Voice of the Employee Research

Voice of the Employee is a research approach designed to support customer driven strategies and organizations -- where evidence is used to drive change in your business.

Traditional employee research, based on polling methods, supports push sales strategies designed to sell or spin existing policies and programs regardless of employee needs or requirements. That's why polling is used so frequently in political contests and advertising research.

But if you need to honestly assess the strength and weaknesses of your employee relationship, assess product, service or program performance with employees, you need a very different research approach. That approach, is Voice of the Customer.

Research for the Real World

Polling (and related employee research methods) typically identify statistically significant issues and concerns. As any business person or manager knows, what is statistically significant, is not nearly so important as what is significant to the employee and the business -- real world significance.

The objective of employee research, after all, is to identify what is important to the employee, not identify what results can be detected in contrast to a theoretical statistical distribution. That's why Voice of the Employee methods represent Research for the Real World.

If you and your business lives in the real world with the rest of us, you should investigate adopting Voice of the Customer research methods. Of course, if you are living somewhere else, it doesn't really matter what customer research methods you choose.

Information for Action

Traditional employee research techniques (Polling) can tell you how many employees feel this way or that about your product. They cannot, however, tell you why employees feel that way or whether the results are particularily good or bad -- despite considerable efforts to convince you otherwise.

Voice of the Employee research, however, is designed specifically to identify issues and concerns of customers that of practical importance to both you and the customer. This is information that can be used to drive improvement in your products, services and program -- information for action.

If you are still using traditional customer research, you probably are confronted with overwhelming numbers of statistically significant results. So many, it is hard to know where to start making things better. Of course, most if not all of these 'statistically significant' results have no real world significance, being completely unimportant to customers or the business.

In contrast, with VoCAl, our Voice of the Customer methodology, you will likely see only a few significant results but these few will be of real and practical importance to you and the business. In other words, VoCAl provides a clear and concise set of real improvement priorities.