Keep Your Employees Happy For Your Clients To Be Happy

What Is Employee Satisfaction?

Employee Satisfaction could have defined as the factor that determines whether find the jobs content and satisfactory. This can be done by conducting a survey among the employees. Some of the topics that could be covered in these surveys are compensation, what they perceive about the management, working hours, their opinion about the team they are working under, available resources etc. Employee Satisfaction is one of the factors for retaining employees within a company. Employees work better and are motivated to do a good job when they feel happy and satisfied. If not, they will look for other opportunities and move out. This would mean the company has to spend lots of money to bring new employees and train them according to the requirement. Tools such as Salesforce also help with conducting the surveys and adequate Salesforce admin training will be a pre-requisite.

Employee Satisfaction and Employee Engagement

On the face of it, both Employee Satisfaction and Employee Engagement might seem like two sides of the same coin. However, they are not. Employee Satisfaction defines whether the employees feel happy and satisfied with the company they are working for in terms of the work they do and the ambiance in which they are working. Employee Engagement is a measure of how driven are employees about their work and whether always give their best to complete any assigned job. If understood correctly, one can notice that both of them are different in terms of what they measure.  When employees are engaged, they put in more effort into their work and are passionate. Satisfied employees are happy with what they are doing and they do not want to change anything about their job.

Conducting Successful Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Even though most of the companies conduct and employee satisfaction survey, not everyone will be interested in taking it up. It is usually the job of the Human Resource team within a company to conduct these surveys and publish results. This also requires necessary approval from higher levels of authority both for conducting and what type of questions must be asked in the survey. The survey usually contains a set of questions for the employees and in the end an option to provide feedback. It involves the rating methodology for each question such as rate your team leader’s conflict resolution. The choices would be numbers from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. Alternatively, it can also have choices like Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree, No Comments. The questions must be carefully selected so that employees are not misled into assuming something. Usually, these surveys are conducted annually, but some companies do follow a half-yearly approach towards this.

Making Employee Satisfaction Surveys Effective

If the employer has to put employee satisfaction to good use and restore confidence that the company is listening to the employees, actions have to be taken based on the results of the survey. For example, if most of the employees had complained about the lack of proper food facilities, the office canteen or pantry can be improved to stock up a variety of food items that employees can have access to. This kind of actions must be taken with full commitment so that employees look forward to providing suggestions without any inhibitions. The surveys should also be short and must take a long time to complete.

Any communications with the employee should be done in a transparent manner. What happens if this does not happen is, over time, employees will lose interest in taking up these surveys and providing suggestions. Sometimes, when they are asked to take the survey mandatorily they will give answers that the employer wants to hear about instead of saying what they want to. By conducting surveys and taking actions, employees feel that an organization is a shared responsibility and everyone must take part in ensuring that.

Some of the methods that companies can adopt to improve employee satisfaction are interacting with employees on a regular basis to understand what they want, offering health benefits, addressing common concerns such as stress and workload, break the routine by introducing new methods of working etc. By putting in little extra thought into employee satisfaction one can see great results such as improved productivity, better employee morale, committed employees and cost savings due to the availability of resources.