Employee Voice survey: The what, why and how

What is Employee Voice?

Traditionally employee voice has been used to describe various channels for employees to communicate with their workplaces, including whistleblowing and trade unions. In a world of work where these kinds of collective voices are becoming less prominent, particularly within the private sector, technology is increasingly stepping into the void.

Giving your employees a viable, secure and safe way of communicating their thoughts, feelings and concerns is vital whether you work in an industry that is unionised or not. Research shows that individuals who feel able to voice their opinions within the workplace are happier and more engaged, feel more valued, have increased job satisfaction, enjoy better development opportunities, and are more productive. 

At The Happiness Index, Employee Voice is what we call always-on listening. It’s a way for your team to communicate how they think and feel with you directly. This allows you to create an environment where everyone can survive and thrive. 

The importance of Employee Voice

Any employee listening programme will benefit from having a 24/7 listening programme where people can feel back when and where they need to, rather than within the parameters of a predetermined survey window. This means you’re able to gather candid feedback that reflects the daily reality of working within your organisation for your people. 

Always-on listening is an employee-centric way of gathering employee feedback as it gives your people control over when they feedback and the topics they wish to cover. At its best this should be open-ended feedback that puts the employee and their feelings first. Giving individuals a voice within your organisation. Hence the name “Employee Voice”. 

Our Employee Voice survey

Employee Voice (EV) is an always-on listening tool which provides a safe and anonymous platform that empowers your employees to give feedback on their terms. EV is not designed to replace other aspects of the listening strategy. It allows your people to feedback when they want and about what they want.

This means you get feedback in the moment, when it’s most relevant - enabling you to create meaningful and empathetic action plans. It also allows your people to air what is most important to them, rather than around set themes that HR has chosen.

What questions are included in Employee Voice?

The tool is designed to give voice to your people. They are given the chance to answer one simple question - “On a scale of 1-10 how happy are you?” and then asked to explain why in a free text box. This allows you to see, in the moment, how your people are thinking, feeling and behaving.

Through our platform you’re also able to activate our 'closing the feedback loop' tool, this means that you’re able to respond to feedback within the platform, maintaining anonymity. You can use this to collect further context, signpost relevant resources, or ask other qualifying questions to help you to help your people. 

What are the benefits of Employee Voice?

Ultimately, Employee Voice gives people another opportunity to feed back, and share how they are feeling - any hour of the day, any day of the week. The benefit of agile feedback, rather than waiting for the next big employee survey, is the introduction of a lighter-touch approach. 

This creates (and reinforces) a feedback culture that demonstrates that you are serious about listening to your people and creating positive change. 

Having an always-on listening tool improves feelings of safety and acknowledgement for your team. And it demonstrates additional commitment to ensuring everyone has a voice.

What are the limitations of Employee Voice?

Employee Voice allows your people to give open-ended feedback, so you don’t have much control over the kinds of comments you will get. Many of our customers find they get really helpful comments which allow them to create a bespoke and reactive HR programme, but you’re not guaranteed to get specific topics.

There are ways round this: some of our customers include specific topics they’d like comments on each week with themes. But generally feedback will (and should!) be about whatever is most relevant to your people at that moment. This means you’ll likely need to commit to more surveys to complement your Employee Voice survey. 

As with all employee surveys, Employee Voice isn’t a tick box solution, you will need to take the data, analyse the comments and take action to see the most benefit (more on this below). In fact, simply listening to your people without taking action off the back of the feedback will see fewer responses in the future, negating the impact. 

Why should you use Employee Voice?

Our Employee Voice survey might seem simple - so why do you need to use our platform? Here are our top 5 reasons: 

1. Gain relevant, timely insights: Our Employee Voice survey allows you to understand how your people think and feel in the moment. Even with a deceptively simple survey like this, the impacts are really profound. We find many of our customers are able to gain really helpful insights. By having all your data in the same place, you’ll be able to explode data silos and use data from other HR platforms using our API as well as comparing results across different surveys. 
   

2. Guarantee anonymity: It’s really important to remember your results with any employee survey are only going to be as good as the data you get. To maximise both the quality and quantity of responses to any survey, we believe in the power of anonymity. Especially when it comes to surveys like Employee Voice, it’s going to be particularly important to give your employees the reassurance of anonymity to help ensure you’re getting accurate data. 
   

3. Customisable reporting options: Because Employee Voice gives people the opportunity to give feedback as often as they want or need to, the volumes of data can build up. That’s why it’s really important to get robust reporting solutions in place. Our in-platform reporting allows both quick at-a-glance overviews, and detailed reporting. 
   

4. Open up benchmarking opportunities: We don’t always recommend benchmarking against other organisations, but within our platform you can see how your results compare with other users. However, much more powerfully, you can benchmark against your own data. Look at improvements over time, dive deeper into seasonal trends, or compare departments, locations or job levels. 

5. Get access to other surveys: Our Employee Voice survey dovetails perfectly with other pre-built surveys within our library. This means that you will be able to build a listening programme that perfectly suits the unique needs of your organisation. You might spot trends within your Employee Voice data that you want to dive deeper into. This is the perfect time to launch a complementary survey from our library of 20+ surveys designed by our experts. Alternatively, you can build your own using our question bank, or from scratch. 

