Why Listening to Employees Is a Leadership Superpower
Leaders can be many things. They can be influencers and inspirational. They can be drivers, they can be empathizers, they can be organizers. One thing all leaders have in common: they’re all human.
Leaders make mistakes, have shortcomings and are shaped by their histories and perspectives. The good news? Overcoming this doesn’t require leaders to be superhuman. All they need to do is learn how to tap into the wisdom and perspective of their employees … and be prepared to listen.
Yet many organizations seem to be lacking effective mechanisms for gathering employee feedback. The 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index found that among managers, over half feel leadership is out of touch with employee expectations and nearly three-quarters feel powerless to make changes based on what their teams need or want.
How My Company Taps Into Employee Perspectives
My company, Centric Consulting, started its listening program in 2015. Our Voice of the Employee (VOTE) Advisory Team provides transparent, immediate feedback from employees to leadership.
The team weighs in on major decisions, especially those impacting culture, as well as the smaller decisions impacting employees’ daily experiences. VOTE gives us an idea of how an issue will be viewed by the company as a whole and acts as an arena for iterating different approaches before we roll something out to the entire business.
VOTE has saved us from some big missteps, helping us make decisions for both the business overall and our employees.
In the early days of Covid-19, for example, Centric’s leadership team strategized ways to make it through the crisis intact. We had to plan for a potential worst-case scenario: Losing significant business and being forced to furlough people. We came up with a plan to rotate people being furloughed — it seemed the best possible solution.
That is, until we took our plan to VOTE. They preferred keeping everyone together, taking salary cuts if necessary to ensure fairness across the board.
“Ultimately, the VOTE team told Centric leadership that if it was all the same to the business in terms of getting the numbers to where they needed to be, we would rather just be hit by it equally with a pay cut. The decision from the team was unanimous. We didn’t want to furlough our peers. We didn’t want to risk losing our amazing team members to other opportunities. The team wanted to face the challenges together” says VOTE Lead Mallory Manke, a manager in Centric’s Cleveland business unit.
Luckily, we never had to put this plan into action, but if we did, without VOTE we would have ended up taking steps that people didn’t want … and missing an important moment in the history of our culture.
4 Elements of a Winning Employee Feedback Strategy
VOTE has become an integral tool for our leaders to make decisions that keep our employees happy and our culture strong. The following factors have made it a success:
It has full leadership support.
Perhaps most importantly, VOTE has full leadership support. Centric leaders value the insights the advisory board provides and make a point to not move forward with something without tapping into the group.
In addition, Centric leaders have worked to build a trusted relationship with VOTE, where vulnerability and transparency are highly valued. As a result, VOTE members feel comfortable providing raw, honest feedback. They’re unafraid to push back and let us know we’ve gotten it wrong.
“It’s definitely not a check-the-box exercise for Centric leadership,” says Jen Barnes, vice president of culture and communications and St. Louis practice lead. “It’s a way for leadership to check in with employees and let them know we actually care about what they are thinking and feeling in a proactive way.”
It delivers true diversity of opinion.
VOTE is made up of a rotating selection of employees from all levels, tenure with the company, type of role and background. Members serve for just a few years. In addition to providing direct feedback, VOTE members also are tasked with engaging their peers, keeping an ear to the ground on how people feel about things. As a result, leadership gets a diverse range of opinions from people throughout the organization.
It provides a check on assumptions.
It’s all too easy to make incorrect assumptions about what employees want or how they’ll feel about something.
VOTE often surprises leadership with their perspective. Things that seem like a huge deal sometimes aren’t, and they also often bring up factors we never would have considered. The feedback routinely helps us feel confident we’re making the right decisions for the right reasons.
It empowers employees to keep our culture alive.
Centric’s culture is all about providing unmatched employee and client experiences. Knowing that culture is a living, breathing thing, it’s essential to keep checking in with what an unmatched experience means for people today.
“What makes an experience or the work environment unmatched is going to vary from one person to the next,” Barnes says. “VOTE gives us a way to continue to make sure that whatever we’re calling an unmatched experience applies to as many people as possible, without that being defined by a small group of people with similar perspectives and world views.”
“VOTE ensures our intended culture and core purpose are actually the reality for people,” Manke adds.
Listening as a Superpower
When an organization’s leaders have a formal, structured way to engage employees and hear their opinions, experiences and perspectives, amazing things happen. Employees feel heard, valued and like they have a real stake in the company’s future. They feel empowered to speak up when issues arise, encouraging leadership to make the right changes at the right time. Leaders get to lead more effectively… and all without superhuman status.
Centric Consulting is an international management consulting firm with unmatched in-house expertise in business transformation, hybrid workplace strategy, technology implementation and adoption. Founded in 1999 with a remote workforce, Centric has established a reputation for solving its clients’ toughest problems, delivering tailored solutions, and bringing deeply experienced consultants centered on what’s best for your business.
