You must be wondering why you should encourage questions from your employees. Well, when what is considered as normal is questioned, innovations are revealed. What if we did it this way? Such a short question asked with the right attitude can possibly uncover innovative ways to achieve better results, produce better products, or improve services. It’s all about attitude and being inquisitive. Let’s learn a bit more about this.
Remember that feedback about everything is great because different people give it in different ways. These perceptions will help you to learn how you can innovate more and get better results. In order to do this, you need to make feedback a core principle for your business. You can get started by sharing customer feedback with your entire team. You can ask the employees to give feedback and to question what is wrong.
Be an Example
You need to adopt the behavior that you want your employees to adopt. You need to show them that you too question the things that are around you because you want things to improve. Keep asking them for their perspective because that will help you in discovering problems that you might have not thought of before.
Focus Only On the Initiative
If you really want your company to grow, you only need to focus on the initiative taken by your employee rather than the question itself. Do not challenge the employees too much because that way they will only go for ‘safe’ questions that will not result in innovation and growth. Don’t be overly critical and try to see the value of their query. You need to appreciate the question that the employee has asked you because it will highlight the concerns that they might have had about how the business is functioning.
Listen To What They Have To Say
There is no point of the questions if you are not paying attention to what they have to say. The whole point of this exercise is to get an insight about things that you have been missing out on. If you work primarily with milennials check out our article on them here.
Time and Practice Are the Keys
A lot of us don’t ask questions any more but that does not mean that we don’t have the ability to do so. Similarly, you need to allow your employees a little time to get used to the habit of asking questions. After you will do so, it will slowly become a part of the organization’s culture. Your employees will closely scrutinize all the business functions in order to see what can be questioned and changed for the betterment of the business.
Things You Can Do to Encourage Them to Question
Some of the things that you can do in order to make sure that they question are:
- Make it easy to communicate
- Encourage them and respect their views
- Criticize constructively if you have to
- Give way to team communication and group cohesiveness
References
- https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240402
- http://hr.toolbox.com/blogs/workplace-challenges/how-to-encourage-your-employees-to-ask-more-questions-43653
- http://www.inc.com/peter-economy/5-ways-to-get-your-employees-to-speak-up.html