What actionable insights might you gain from Employee Voice? 

Because of the open-ended nature of our Employee Voice survey, the kinds of insights you might get are almost limitless. However, here are a couple of areas that you might unlock insights into:

1. Quick wins: Often our customers find there are areas where there’s an easy solution that will have a big impact on their team. For example, knowing that people are frustrated having to wait for their turn with a kettle could be easily solved by buying a second kettle for that particular floor. In this example you may find that there’s an impact on employee productivity as well as happiness and engagement. 
   

2. Areas for communication: You might find that some of what people are asking for or need, is already part of your offering. This might show you areas where you need to improve communications. It could be that your benefits package isn’t clear to all employees, or certain processes, such as salary reviews, aren’t transparent. By getting direct feedback from your people on their problems you’ll be able to not only signpost directly to these individuals, but you can also improve comms more widely around these issues. 
   

3. Ways your strategy is working: One of the ways we love to see our customers using insights is when they see a change they’ve made is working well. You might not think this is actionable - but celebrating wins organisation-wide will show not only that you’re having an impact and that feeding back using the system works, but also highlight the offering to everyone. Plus, you might find some of these successes can be applied to other locations, teams, or departments. 
   

4. Trends to monitor: You may spot patterns in your organisation’s happiness, for example based on seasonality, busy periods such as month-end, or based on organisational changes. You can’t stop people feeling less happy at times (happiness fluctuates, and toxic happiness doesn’t help anyone) but by understanding what causes the changes you might be able to mitigate stress during these times. You can also change your communications during these periods to suit the mood within your organisation. 
   

5. Questions to explore further: Lastly, you might notice clusters of responses. This is the perfect opportunity to do a further survey to dive deeper into the area and uncover a wider range of responses to this topic. Topics could include wellbeing, mental health, or particular neuroscience themes. By rolling out a specific survey for these you will be able to get more data, as well as more specific insights. 

What impacts have our customers seen from using Employee Voice?

Here are some of the things that our customers have noticed and said about our Employee Voice survey: 

“Employee Voice, the single most useful employee health check and engagement tool I’ve ever used. “ Paul Walker, Chief Commercial Officer at Vivobarefoot. 

• We have seen scores around the key neuroscience themes of Safety and Acknowledgement (specifically trust and feeling listening to) increase significantly within organisations who are using EV. 

• Many of our customers have told us that EV helps promote a culture of listening and feedback. For example, initially there might have been a lot of feedback directly through the tool. But then slowly as people become used to having their voices heard, they will begin to give more direct feedback in meetings and other settings. One customer said there is now a culture where even junior team members feel able to voice their opinions to leadership.

• “By listening to employee voices in real time, we were able to calm individual fears about health and safety concerns about a particular site. Physical safety concerns were resulting in poor psychological safety and were eroding trust. In reality, they had a communications issue, not a safety issue, but the data helped them identify the problem and fix it.” (From Matt Phelan’s book The Happiness Index: Why today’s employee emotions equal tomorrow’s business success.) 

How can you make sure you’re successful with Employee Voice?

An always-on listening programme needs nurturing in order to see the best success. Here are a couple of practical tips: 

1. Ensure adequate resource is allocated: As with any employee survey, it’s really important that you make sure you have time to analyse results, communicate feedback and action plan. Without these resources in place, your employee listening programme won’t achieve your goals.

2. Always be communicating: Plan to communicate with your people about their feedback at least once a month and always aim to reply to any closing the feedback loop requests as soon as possible. Even if you cannot action feedback immediately (or at all) make sure you’re transparent with your team about roadblocks, timelines and other milestones. 

3. Don’t put a target on happiness: This might seem counter-intuitive, but we warn against having a target score for your Employee Voice feedback. This is because toxic happiness is a real problem, and because all emotions are important for humans to feel. 

4. Actions speak louder than words: It’s all well and good talking about employee listening, but listening is only half the game. You also need to make changes off the back of your listening. Creating an action plan and following through is just as important as running a survey. 

5. Create a culture of listening: Listening shouldn’t start and stop with Employee Voice, but should permeate through your whole culture. Back up employee voice with other surveys from our library, but also consider other forms of listening such as employee advocacy groups, leadership open office hours, and more.

For more information on making the most out of Employee Voice, check out our eBook: How to succeed with Employee Voice.

What other surveys should you run with Employee Voice?

Our Employee Voice survey is perfect as a stand alone listening tool, but many of our customers find it helpful to use it alongside some of our other pre-built employee surveys. The most popular to use to improve culture and build employee happiness and engagement are: 

• Cultural Assessment: Understand your current climate and build a picture of what your people want and need to perform within your organisation. Learn More

• Equality of Voice: Our EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) survey is designed by experts to give you actionable insights. Use data to inform your culture and build an environment where everyone can survive and thrive. Learn More

• Wellbeing Index: Identify your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to wellbeing and mental health to build and maintain a happy, healthy workforce. Learn More

If you want to learn more about how Employee Voice could supercharge your organisation’s culture, why not chat to one of our experts? Book in a call today.