Elevating the Employee’s Voice to the Top of the Organizational Agenda

Read my Perspectives in the summer 2019 issue of People+Strategy Journal.

Have you ever kept silent while harboring a deep sense of unfairness? Have you ever felt powerless against the inequities of organizational politics? Have you ever wondered why some speak up and act on their values, and do so effectively, while others remain silent? What do leaders and organizations need to do to make sure the employees’ voice is heard? 

Our select panel of scholars, practitioners, and consultants reflect on the current state of organizational practice, highlighting the critical role that leaders, managers, and employees collectively play in elevating the employee’s voice to the top of the organizational agenda. 

Dr. Margaret Luciano, Assistant Professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, opens the discussion with this issue’s central question on how organizations could act upon employees’ voicing their opinions and concerns. Luciano argues that it must include at least three important steps: a) open-minded honest discussions, b) consideration of multiple stakeholders combined with creative problem-solving, and c) purposeful action and reassessment. Luciano’s project is not to create a rule for every possible ethical dilemma but to provide a platform that helps decide on how to deal with any ethical challenge that may come along.

Bob Dent, Senior Vice President, Chief Operating, and Chief Nursing Officer at Midland Memorial Hospital, is leading his organization from a culture of accountability to a culture of ownership. He reveals three success factors he discovered on this journey: a) the importance of being emotionally positive and intolerant of toxic behaviors, b) the importance of self-empowerment through the philosophy “proceed until apprehended,” and c) and a culture of full engagement.

Dr. Ethan Burris, Professor of Management at University of Texas at Austin, examines the middle manager’s central role in taking action on employees’ voice. Whether the issues are acted upon and lead to change or get deprioritized and forgotten is more often than not a question of whether middle management has the resources, discretion, and the lines of communication to senior management to act. As many recent examples show, “ideas can easily get cast aside if the pressures to perform overwhelm the desire to change.”

Dr. Heba Makram, HR Transformation Lead at Emirates Airlines, reflects on the difficult negotiation between responding to the employees’ voice and navigating organizational politics. She argues strongly for the role of HR in de-signing the right processes and supportive systems, as well as honoring traditions that create the right conditions for the employee voice to be heard. 

Dr. Mary-Clare Race, President of Mind-Gym, Inc., focuses on the strategies to overcome disconnect between explicit corporate messaging of openness and implicit signals to the employees to remain silent. At the organizational level, it is critical to figure out the balance between the culture of safety while respecting different and often conflicting viewpoints. Managers need to be trained on the shifting boundaries between what could have represented the voicing of a different perspective but now could be perceived as a “micro-aggression.” 

Dr. Thomas Aloia, Professor of Surgical Oncology and Head of the Institute for Cancer Care Innovation at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, closes this set of Perspectives with remarks on the critical role senior leaders play in endorsing, promoting, and role modeling the culture of transparency. Aloia argues against hands-off leadership stating that there is no option for leaders to remain neutral and noncommittal and hide behind the concepts of emotional intelligence. Organizational culture comes down to engaged and value-based leadership.

Creating Value from Employee Voice

By Margaret Luciano

In her influential book Giving Voice to Values, Mary Gentile offered an important step forward in business ethics training by advocating for organizations to help prepare people to voice their values. Voicing one’s values, as opposed to silently assenting to the status quo, is a critically important step beyond awareness and analysis of ethical issues. Building on Gentile’s recommendations, I advocate for consideration of how organizations can create value from the employee’s voice. 

Research has generated numerous insights regarding types of voice (e.g., promotive, prohibitive), factors that encourage voice (e.g., proactive personality, felt responsibility, psychological safety, leadership), and why voice is important (e.g., influences job performance). How-ever, we know relatively little about how managers should respond to employee voice, how to decide which suggestions to pursue, and how to implement them. In my experience working with organizations to implement change initiatives, employees can (and often do) clearly articulate what they believe is wrong with their organization—the issue is how to fix it. Herein I outline three key ways to facilitate creating value from voice: open-minded and honest discussions, consideration of multiple stakeholders combined with creative problem-solving, and purposeful action and reassessment.

Open-Minded and Honest Discussions

Many scholars and practitioners have highlighted the importance of bringing your whole self to work. I would like to highlight the importance of bringing your whole mind to work—and ideally an open mind. For value-based discussions to be effective, individuals must be willing to speak up and listen up. Unfortunately, discussions of values can quickly devolve into emotional arguments based on limited personal experiences. In the era of social media, we are bombarded with sensationalism, biased perspectives, and even outright lies. To be clear, an open mind does not mean acceptance of all perspectives or value systems; rather it is a willingness to honestly consider new information and acknowledge the possibility that your original perspective was wrong or incomplete. Post-hoc rationalization of emotional decisions is a dangerous practice we must guard ourselves against.

Many ethical decisions in the work-place will not be clear, choices will more often be between two good options—or perhaps one that is right and one that is easy. Indeed, many unethical behaviors stem from the failure to make hard choices. It is important for HR to help train employees to overcome cognitive biases and limitations as well as to effectively gather and communicate information. Although HR cannot anticipate every possible set of circumstances an employee may encounter, they can pro-vide training on a structured approach to dealing with ethical challenges—whatever form they may come in.

