“If you want to know what’s going on in a business, ask the people on the front line.” I don’t know where I read it, but I think it’s true. As I have written elsewhere, I believe a manager’s responsibility is to provide the practical and emotional resources for the people on his team to do their best. The only way I know of to find out if this is happening is to ask people who are being managed how they feel about working for their manager and their employer. Most people will see their manager as their employer; After all, there is another famous saying: “People don’t leave organizations, they leave managers”!
So how can we find out how employees feel about working for us? Well, there are a number of tools available. Many large companies conduct regular employee surveys, and there are outsourcing companies that will conduct this exercise in strict confidence for you. Another great tool is to use 360-degree feedback across the organization, so everyone gets feedback on their performance from everyone else who interacts with them.
At a company I once worked for, the CEO and directors held regular dinners for frontline people and support roles to get a chance to talk candidly about what was going on in the organization and how it was affecting the organization. Morale, Motivation and Customer Service. This company (I’ve written about them before, it was the GNER train company in the late 1990s) had made the link between employee engagement and customer service, and really understood how to bring out the best in their people.
It’s comparatively easy to run an employee survey or 360-degree feedback exercise. What is not so easy is acting on the results. It takes great humility on the part of business leaders to receive feedback from their employees and to admit that they have to change their behaviors if the company is to be more successful. So it’s great to give employees a voice, but it’s totally counterproductive if you don’t take the survey results into account.
Another company I worked for conducted an employee survey three years after I joined. They had a new CEO and he was determined to turn things around. To my knowledge, some of the results of that survey, which was carried out three years ago, have not yet been implemented. As a result, employee turnover remains high, and few if any of that company’s employees are reaching their full potential. Therefore, the business is not as successful as it could be. People come to work and do enough not to get fired.