VoE: Supporting Meaningful Change

Posted on Jan 04 in Featured, VoE by admin

Interested in employee research that actually makes a difference? Voice of the Employee (VoE)  is a research methodology designed to support employee driven change — where hard evidence is used to drive improvement.

Traditional research, based on polling methods, support strategies that push or force feed solutions on to people. That’s why polling is used so frequently in political contests and advertising research, where the data is used to spin messages that are pushed onto the public.

An organization responding to the needs of employees needs something very different – an honest assessment of the strength and weaknesses of your relationship with employees. These needs can only be met through Voice of the Employee.

VOE  provides information that drives improvement to process or service design. Improvements that yield changes that employees want and demand – that are pulled by the employee rather than pushed by the company.

Research for the Real World

Traditional customer research (of which polling is an example) uses statistical significance to highlight issues and concerns. As any manager knows, what is statistically significant is not nearly so important as what is significant to the customer or to the business — real world, economic significance. This is the biggest difference between traditional employee research and Voice of the Employee. Traditional research identifies what is statistically significant; VoE identifies what is important!

Doesn’t statistical significance measure importance? Not at all. Equating statistical significance with importance or real world, economic significance is and example of:

(i) scientific/statistical incompetence or

(ii) simple fraud.

Statistical significance is the probability of detecting a result using an assumed theoretical probability distribution as a benchmark of expectations.  Now if that is what you are looking for – great. For those less interested in detectability estimates based on assumed theoretical probability distributions and more interested in finding what is really important to people, then analytic methodologies such as Voice of the Employee are the only scientific approaches capable of delivering the results you are looking for.

You can’t be customer driven if you can’t tell the difference between the wheat and the chaff – between what is really important to customers and what isn’t.

Information for Action

Traditional employee research techniques (such as polling) can tell you how many employees feel this way or that about some organizational characteristic. But what traditional research cannot identify is why people like or dislike the characteristic or what can be done about it. You have probably noticed your employee research has a so what quality to it, leaving management wondering: What am I supposed to do with this?

Voice of the Employee, however, is designed specifically to identify issues and concerns that of real and practical importance to both you and your customers. This is information that is specific, concrete and of real world importance - information that can be used to drive improvements in your products, services and programs. Information for action.

VoE not only produces information intended to support management action but also supports an accurate set of priorities. If you are using traditional customer research, you probably have an overwhelming numbers of statistically significant results. So many, it is hard to know where to start. Of course, most if not all of these results are of no practical importance. This is why statistical significance is used, because it generates so many ‘significant’, albeit meaningless, results.

In contrast, VoE offers  fewer significant results but these few results will be of real world significance to you and the business. This gives you a  clear and concise set of improvement priorities that will actually make a difference.

Employee Driven Organization Development

Some organizations believe they engage in employee driven change simply because they conduct employee research and respond to it. Organizations using traditional research are more driven by meaningless statistical significance tests than by the real needs of employees. The only voice that is being heard is that of an assumed theoretical probability distribution. This results in an increasing disconnect between the business and its customers. Organizational development initiatives must be pushed onto employees. Why? If these initiatives are really what people wanted, why the hard sell? Shouldn’t evidenced-based initiatives be pulled by employees? Yes, they should.

Employee driven organization development responds to the voice of the customer. This voice is embedded into the design and delivery of OD initiatives. The result are initiatives that people demand – without all the pushing. Reputation grows as the business is perceived as effectively responding to employee needs.

All this is predicated on having a research method capable of identifying what is important to employees and what isn’t. Traditional customer research can’t do it.

Voice of the Employee can .