4 Laws of Building Listening Organizations — Rule 4: Make it Satisfying

When I sat down to pen down the final article of the 4-part series last Sunday night, I was not in the right mind. My thoughts were unclear, and I couldn’t think straight. I don’t abuse any substance or such; for some weird reason, I felt not ready. Hence, I decided to give myself a short break.

On Monday night, just before writing the article, I had this powerful appetite inside me to write. An urge to pen down the article. And while writing it, I am getting satisfaction in writing at my own pace and will.

I generally don’t prepare before writing. I just start and let myself go wherever the words take me. That is the reason my articles haven’t been great, save legible. However, I write for my satisfaction. I am seeing an improvement and I feel, once we get a feeling of satisfaction, we are likely to get better at it. This was missing on Sunday night.

Until now, we have examined 3 out of 4 laws on how we can make a culture of listening in the workplace. (Links can be found in the comments section). In this last article of the series and my last formal article of 2021, we will explore the last and the most important law, “Make it Satisfying”.

How can we make “Giving Feedback” a satisfying experience for employees? You can flip this question as to how can we make “Listening” a satisfying experience for employers and managers?

Of course, you can tie up rewards and benefits with feedback. Gamification and ease of giving feedback are the bare minima to drive listening/speaking culture. However, they alone cannot accomplish the task of making a “Listening First Culture”. They need something more intangible.

I saw “ Man of Steel “ 6 years back. I have a faint memory of kryptonite and the war and everything else but one thing that I can vividly recall is a piece of advice that a church father gave to Clark Kent. It said, “Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith first. The trust part comes later”

Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith first. The trust part comes later

I cannot dare to insult the reader by explaining the meaning of it. It is a very genuine and humble point. And at the workplace, we need the same. Management and Employees, must cultivate enough faith in each other first and then comes the question of Trust.

Faith at the workplace can be cultivated by practising some of the following:

1. Respecting employee feedback. Whether the management is going to act on feedback or not. The very first thing to ensure is that feedback is respected. It is viewed with utmost respect and sincerity. It should be viewed as a Leap of Faith by employees into the employer that things can be improved.
2. Acting on employee feedback. For organizations, it is technically not possible to act on all feedback. However, on close inspection, the management would sense a pattern in feedback. Tools like Lissen.io ensure that a business user can identify the patterns in feedback so that the underlying issues can be tackled. Generally, the number of problems at root are very less whereas we get an overwhelming number of symptoms.
3. Have faith in employees. Leaders which stay humble, vulnerable, and open for feedback have the highest faith in their people. As a result, they not just get criticism but also positive feedback. Not all employee feedback is bad feedback. As per our data, more than 2 3rds of the total feedback collected will be positive. For just some criticism, turning face from the majority of appreciators of your workplace culture doesn’t make business sense. Don’t beat yourself too much 😊
4. Aspire to be a Great Place to Work FOR ALL. The ultimate motive of building a listening workplace culture is to have a system where everyone can perform their best. Great workplace culture is an instrument using which enables every human to achieve their personal best. And once you create this human-centric organization, by whatever means, you will have an unmanageable load of ideas, innovation, operational excellence, and business success.

Whatever you do, ensure that no person feels left out at your workplace. Society is not fair to all. Life is not fair to everyone. Under such circumstances, have faith in the unlimited potential of human beings and give them a platform to perform.

This leap of faith into humanity and its unlimited potential will surely give you success at work.

Note: Views expressed are personal.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.