Are you Listening to your Employees?

August 11, 2017

Are you collecting employee feedback and input on an ongoing basis in order to remove obstacles and identify opportunities? A key element of healthy, successful leadership teams is prediction – being so in touch with employees that predicting what’s coming next (or creating the opportunity to do so) is clear.

This can become difficult as companies scale to more employees, customers, geographies, markets, etc. Building communication rhythms right and well from the beginning can have a positive, compounding effect in companies

Here are four steps to help ensure you have an ongoing system for collecting employee input to identify obstacles and opportunities – it’s #4 on the Rockefeller Habits Checklist from the book Scaling Up by Verne Harnish.

1.     All executives (and middle managers) have a Start/Stop/Keep conversation with at least one employee on a weekly basis.

2.     Insights from employee conversations are shared at the weekly executive team meeting.

3.     Employee input about obstacles and opportunities is being collected weekly.

4.     A mid-management team is accountable for the process of closing the loop on all obstacles and opportunities.

Having the right employee communication rhythms and processes in place is key to avoiding obstacles and finding opportunities. Want to learn more about implementing this kind of process into your company? Contact me for a free consultation.