Designing for Employee Voice
This work addresses the challenge of enabling constructive employee feedback for organizational improvement, though it is incremental as it builds on existing concepts of workplace democracy.
The paper tackled the problem of fostering employee voice in organizations by designing a secure anonymous system based on identified qualities like civility and safety, resulting in a two-week deployment that generated candid discussions on workplace issues.
Employee voice and workplace democracy have a positive impact on employee wellbeing and the performance of organizations. In this paper, we conducted interviews with employees to identify facilitators and inhibitors for the voice within the workplace and a corresponding set of appropriate qualities: Civility, Validity, Safety and Egalitarianism. We then operationalised these qualities as a set of design goals - Assured Anonymity, Constructive Moderation, Adequate Slowness and Controlled Access - in the design and development of a secure anonymous employee voice system. Our novel take on the Enterprise Social Network aims to foster good citizenship whilst also promoting frank yet constructive discussion. We reflect on a two-week deployment of our system, the diverse range of candid discussions that emerged around important workplace issues and the potential for change within the host organization. We conclude by reflecting on the ways in which our approach shaped the discourse and supported the creation of a trusted environment for employee voice.