As a business owner, you know that having motivated and happy employees is key to your company's success. Keeping your employees satisfied means they’ll be more productive, stay with the company longer, and be more engaged in their work. But how do you ensure that your team members are working at peak levels?
In this blog post, we'll discuss strategies for keeping your employees satisfied so they can continue to perform at their best. We'll cover topics such as providing rewards for hard work, creating a positive work environment, and offering career growth opportunities. By following these tips, you'll be able to keep morale high among your team members so they can continue to deliver great results for your business!
How to Satisfy Employees | 17 Ways to Improve Employee Satisfaction and Engagement
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What Is Job Satisfaction?
By definition, satisfaction is something that makes a person pleased, happy, and content. Job satisfaction, therefore, means that a person is satisfied with their job.
While the definition is simple, ensuring your employees’ contentment can be very tricky. Low satisfaction can result in a lower employee retention or a higher employee turnover rate. Too much, in the meantime, can cause most employees to become complacent with their work. Thus, it's important to form some balance between how employees feel and the business’ needs.
Here are some ideas on how you can have satisfied employees and at the same time keep your business afloat:
Instill Better Work-Life Balance
In every office setting, work-life balance is very important. Based on a Gartner survey among US employees, it was found out that work-life balance is valued more than health benefits. The employees' desire to live their personal and professional lives according to how they want it without work tying them up is stronger and more significant. There's a good reason for it, too!
Too much work robs people of time that they rather spend with family or in society. Poor work-life balance can lead to stressed-out workers, too! Little work, in the meantime, can stunt career development, which can lead to unhappy workers.
As employers, here are a couple of ideas on how you can instill the balance between the professional and personal lives of your employees:
- Be Strict with Working Hours
As much as possible, avoid requiring overtime unless absolutely necessary. This includes the weekends (unless weekend work is a requirement).
Let it also be a company rule that when an employee is on a vacation, they must not be disturbed. It should be a time for the employee to unwind, refresh, and get ready for work again.
- Provide Flexible Work Schedules
Most companies are now offering flexible working hours for their employees. This can mean the employee can work from home or adjust their hours of work according to their convenience.
One example is having a flexi-time scheme, allowing employees to start and end their shifts earlier or later than usual depending on their needs.
- Have a Company-Initiated Sports and Leisure Program
This is especially important if your company has remote employees. Having programs that encourage employees to bond and have fun together can help boost their morale.
It also helps build healthy work relationships among team members, which may lead to increased performance levels. This could include activities like going for a run or playing sports during lunch time, or even having team-building activities outside the office.
- Hire the Right Number of Staff
Hiring too many or too few people can sometimes lead to job dissatisfaction. Your employees will feel overworked if there are too few of them, while they might not be able to do their best if there are too many employees in the office.
Make sure you have the right number of staff who can work efficiently and effectively together as an entire team.
Ensure Market-Competitive Compensation
Probably one of the most sensitive topics for discussion is the employees compensation, since this is limited by the company budget. However, keep in mind that compensation is still one of the top considerations of employees when looking for the right job.
You can ensure employees fair compensation by incorporating some tasks below:
- Perform Annual Salary Review
When doing an annual salary review, the employees’ performance, as well as tenure, must be always taken into consideration. This helps ensure that employees’ salaries are in line with the current market.
- Offer Performance-Based Incentives
Aside from salary, you can also offer incentives to employees based on their performance or productivity. This not only rewards them for doing a job well done, but it also serves as motivation for others to strive harder and do better.
- Provide Reasonable Benefits Package
The benefits package should be reasonable enough that it would compensate those who work hard and still provide some financial security during an emergency. It should also include insurance coverage, vacation leaves, sick leaves, and other entitlements that are commensurate to the labor force in your particular industry.
- Research Job Market Value
To determine the market value of the different functions in your organization, you can rely on research-based values provided by external parties like Salary.com or Payscale.com, or from more extensive research done by HR professionals or consulting firms. By having fair or even above-market compensation, you'll surely get a higher chance of having satisfied employees in your organization.
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Be a Trustworthy Employer
To become a trustworthy employer, you must gain credibility in the eyes of your employees.
Per Amy Lyman, co-founder of The Great Place to Work® Institute, trustworthy employers succeed because they gain the commitment and cooperation of the employees. Once you've established credibility, it's safe to say that your employees will trust you, and thus it'll lead to a healthy work environment and workplace satisfaction.
What are the ways to build your trustworthiness among your employees? Here are some suggestions:
- Foster Open Communication
One of the most effective means to establish understanding between employers and employees is to encourage open communication.
As an employer, you must be attentive to your employees' sentiments.
