About This Resource

This toolkit was initially created for our CA:RISE program, and is now available to the field!

PURPOSE

To provide employment social enterprises (ESEs) with a review of various Employee Voice Strategies that includes a description, benefits, and challenges of each and helping them choose one via a self-guided quiz.

INTRODUCTION

In any organization, employee voice is a vital tool for developing a culture of collaboration, innovation, and shared ownership. Yet, there are a variety of strategies that an organization might leverage to hear from the individuals who staff their organization. An Employee Voice Strategy refers to the way that employees express their feedback, concerns, and ideas and how that information is used to drive organizational decision making and strategy. An Employee Voice Strategy is particularly important for social enterprises, whose organizations are rooted in a desire for equity, or to remove and repair the harm caused by barriers due to oppression. In fact some organizations’ equity plan is synonymous with their Employee Voice Strategy as it creates an opportunity to honor the lived experiences of employees that are created by injustice and restore balance and wholeness.

Selecting an Employee Voice Strategy helps leaders move from simply assuming that their organization values and uplifts the voices of their employees to formalizing the process for doing that, which has several important benefits:

• It helps to ensure mission alignment and accountability as leaders have a regular and consistent process for hearing from the people their enterprise exists to serve. An effective employee voice strategy can help to build trust and demonstrate commitment to the ESE’s values.
• It promotes inclusivity and empowerment, which is essential for ESEs who exist to empower marginalized groups. Employee voice strategies help ensure that everyone—especially those who may have been historically excluded from decision-making—has a platform to share insights.
• It is becoming more and more common for funders of nonprofit organizations to require grantees to have an effective approach to hearing from those they serve that applicants can clearly articulate and implement during the grant cycle.
• An organizational Employee Voice Strategy also means that staff have a clear understanding of how to share feedback, which can contribute to a positive employee engagement experience, increasing employee satisfaction and retention.

This toolkit is designed to introduce you to the various approaches to developing an Employee Voice Strategy at your employment social enterprise. While there isn’t a hard and fast rule on which strategy is the best, there are considerations that might make one option more appropriate and effective to your unique context.

Download the toolkit here:

About Flying Whale Strategies

Flying Whale Strategies is supporting a new wave of nonprofit leaders who design definitive solutions to age-old problems. These leaders are working on deeply rooted challenges that have no foreseeable solution: hunger, the education system, criminal justice reform, the climate crisis, the refugee crisis, to name a few. And yet despite the enormity of these challenges, we believe nonprofit leaders could begin with the question, “Why can’t we?” They offer consulting and training in: culture, leadership, development, and operations.