Employee satisfaction is an aspect that employers seeking to improve their organizations’ performance should take seriously. However, managers sometimes neglect this issue as strategies targeted to capture customers’ attention often take priority. This article raises attention to the importance of employee satisfaction and how organizations can measure whether their employees are satisfied.
What is Employee Satisfaction?
Employee satisfaction is a term that describes the level of fulfillment and contentment that employees derive from their work. Employees who are happy with their experiences and have their needs met at the workplace are likely to report a high level of employee satisfaction.
Employee Satisfaction FAQs
Why is Employee Satisfaction Important?
Employee satisfaction is important for a variety of reasons. For one, employees who feel happy and fulfilled at their job are less likely to migrate to other companies. This lower turnover allows employers to retain top talent, thereby saving the company money it would otherwise use in recruiting and training new employees for similar posts.
How Can I Measure Employee Satisfaction?
You cannot gauge employee satisfaction by instinct, but rather by measuring it. You can measure employee satisfaction using the following:
- Surveys: This is one of the ways to identify what matters to employees. You can generate a set of questions and use them to establish how employees feel about their experience at the workplace. The questions should be easy to understand and allow them to express what they love about working at the organization and things they think should improve to help them feel more fulfilled. Regular surveys are useful for keeping in touch with employees’ feelings and expectations and meeting their needs.
- Employee satisfaction index (ESI): This is a scale that determines employee satisfaction based on their answers to three questions. The index asks employees to rate on a scale of 1-10:
- How satisfied they are with their workplace?
- How well the workplace meets their expectations?
- How close the workplace is to their ideal job?
You can then calculate The ESI by dividing the question mean value by three and multiplying the result by 100. The higher the score, the greater the satisfaction.
- Face-to-face meetings: Holding regular meetings with employees allows them to express their concerns about the on goings in the company. However, these can only work when you foster an atmosphere of freedom and trust where employees can air their views without reservations. That way, you will get constructive feedback on what they are happy about and aspects that should improve.
- Suggestion boxes: Like surveys, suggestion boxes allow employees to express their views anonymously, thus encouraging them to voice their concerns on controversial issues without fear of punishment. However, unlike surveys that limit responses to a few questions, suggestion boxes enable employees to air their suggestions on any issue in their workplace. Too many suggestions on areas of discontent indicate that the company needs to do more to improve employee satisfaction.