Allegiance Blog

In my previous post, I provided some of the elements needed to make a solid business case for a formalized Voice of Employee (VOE) program. Now that you’ve got the WHY, let’s move on to the design mechanics you need to ensure your program delivers!

Intuitively, everyone seems to get it: happy employees are productive employees and productive employees impact the bottom line in countless ways. Yet, why isn’t this enough to secure funding for a systematic and ongoing employee voice program? Because you simply can’t count on translating common sense to resources in today’s business environment that relies on hard ROI figures and up-to-the-minute financial performance to drive investment. You need to make a solid business case.

How much impact does employee engagement have on a company’s bottom line? More than you think. A recent Gallup study estimated that disengaged employees wasted more than $300 billion in productivity at U.S. firms. The flip side: firms with engaged workforces have 2.6 times the earnings per share growth rate compared to their industry counterparts.

You have a well-designed, comprehensive feedback program in place, with several gigabytes of data on employee and customer satisfaction, loyalty and engagement. Now is the time to maximize the actionability of your VOC (Voice of the Customer) and VOE (Voice of the Employee) initiatives and optimize the ROI realized from your feedback program.

Engaged employees contribute to the bottom line. As their engagement is reflected in their service to customers, they are helping to create more loyal customers. Highly engaged customers buy more products, refer potential customers to a company, stay longer and give more feedback, which, in turn, gives companies the opportunity to address issues and concerns and preserve potentially lost revenue.

For any VOC initiative, it is just as critical to conduct employee surveys as it is to survey customers. Employee engagement drives customer engagement, and without understanding the hearts and minds of your employees, your VOC initiative will be incomplete.

This blog post discusses the results of a quantitative survey that Allegiance recently conducted with voice of the employee (VOE) practitioners, including human resource vice presidents, directors and managers, as well as other HR-related titles. It also talks about why, in order for companies to create and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage once they economy rebounds, they not only need to be actively listening to their employees now in real-time to address and resolve any concerns that they have, but also start putting some strategic measures in place to retain their best and brightest employees.

In the work that we do here at Allegiance, we occassionally come across a company that is afraid to ask for or collect feedback from their customers or employees for fear of what those individuals might say–or that the only feedback that they’ll receive will be negative.

While this is a natural human concern, it isn’t a concern that typically matches up with reality.

Read this blog post to learn more about why collecting customer feedback is crucial to creating more value for your customers.

A survey recently conducted by Towers Perrin, a global professional services firm, reveals that the current economic environment is stirring widespread anxiety among U.S. employees about their job security. This blog talks about some of the most important things that companies can do to increase their employee productivity and loyalty in this environment.

The hot new word on the street is “Community.” (A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, online social networks or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes). One could say that we have reached the tipping point where companies must incorporate communities into their marketing communication and public relations strategy. But before you do, here are some items that you may want to consider before diving into this brave new world.