What have you known about employee satisfaction? Sometimes, people call it as job satisfaction. Either employee satisfaction or job satisfaction, they are just the same to mention how content and employees are satisfied with their jobs, their experience at work and the organization or company they work for.
Typically, employee satisfaction is measured by a survey. The survey usually includes some factors that influence the employee satisfaction. Those factors are compensation, perceptions of management, workload, flexibility, teamwork, resources and etc. which are all very important for companies to keep their employees happy and reduce the turnover. However, employee satisfaction is just a part of the entire solution.
In reality, some organizations focused on how to improve employee satisfaction but resulted a demoralized the high performers. Do you feel confused to understand it? If so, let’s get started reading the detailed description of employee satisfaction for in the rest of this article.
Employee Satisfaction and Employee Engagement
Frequently, employee satisfaction and employee engagement are used interchangeably. Though they are likely similar, they are just different. Engagement is one factor that influences the overall satisfaction while satisfaction is not a predictor of a performance.
Engagement indicates an employee’s passion for their job that is related tightly to the output. Meanwhile, satisfaction ideally happens as a result of material factors including compensation, benefits, recognition, strong leadership and engagement.
The Reasons Why Employee Satisfaction Is Important in The Workplace
In general, every individual must have an ability to adapt to a difficult situation at work. This way, if your employees feel unsatisfied with the job, they will likely find the other new jobs.
In some extreme cases, some employees are sabotaging your progress in order to get adapted with their work circumstances. They can even commit fraud. However, if a big group of employees are not satisfied with their jobs, they could form a labor union to build their own company.
No worry! Such situation is rarely occurring. A company may experience significant loses as a consequence of the employees’ unhappiness. Most importantly, the dissatisfied employees almost never supports the innovative ideas. Even when all of the people are happy in the company, the dissatisfied employees will feel motivated to give band and go for extra mile away.
Factors That Influence Employees’ Satisfaction
As we have mentioned, there are some factors that influence employee satisfaction. These factors generally determine the level of satisfaction that your employees may experience.
One of the factors that mostly determine the employee satisfaction is whether the employee is respected or not for what he/she has achieved. Employees will feel respected when they reach achievements and when their compensation is suitable with their performance.
In this case, many companies focus on improving the satisfaction of their employees through the workforce empowerment. This is necessary enough for the management in the most decision making. This way, the employees will feel better to work when they are given the proper degree of autonomy.
Some additional factors influencing the employee satisfaction include the company activities, positive approach for managements and opportunities for advancements. These factors can actually enhance the satisfaction in the work atmosphere.
How to Measure Employee Satisfaction
Now that you have simply understood what employee satisfaction is and why it is necessarily important, it is the time to check out how to measure the satisfaction. In this regards, companies or businesses that want to improve satisfaction must firstly establish a metric to understand where they stand.
Well, there have been a wide variety of approaches used to measure satisfaction. However, based on the research, using surveys is the most effective measurement. It is due to the fact that surveys can get to know how the employees feel about the company and the work they are performing.
So, give out the surveys on a consistent basis to allow you to monitor your employees’ performance as well as to assess the effectiveness of your new management strategies.
Satisfaction Surveys
Before handing out the surveys, the first thing to understand is what areas in the work field you want to measure. In general, you should emphasize the factors that you can control. Usually, the topics included in the satisfaction surveys are management expectations, co-workers relations, communication quality, level of stress and perceptions of empowerment.
How To Create a Satisfaction Survey
If you are finished listing the factors influencing your employee satisfaction, the next crucial thing to do is to create a satisfaction survey which is proper with your company or organization. This way, take your time evaluating the questions you are going to use in the survey. Will you use the same questions for the survey you organize every year to profile your performance?
Once you are finished making questions for the survey, you may print out a copy of it though digital channels have been popularly used and more preferable today.
In sending out the survey for all the employees, there are variety of ways to choose. For more practical and efficient way, emailing the survey to all the employees at the same time are frequently the best option. This is due to the fact that emailed surveys are considered more convenient to enable you to easily compile the data without manually inputting the data from the paper sheets.
Improving The Results Of The Satisfaction Surveys
Let’s say you are finished organizing your employee satisfaction surveys, so you are going to see the results of the surveys. Take a careful look at the results since your initial satisfaction survey is filled out by your employees. In this case, use the initial period to remove questions that are confusing. Add considerably some new questions that may be relevant through the employee feedback.
Typically, the best results are obtained from the results when you focus on responses of the “yes/no” questions. The numbers of responses can be used to quantify your performance.
If the surveys are conducted on a regular basis, a graph changes can be visualized in the level of satisfaction that your employees experience. If there is achievement viewed based on the performance in key metrics of satisfaction, you can give bonuses to your management team.
The Use of Survey Data
Once the employee satisfaction survey is finished and you obtain the results, you will be able to know where you stand. So start implementing the changes in the areas that need improvement. Of course, this is based on the results of the survey data.
In many cases, it is recommended that you organize a meeting along with your staff members to discuss the findings based on the results of the surveys. This way, some employees will be the volunteer to explain why people rated in the certain area both positively and negatively.
If there is anyone failing to explain clearly, consider telling that you will provide suggestions box outside the office. This way, the employees can determine the areas that they think it needs improvement. Definitely, if you understand the issues leading to dissatisfaction, you must implement the changes properly.
Achieving Improvement
The last thing to do dealing with the employee satisfaction is achieving the improvements. Just because you have achieved the improvement doesn’t mean that everything is finished. Monitoring must be organized over time to ensure that the improvements have been effective in practice. You will also need to review the satisfaction periodically about the workforce to find out new pain points coming up.
Final Words
Finally, we could understand all about employee satisfaction including the reasons why it is important to know whether or not your employees are satisfied with their jobs and company. Some factors are always there to influence their satisfaction. This way, measuring the satisfaction commonly uses surveys to find out where you stand.
Get the results from the surveys and make such improvements to make achieve better. Well, these are the plots that you will follow to discover employee satisfaction.
