TALKING HEADS
T
Bring employee voice into the boardroom
E
Louisa Moreton
Treat employees as
equals by giving them
a voice that you hear
and respond to.
mployee voice exists where
a company’s mechanisms
and culture enable it to have
an ongoing conversation
with colleagues, in different ways, to
ensure opinions and ideas are heard.
It’s embraced by companies that see
their people as central to delivering their
vision and strategy.
Achieving this is not just a task for
HR. Boards have a remit (under the
revised UK Corporate Governance
Code) to “establish a method for
gathering the views of the workforce”;
implement “a means for the workforce
to raise concerns in confidence and (if
they wish) anonymously”; and “ensure
that arrangements are in place for
the proportionate and independent
investigation of such matters and for
follow-up action”.
However, it feels as if ‘employee
voice’ is still misunderstood. For me,
it boils down to gauging sentiment,
ideas sharing/problem solving, and
issue raising. Gauging sentiment
involves knowing how people are
feeling and segmenting audience
groups to understand the causes of
these sentiments. Surveys enable you
to benchmark and track progress, but
frequent dialogue-based interventions
such as leadership listening sessions
add first-hand exposure.
With problem solving, consider
how people can share ideas around
processes and innovation (before
bringing in external consultants).
Innovation jams and hackathons are
helpful for giving focus, with board
“Consider how
people can share
ideas around
processes
and innovation,
before bringing
in external
consultants”
members part of the assessing panel.
During a listening tour, boards could
simply ask employees, “what would you
change if you could?”.
Raising issues goes beyond whistle-
blowing to creating a safe environment
in which people can question how things
are done. Strong employee voice can
only thrive under three conditions:
It must be two-way, with people
given the opportunity to speak as
equals. Messages imparted must be
representative of diverse views across
the organisation, and the process
must be repeated. Board members
need to spend time with employees in
multiple locations and conduct data and
sentiment analysis on a regular basis.
Ways of giving employees a voice
within organisations include conducting
regular surveys; enabling unions to act as
intermediaries between staff and boards,
creating two-way communication
channels; and board member site visits,
including listening sessions.
Schemes to enable the reverse
mentoring of board members also
amplify workers’ views, while some
firms develop employee boards to feed
perspectives into the main board, or
allocate a non-executive director to lead
on employee voice and engagement.
Former prime minister Theresa May
proposed putting workers on company
boards as part of corporate reform,
but this was dropped from the
government’s plans.
In my view, developing robust
employee voice requires all of the above.
If ‘employee voice’ is represented too
narrowly, understanding will be limited;
without some formality, it only takes a
small change in leadership composition
or company fortunes for employee
voice to be relegated. ‘Voice’ sounds
like communications, but it’s about
culture, engagement, involvement
and motivation. The UK Corporate
Governance Code gives HR an
opportunity to re-stress its importance
to C-suite in a strategic conversation that
links people and business outcomes.
Louisa Moreton is a partner at Finsbury,
specialising in employee engagement,
communication and change.
February – May 2020 // 47