How a Leader Can Address Employee Concerns on an Individual Level

No matter how well an organization is run, there will always be problems along the way on all levels. Being a good leader is not so much about preventing these problems from happening at all although it’s good if you can achieve that.

Your main goal should rather be to ensure that whenever something is wrong, these concerns can be addressed on a close, personal level and that employees feel that they have the safety to express their thoughts. They should also know that their concerns will actually get addressed, which is a part of the equation that we often see missing in some larger organizations.

Why It’s Necessary in the First Place

If you don’t develop systems that can address concerns on a level as low as possible, you’re going to run into significant problems with your company in the long run. It might take a while for those issues to present themselves, but make no mistake they will sooner or later. The most obvious implication is that this will prevent you from knowing when something is wrong so that you can take corrective actions against the problem.

But it goes deeper than that. Ongoing issues with employees’ ability to voice their concerns can lead to growing resentment and decreased productivity. And when dealing with issues of this type, by the time you realize something is wrong, it’s often too late.

Providing Good Input Points

The most obvious thing you could do to make things better for your employees in this regard is to ensure that they have viable points to voice their concerns through. This will vary from one company to another, but the general idea is to have an integrated system that allows people to express what concerns they might currently have and to track their eventual resolution.

Modern technology can make it very easy to set something like this up, so take advantage of that. But make sure that the system is not too complicated to use, and does not exclude anyone for any reason. This will only lead to even more problems of the kind that you’re trying to address in the first place.

Filtering the Input

Not all input is equally good. In fact, as a leader of a company, you’ll have to deal with the problem of filtering out the good input from the bad. And this will sometimes be hard, especially when it comes to people’s concerns. Whenever someone has a problem that interferes with their work, their perception of its importance can get skewed. Some people see their issues as much more critical than they actually are.

And in some cases, someone might not even realize that the things they’re complaining about exist for a reason. The point is, you need an efficient way to filter those opinions out from each other, and this must be deeply rooted within your system itself.

Feedback

Once you’ve implemented something like this, your employees are going to start providing you with feedback on it sooner or later. And it’s a good idea to pay attention to what they have to say, as this will allow you to improve that system in the long run. Ideally, you should have that feedback system integrated into the main tool that you’re using to collect information about the state of your organization in the first place.

But since that’s not always possible, just prioritize setting things up in a way that allows employees to share their current concerns with minimal possible impact to their work. Sometimes, people might be worried that raising their voice on some issues might have negative repercussions for them. You have to make it known that this is not the case in your company.

With enough effort, this kind of system can provide your organization with incredible benefits in the long run, the kind that you simply can’t get from anything else. It’s important to have a proper feedback system integrated tightly into your company and its workflow. And the more your organization continues to grow, the more important this is going to become in the long run. Sooner or later, you’ll be glad that you’ve taken the time to set this up and perfect it to its current state.