As a leader, you want your employees to go to work with the motivation to do their best every day. However, many workers aren’t satisfied with their jobs. According to the Employee Happiness Index by Utah-based workplace software provider Teem, over 48% of American employees aren’t happy at work. The most common culprits are poor work-life balance and the feeling of being underappreciated in their jobs.
When your employees don’t think that their work is worthwhile, they’re likely to miss work or leave entirely. This will cost your company precious money and time to hire and train new employees. As such, it’s important that you regularly measure your employees’ satisfaction so that you can identify and address possible issues early on.
Satisfaction vs. Engagement
Employee engagement is a buzzword among managers, and it often gets exchanged with employee satisfaction. Although they may seem similar, they are two vastly different measures. Employee satisfaction refers to how happy your workers are about their condition at work. It involves measuring how pleased they are about their healthcare administration benefits and all the other perks they receive from you. Engagement, on the other hand, is how committed they are to their organization. Its measures include how much extra time an employee puts in to help clients or the company.
Now that you know the difference between the two, it’s time to start measuring your employees’ satisfaction in the office. Choose from one or a combination of these options.
Focus Group Discussions
Focus group discussions (FGD) provide you with rich, qualitative data that can stand alone or be used as a companion for your employee satisfaction survey. Be careful, though. An FGD can quickly turn into a gripe session if you’re not alert. The Society of Human Resource Managers (SHRM) recommends creating a central objective, such as “to measure employee satisfaction about company facilities and benefits.” Their guide also recommends breaking down general questions into more specific ones. This way, you’ll avoid getting vague answers.
Ask your Human Resources department to help you draft your outline, facilitate sessions, and process the data after. If you’re worried that your employees are afraid to speak up because you’re in the room, you can always hire third-party interview facilitators to do the job.
Online Surveys
As mentioned, some workers may want to remain anonymous when voicing out their concerns. An online survey is a great way to cull feedback from your employees, along with collecting quantitative data that you can easily translate to tables, graphs, and charts. You may use the questions from your FGD, but in a form that’s appropriate for the Likert scale, so the data is easy to interpret.
There are many free survey tools out there like Google Forms and Survey Monkey. These platforms automatically generate reports for you, so all you have to do is interpret and present them. The latter even has an employee satisfaction survey template that you can easily distribute if you’re in a bind.
Your employees’ satisfaction is the key to your company’s productivity, and ultimately, profitability. These methods provide efficient and effective ways to gather data about employee satisfaction. Use them well and act on every issue you find. Your clients aren’t the only ones who deserve excellent service; your workers do, too.
