In today's competitive business environment, companies need to listen to their employees in order to be agile and adapt quickly. Learn why not listening to your employees can be detrimental to your business, and how to create a forum to open up the lines of communication and foster innovation and creativity.
Transcript from video
Hands down the biggest mistake. I see businesses across all industries and all sizes and all types of making when it comes to engaging their people and driving productivity and supporting a high level of retention not listening to your employees. Now, this comes from the industrial revolution where we used our top-down business systems, where the management and the leadership came up with ideas, and then we just gave that to the factory workers and say gone with that. And we didn't need any innovation from them. We didn't need ideas from them. And it didn't matter if they were engaged because there were limited jobs available, so they weren't going to leave. Today's world is very different.
Today, we need innovative staff because businesses are changing constantly because competition has increased due to the internet and the speed of ideas has changed, thanks to the internet. So we need for businesses to be successful, you need staff that can come up with ideas, can see ways of doing things better so that your business can be agile faster and adapted. So for that, you need engaged staff and if your staff is disengaged, then I'm gonna do that. But here's the problem. Nice businesses are still stuck in that old way of doing things that stuck in an old-fashioned way.
They tell themselves that they need to create a strategic direction, which they do. and they need to pass that down. It's solid instructions to their teams so their teams can get on with it. And they're so busy stuck in that process. that your engaged employees, that's the employees that you've got throughout your business that really cares about the organisation
and really want it to grow are sat there with all these ideas and insights into how things could run better, but they're not able to express those ideas because there's no structure
in place for them for messages to come back up at the room's top down. It's what we call a waterfall system, not a fountain system. So this is really damaging because what happens is these engaged employees who genuinely care about the company that wanna share these ideas get more and more frustrated inability to share their ideas and see their ideas actioned.
And it's a double loss because many of the ideas that these employees have could radically transform a business. They could change it. Just one idea could have a huge impact on the business. So the way to do things better is layered within your organisation with your people that are on the ground exposed to it every day. But because they're not able to share that, they start to get disengaged frustrated, and fed up. The business doesn't get the benefits of all that innovation and creativity and ideas. So the business doesn't grow as fast as it could or adapt as fast as it could, the employees become disengaged and unhappy, and they eventually just leave because they don't feel because they're frustrated,
they don't feel able to affect change. So one of the most powerful things most organisations could do and then any external consultant for this is put a forum in place once a month or once a quarter where employees get to share their ideas and the leadership shows that they're listening to those ideas and celebrate the ideas that get implemented.
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Mike Jones Better Happy Founder
Mike founded Better Happy in 2018.
He now works with a variety of businesses ranging from small accountancies up to large organisations such as Travelodge on improving employee happiness. Mike's vision and the vision of Better Happy is 'Every employee happy, every business thriving'
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