Consideration of Multiple Stakeholders Combined with Creative Problem-Solving

Value conflicts at work are often not only between an individual employee and the organization, but also between employees. Soliciting multiple opinions representing multiple perspectives will help assure a holistic understanding of the situation. It is important to remember that the loudest voices are not necessarily the most informed or representative voices. 

The potential for conflicting values creates the need to engage in creative problem-solving.

When an employee voices a suggestion, managers may need to dig deeper to understand not only the content of the employee’s request, but also what values are underlying the suggestion and why the employee thinks it is important. Understanding why enables engagement in creative problem-solving, including looking for mutually beneficial solutions. In situations that require selecting between alternatives, giving individuals a voice in the process and engaging them in problem-solving will help illuminate the rationale behind the selected alternative and motivate the individuals whose ideas were not selected to fully participate in the implementation and continue voicing other ideas in the future. This approach is most effective when employees understand and respect the difference between having a voice and having their way (i.e., inputs were considered vs. outcomes as desired).

HR has an important role in this area by helping to create a culture of ownership and promoting a shared understanding. A shared understanding is critical to helping employees determine better solutions—many seemingly good suggestions will not work for very valid reasons that the individuals are un-aware of based on their particular role in the organization. A shared system of understanding goes beyond buying into the company mission, vision, and core values to include the organizational structure and interdependences between roles—in short, understanding how changing one thing will influence the other parts of the system. 

Purposeful Action and Reassessment

It is easier to complain than to lead change. In many circumstances managers may become fatigued by employee voice, particularly if they feel they do not possess the knowledge, skills, support, and resources to address their concerns. Awareness of issues, especially value conflicts, without fol-low-through may be counter-productive for employees as it creates cognitive and emotional dissonance. It is import-ant for voice to be constructive and action-oriented to avoid devolving into venting sessions. Change is a process and raising awareness via voice is an important initial step, but we need to keep going—albeit in a focused, mea-sured, and purposeful manner. There may be many great ideas, but only sufficient resources to pursue a couple of them at that time. Haphazard, half-hearted action can be worse than doing nothing as it wastes resources, discourages future efforts, and con-tributes to the sentiment “nothing ever changes around here.”

HR can help make it is easier to design and lead change by providing training and being actively involved in the implementation process. For example, HR can assist in determining key performance indicators to assess change effectiveness and help collect data to enable assessment and reassessment. This is critically important as change may have intended and unintended consequences. Unintended negative consequences do not necessarily mean a change should be scrapped, rather it may be better to adjust or add elements. Particularly for more complex change, several rounds of adjustments may be required to optimize effectiveness. HR assisting in this process is particularly important as many managers do not have the time or training to systematically determine the effects of change.

Why Managing Employee Voice Is Easier Said Than Done

By Ethan Burris

Employees routinely encounter problems in their work environment. Issues with coordination across functional teams, challenges with effectively implementing the strat-egy laid out by senior leaders, problems with managerial styles, and even ethical issues. Employees may have some ideas to address them, but they also do not have the sole authority to take action on their own. At the end of the day, they need help from above to make substantive changes.

At the same time, most senior executives want to help facilitate changes in order to realize their strategic goals. They understand that they do not always have all of the information necessary to make decisions. They are not the ones routinely interfacing with suppliers. They are not on the front lines of the manufacturing floor. They are not the ones hearing customer feedback on a daily basis. They have the authority to take action, but they must rely on other employees in the organization to surface the issues that need to be addressed.

Both of these parties rely on middle managers to take strategically important information from employees and either take corrective action right away or relay it in a way that ultimately drives change. In my own research, I have found that managers who proactively look for change stemming from employee ideas, have the resources necessary to make those changes, or feel they have a direct line to upper management to acquire those resources can leverage employee voice to generate improvements. In one study, this led to a reduction of turnover by roughly 30 percent. In another, it led to improvements in financial and operational performance by 20 percent.

Yet, the challenge is that these managers are also under tremendous pressure to execute against their cur-rent goals, and leveraging employee ideas necessarily means 1) taking on new tasks, 2) changing processes to accomplish existing tasks, and/or 3) explaining to senior executives why their current strategic goals or the processes to accomplish those goals need to be changed. 

If these managers begin to feel that there is greater pressure to perform, rather than taking on extra tasks requiring additional time, resources, and attention that would divert from executing against current goals, it be-comes easy to deprioritize ideas from below. It becomes easier to ignore problems identified.

For many sensational examples of management failing to act on voice, it is easy to see the ethical failures of executives in ignoring moral pleas to fix problems that could lead to disasters, financial and otherwise. Yet, I highly doubt that any executive or middle manager set out to engage in actions that would cause moral trauma. Competing pressures to perform a set of cur-rent tasks and make necessary changes to those very tasks to improve is difficult to navigate. For those wanting to manage this process better, research does suggest ways to help navigate these tensions. For managers, constructing performance criteria that includes improvement and change can help create greater receptivity to ideas from below that require such changes. For employees, developing a greater sensitivity to the difficulty in driving change can help set the stage for more support. For instance, changes requiring less coordination across multiple stakeholders in the organization or requiring fewer resources to implement makes it easier for managers to support those changes. Pitching the ideas in a way that aligns with the key performance indicators of higher level managers can more compellingly convince them of the importance.

Leveraging employee voice has the potential to catalyze not only performance improvements but engagement among employees who see their ideas come to fruition. Yet ideas can easily get cast aside if the pressures to perform overwhelm the desire to change.