We often hear about ways to improve customer satisfaction, however employee satisfaction is just as important and arguable as essential for a company.
In this article we will define what do we mean by employee satisfaction and we’ll discuss techniques so you can measure and improve your employee satisfaction.
Employee Satisfaction: A Simple Definition
From a growth perspective, employee satisfaction is a subject that is addressed before customer satisfaction. These two notions go hand in hand, since happy and satisfied employees have relationships with customers that generate good experiences.
First, let’s look at the definition of satisfaction.
Satisfaction is a feeling of well-being or joy that results from the fulfillment of a need, desire, request or wish.
By referring to this definition, we can say that employee satisfaction is the feeling of well-being for an employee within a company. It’s important to note, however, this feeling of satisfaction depends on several factors:
- Workload is an important element. The cases of burn-out in companies are very frequent and have multiplied because of covid-19 and remote working. In 2021, two and a half million employees have suffered from burn-out.
- The work environment. This is a factor that has also changed a lot because of this pandemic, since many employees have had to switch to remote work for the first time. Unfortunately for some of them, they did not have a suitable workplace at home.
Resources can really affect how your employee experiences remote working. Does the employee have the right tools and the equipment to accomplish their daily tasks? - Relational skills are almost paramount. According to a study, 43% of employees believe that relationships and atmosphere at work are more important factors than salary. It is also noted that the productivity of satisfied and happy employees is 12% higher.
Obviously, more factors come into play in the well-being of employees. A company can also listen to their employees and show its support.
Now that we have a very clear idea of what employee satisfaction is, we can determine the methods to improve it.
“How do I improve employee satisfaction in my company?”
As said earlier, employee satisfaction is a priority in order to ensure good growth for your business. To improve this employee satisfaction rate, there is not just one quick and easy answer.
It’s all about doing everything possible to ensure the well-being and fulfilment of your employees, and that is reflected when measuring the Employee Experience.
The importance of measuring Employee Experience
The Employee Experience must be a priority on the same level as that of your customers. Knowing that the employee experience refers to a set of interactions between the employee and the company, there are various touch points to optimize.
Optimize the employee experience at all costs
As mentioned above, 43% of employees think that the atmosphere at work is more important than the salary. This means that all of your employees’ interactions are a factor in the evolution of the satisfaction rate.
Employee Experience is not just about having happy employees. It’s about all the benefits related to their productivity, engagement and then satisfaction.
According to a 2018 study, 60% of employees surveyed said wellness improves employee retention, and 61% said it improves employee productivity and business results.
Deloitte
Creating strong, cohesive teams is a great way to keep your employees happy. Although affinity cannot be controlled, interviews can determine whether the profile matches the company’s values and spirit.
By having employees who are aligned with the same goals and who help each other to achieve them, they will naturally improve their productivity. They will then feel confident and less afraid of failure.
Finally, the employee experience correlates perfectly with the success of your business.
It’s not easy to always know what your employees are thinking. It’s therefore very important to ask them for feedback. The goal is not to get 100% positive feedback, but to detect the negative points and to take action. This will allow you to improve these points and ultimately satisfy your entire workforce.
How to create an internal satisfaction survey
Before creating your employee satisfaction survey, keep in mind that the way you ask for feedback will have an impact on the transparency of your employees to respond. If you ask for feedback in a 1-to-1 format, some employees will tend to be less than forthcoming.
Get to the point
When creating your satisfaction form, get straight to the point. Be clear and concise. The response time should be short and ideally the number of questions should not exceed 5 or 6 per survey.
Work environment satisfaction
Capture and maintain the attention of your employees.
On the internet, the average attention span is 8 seconds. Obviously, you are not going to create an 8-second satisfaction survey. However, keeping the respondent focused on the form with each question is possible by varying the types of questions used.
The varying question types on Feedier gives you the option of choosing from more than 15 different types, all of which allow you to keep the attention of your participants. Vary your questions while measuring various KPIs that will give you specific points of improvement for your EX strategy.
Promote your company’s identity
Personalizing the branding of your employee satisfaction survey is important. By using your own jargon and highlighting your values your employees should feel more comfortable and familiar with your survey.
Don’t forget to add your company colors, logo, add very specific company questions, etc.
Improve the response rate of your employees
There are several ways to distribute your satisfaction form. The one you will most likely think of first is to send an email with the link to the form. This is quite common, but we’ve found that diversifying how you send your survey can give you an excellent engagement rate.
Set up email campaigns
Email campaigns are a way to send out reminders to employees if they haven’t responded to your satisfaction survey. Choose a platform where you can create reminders that will be sent at a specific intervals.
Sometimes when you receive an email, you may have the right intentions to answer it, but you get distracted by your daily activities and before you know it you’ve completely forgotten to answer the email. Here, it is exactly the same. You have to follow up with your collaborator until you get a response to your questionnaire.
Email campaign and reminders
Create a simple and uncluttered email template. You can even push for actions by mentioning the average response time of your survey. It’s much less annoying to take a survey for 30 seconds than to spend 5 minutes on it…
Sending an SMS to your employees could also be a possibility. It may be a bit more direct, but we spend an average of 4.8 hours of our day on our smartphone! How can you not see the notification when you receive it?
Trust the power of QR codes
QR codes are an extremely easy way to create engagement to measure your employee satisfaction.
There are no limits. Once the QR code is generated, you can embed it anywhere you want. Whether it’s on a letter addressed individually to each employee, on posters placed in strategic locations on your premises or on giant screens.
The possibilities are endless, all your employees have to do is take out their phone and scan the code to measure their satisfaction rate.
In summary
We’ve seen that employee satisfaction is paramount to the healthy growth of your business. Indeed, the benefits of the employee experience automatically align with the improvement of your customer experience.
In order to improve your employee experience, there are many solutions. But it is important to listen to your employees on an ongoing basis. Their dissatisfaction is valuable because it allows you to improve an important detail of your EX strategy.
In order to measure and improve employee satisfaction, use a feedback form that will allow you to pinpoint dissatisfaction. This will give you the information you need to improve the overall experience.
If you want to monitor your employees’ satisfaction, you can read more information on our website and schedule a call with one of our experts at Feedier.
