Any leader or manager knows intuitively how important listening is as a leadership capability. It underpins the trust, respect and clarity that makes up successful relationships. However, we’ve learnt through our research that many organisations in the UK struggle to listen effectively to their employees.
If you’re listening effectively, you’ll be making sure people’s voices are heard, as well as giving genuine feedback to your teams. This covers conversations with your line manager, like an annual review, but it also covers the whole organisation, like an employee engagement survey.
According to our research, less than half of UK employees feel that their employer listens to them – a worrying statistic in itself. Even more shockingly – in the lowest performing 20% of companies (based on growth, profit and NPS), that figure rises to a whopping 95% of employees. Also, when we asked employees in the UK what they tell their friends and family about work, listening was one of the five most talked-about topics.
We looked at over 2,000 organisations across the UK and found that when organisations were good listeners, there was a direct correlation to positive growth and net promoter score (NPS). Put simply, listening is one of the biggest predictors of both how quickly your company will grow and how positively your customers will rate you.
Download our research into Organisational Fitness across 2000 UK companies
In fact, companies with the highest listening scores (as measured by our Organisational Fitness survey) are 14.4 times more likely to have the highest customer NPS compared to those who score the lowest.
The findings are clear – when you listen to your employees, it has a knock-on effect on your customer service. As Sir Richard Branson famously said “take care of your employees and they will take care of your customers”. Why is it important to listen to your employees? Because it’ll boost your NPS scores.
Companies that listen well are also 4.6 times more likely to have the highest levels of growth as opposed to companies with poor listening. For companies in high growth mode, taking the time to listen to their employees’ concerns, changing course appropriately and at speed, is what makes the difference between success and failure.
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