be heightened organizational listening. It is always dangerous to pick one element given that a healthy culture is about so much more. In fact, culture is often described with a somewhat amorphous sounding list: the behavioral norms of how we get things done, how we communicate and make decisions, what behavior gets rewarded and punished, and what it takes to “fit”. I firmly believe, along with other culture-first professionals that culture is arguably the enabler of all workplace health and productivity, but that is for another post. I am proposing today that we start with a bite of the elephant. The right bite. The data is unambiguous. We know employees absolutely need to feel and be heard, valued, appreciated; heightened listening strategies can meet this need to accelerate higher engagement.
Organizations are human too, or rather, they behave like humans in many ways and so they need feedback to understand how they’re doing. Organizations who do not listen miss precious opportunities to gain valuable perspective from the workforce and tweak organizational behaviors that no longer serve them well. In my view, the KOD (kiss of death) for a company is when employees experience a gap between what management says and what management does. Once credibility fails, employees lose faith in what management says - an extraordinarily tough spot to climb out of. Therefore it’s essential to catch the cycle before it plummets to lost employee trust.
Here are 10 actionable ideas to enhance organizational listening:
Train leaders to tell less and ask more. We’ve been conditioned to listen to authority all our lives - first at home by parents, then by teachers in school, and ultimately at work managers become the ones invested in “telling” - announcing, presenting, persuading. This makes it shockingly difficult to shift from “tell” mode all the time to a more balanced approach: tell when the situation calls for it, and ask more. Do this and you’ll be on track for dramatic improvement in listening between individuals.
Cascade, but invite reaction. Cascading or waterfalling is the practice of having each level of management share important news and information with their respective teams. This is an excellent way to make sure communication is happening throughout the company - but it is, as most organizational communication is - exclusively one-way, top down. It is messaging which is unavoidably driven by management’s perspective. Find ways to reverse the waterfall to gather employee perspective: ask questions to draw input and feedback from employees. This is powerful for several reasons: 1) it is hierarchy-busting, 2) it has the potential for genuine dialogue between leadership and employees and 3) it is less common and your employees will notice and welcome this approach.
Communicate and listen around and through change. Change is ironically when employees need communication most, and when it often breaks down in a company. Naturally, as we all know all too well, employees fill the void by shopping for answers, or making stuff up - both typically far worse than reality. You can and should still communicate during times of transition when you do not have all the answers, especially when you do not have answers. Build scripts for managers on what they can say, and how to react by acknowledging fears. Resist the urge to stay away.
Start with why. One of the biggest “aha” moments of my career was when, after vast amounts of “communication” on major change initiatives in my company, a VP asked me, “Ilana, why are we really doing this?” I couldn’t believe after so much “communication” this wasn’t clear to him still. But I realized the why hadn’t been clearly articulated, nor had we sufficiently previewed the initiative with managers. So start with why, and then make it safe for managers and employees to express concerns. Then respond to those concerns. Build your FAQ on real questions bubbling up, not just made up questions you have imagined.
Pilot initiatives. Test messaging and experiment in launching of initiatives with a subgroup, conduct focus groups with managers, and with their nominated (code for best) employees to gain understanding and anticipate employee reaction: is anything unclear? Does messaging adequately answer the why, and address issues? Listen...and incorporate responses to objections into broad rollout of messaging.
Train your leaders to share their opinion last in meetings - they of course should hold a meeting, describing the desired outcome for a discussion, but seek opinions and let the brainstorm flow. If leaders offer opinions too early or too forcefully, ideas will be shut down. In my experience, the most powerful question a leader can ask is simply “What do you think?”
Make it ok, and even rewarded, to talk about mistakes and lessons learned. Sometimes these are called “after action reviews”, or “retros”. Whatever the format, if management models being vulnerable, open, with less glossing over and sugar coating what everyone knows didn’t go so well, the impact will be significantly magnified.
Encourage horizontal collaboration - it enhances listening because it breaks silos and department-first thinking. Dual reporting structures and project teaming across the globe are healthy examples. Focus on the collective work to be accomplished, get to know one another sufficiently for trust to take root. When you believe your colleagues have your back and you can let your guard down, you achieve the feel of a flatter structure in which everyone feels they are in the loop.
Include a 360 development process in your leadership development initiatives. Leaders gain critical self-awareness, especially of their blind spots, to learn about their strengths and development needs through a variety of perspectives, not only from their manager, but also from peers and direct reports. Only very rarely are leaders “born”; most of the rest of us get better by listening to feedback, and taking action to drive behavioral change.
Conduct an employee engagement survey. But, as I tell my clients, don’t even think about a survey unless you are willing to commit organizational energy to three things: 1) share results broadly; 2) drill down on the data (such as via focus groups) to sufficiently understand what the data is really saying; and, 3) most importantly, act quickly and clearly based on the results. As an example, I’m often asked what the optimal interval is between surveys, and my reply is “long enough for the organization to demonstrate something has been DONE about a concern on the prior survey”.
On the path to improving organizational listening, beware of these traps in order to avoid the KOD of lost employee trust:
Commit to the effort as an organizational lifestyle, an essential aspect of high performing company culture - don’t treat this as a one and done exercise (“we’ll just create a newsletter - done!”)
Face the fear. Listening to employees can be scary to leaders because it’s unpredictable by nature, and as such, easy to understand why organizations limit these opportunities. However, this is no excuse if you’re serious about retention and productivity. Accept the fear that you do not know what you will hear.
Make it worthwhile for employees to speak up by hearing their perspective, no matter what you’ve heard - and genuinely respond.
We hear more and more about the importance of psychological safety in the workplace - or what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, defines as “a climate in which employees feel comfortable being and expressing themselves”. How do you operationalize such an essential, yet complex, seemingly intangible goal? Enhanced listening is a terrific way to start. If you work in an organization that already does this well, congratulations and keep up the good work! In whatever sphere of influence you have, commit to improving your listening in 2020 - for your colleagues, your team, your organization.