Their inputs and suggestions must always be taken into account, take necessary course of actions when needed, and acknowledge them for their contributions.
One effective platform to do this is through having an employee satisfaction survey. With this, you'll be able to gather employee feedback, whether positive or negative. What's more, conducting employee surveys can also be a way to measure employee satisfaction!
- Be Honest
This is a given, of course. When employees feel that their management team is lying and not transparent to them, it could create suspicion and distrust, eventually leading to dissatisfied employees.
An honest management creates mutual trust and respect between employers and employees. These two factors are just some of the things that make up a great workplace culture.
- Carry Through with Your Commitments
As employers, it's your obligation to follow through with your commitments.
One of the things that make an employee feel dissatisfied is when their employer makes false promises. This is actually dangerous and could lead to a high number of resignations.
To avoid such, ensure that you commit promises that you can deliver. In the event that such a commitment cannot be delivered, it's better to let your employees know ahead and admit what went wrong.
- Be Fair
A fair employer makes employees happy. When there's favoritism from the management, employees tend to feel resentment towards their employers. By being fair, you're sending the message that everyone gets equal opportunities and just treatment.
Some of the processes that ensure fairness among your people are regular performance evaluation and peer-to-peer feedback. With these, you'll ensure that people get rewards based on their competence.
The above are just some suggestions to keep overall employee satisfaction at a high rate. But then, there's also the matter of employee engagement, which is totally different from employee satisfaction.
What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement involves the active participation of the employees in their daily tasks with passion and dedication, not just for the sake of doing it. When an employee is engaged, they take accountability and ownership of their work, and ensure that high-quality output is delivered.
Most of these types of employees also go beyond the scope of their regular work, usually taking part in process improvements and other high-level decisions within your organization. These engaged employees are what you absolutely want in your company.
However, it's not an easy task to engage them, let alone maintain that engagement for a long period.
Continue reading below to gather some ideas on engaging employees.
Ensure That Your Employees Are Valued
Employees who feel that they're valued and praised for the work they do are oftentimes the ones who excel in their work. Aside from boosting employee morale, it can also bring out the best in your employees skill set.
Read below to get some ideas on activities that'll aid in making your employees feel valued.
- Reward and Recognize Employees
What better way to show appreciation than rewarding and recognizing employees in front of the whole organization? Through this, awarded employees will feel a sense of pride and will strive further to do their best in their daily tasks. While monetary award is most preferred, there are other forms of reward such as material gifts, plaque of recognition, etc.
- Adopt Gamification in Hitting Targets
Gamification is a great way to engage employees and make hitting targets more fun. With this, it'll encourage friendly competition within the organization as each individual strives to stand out among their peers. It can also be done virtually or onsite depending on your resources.
- Connect with Your Employees on a Personal Level
Immediate supervisors who connect with their subordinates with personal touch are usually the ones that gain the trust and respect of their co-workers. When employees feel that the management cares for them not just for the work they do but also as a person, their normal response would be to give back by exerting more effort in their responsibilities. Being personal also makes them feel special.
- Provide Opportunities for Growth and Development
Employees who feel that their skills are not being maximized or are stagnant will usually look for other opportunities elsewhere. To avoid this, you should provide an avenue where employees can explore and develop their existing skill set.
Aside from seminars and trainings, giving employees the chance to experience new tasks in your organization will also do wonders for them.
- Give Employees Their Sense of Purpose
An article from Forbes said that “millennials work for purpose, not paycheck”. This statement shows that the sense of having a purpose in what you're doing can be greater than any monetary value.
When employees see that the work they do contributes to the overall success of the organization, they're inspired to do more. The feeling of being part of the bigger picture keeps employees motivated.
In order to give your employees that sense of fulfillment, you must do these things:
1. Connect their targets with the overall goals of your organization: A structured goal-setting can address this idea. Every goal that must be set should be aligned with your company’s targets.
2. Communicate transparently and clearly the impact of each employee’s responsibility to the success of your business: For every company achievement, there should be a traceability of your employees’ contribution; how their day-to-day tasks enabled that success. This can be relayed through one-to-one discussions, newsletters, or via announcements in company meetings.
This last part is often forgotten by most leaders, but ensuring employees’ sense of purpose might actually be one of the most important aspects in preserving employee happiness.
The Final Word
Having engaged employees can be beneficial to your organization and its bottom line. As a leader, it's essential that you find ways to make sure that the people working for you are motivated, inspired, and feel valued in their job.
The activities mentioned above are just some of the ways by which you can ensure greater job satisfaction and engagement among your employees. Ultimately, employee engagement comes down to genuine care from both parties – from leaders with their subordinates as well as from employers towards their employees. With this mutual understanding, success will soon follow!
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