8 Recommendations to Improve Employee Job Satisfaction
How to improve employee job satisfaction? A question that’s so simple to ask but so complicated to answer. Your employees represent the engine of your organisation. They have the wheels and power to make your business move from A to B. That’s why it’s important to think about their wellbeing, and especially understand their preferences, passions and wishes. The more you know about them, the better equipped you will be to find winning solutions that are optimum and adapted to improve the satisfaction at work.
How to Contribute to Employee Job Satisfaction
You may be encountering difficulties when it comes to finding solutions to optimise the productivity of your workforce. Maybe that’s because you haven’t pin pointed the source of your troubles yet. That is a drop in your employees’ motivation.
Here are 8 recommendations to help you improve employee satisfaction at work.
#1. Motivate Your Troops
When it comes to mobilising your troops, your success is mainly based on your ability to work with emotions. This means that you need to create an environment that is adapted to the development of positive emotions. Fostering professional and especially personal growth plays a major role in creating favourable sentiments towards your organisation for your employees. People who are encouraged to grow and develop are more likely to produce more efforts, push beyond their boundaries and deliver value in any task they undertake.
For example, you could implement a recognition program that goes in that sense to boost people’s motivation. A program recognising efforts and based on merit will provide the incentive necessary to encourage self-improvement.
#2. Encourage Communication
Communication is a key element of employee job satisfaction. An open communication is founded on collaboration and a work environment that is stimulating to encourage exchanges between employees. There is a whole bunch of tools that can facilitate communication: from project management software, to instant messenger app or live chats, to internal newsletters.
Before you do anything, you should figure out what type of tool your employees will be more responsive to. That tool should also align with your work culture and fit within your current processes. With careful analysis, you will be able to implement a system that is well suited to your organisation.
#3. Involve Your People
Your employees not only need to feel at ease within their workplace, but also useful. Your organisation is a project on its own which should be exploited to its full potential.
Have a company blog? Invite your employees to write articles. Have a project that requires a lot of resources? Ask them how they think they could contribute and provide them with an opportunity to do so.
There are thousands of ways to involve your employees, which in turn, gives them the opportunity to develop new competencies.
#4. Care About Their Wellbeing
Wellbeing is often synonymous of a healthy mind. Psychology is therefore an important element to understand for effective human resource management. Simple proofs of recognition, such as a smile in the morning, a compliment, or just providing an attentive ear, are mindful touches which can have a great impact. However, we should not neglect the physical and financial aspects attached to employee wellbeing. Financial security brings the peace of mind needed to focus our minds on other things than paying the bills when we’re at work. Providing guarantees of medical care or retirement support are examples of actions that will help preserve the mental health of your workers as well as their families.
#5. Provide Training Opportunities
Personal accomplishment is at the top of Maslow’s pyramidal hierarchy of needs. That’s why it’s not surprising many of us develop a thirst for continuous learning and development.
When you offer training opportunities, you give your employees the chance to deepen their knowledge and get specialised in a field they enjoy. As a matter of fact, training program are a win-win solution for employees and employers alike.
And don’t worry, bettering their skills will not increase their likeliness to fly away. It’s actually an investment (and not an expense) your make for your employees which encourages them to stick around. Who wouldn’t want to know that they are worth investing in them?
Whether employees seek internal or external training, you should allocate them some time to spend specifically on their self-development.
#6. Provide Feedback
Feedback can be seen as a form of recognition when it is constructive and well presented. Satisfaction goes through a two-sided dialogue, giving you the opportunity to learn about the challenges your employee is confronted to, as well as the aspects they enjoyed the most about their job.
Good feedback can be defined by three criteria: its promptness, its frequency, and its precision. It’s important to provide feedback quickly, as regularly and as often as necessary, and with enough details in order to be effective.
Also, don’t forget to organise a follow-up. This way you will be able to provide the necessary support to help them improve and demonstrate the importance you attach to their own success within the organisation.
#7. Recognise Collective & Individual Performance
Did your organisation just win a prestigious award? Have you been mentioned as an employer of choice or just acquired a major new account? Any of these are good reasons to highlight your employees as a team as well as recognise their individual efforts. How should you announce the good news?
Here are some ideas:
- Organise a celebration or go out for lunch
- Plan a post-work drink with all the members of your organisation
- Write a personalised thank-you note
For example, if you’d like to congratulate someone in particular to make them standout, there are many ways in which you could communicate your appreciation and recognition. But in the end, what actually matters is not how much you spend but how much you care. And that shows through the small details.
#8. Encourage Team Spirit
Creating a team spirit is as important as your employees’ motivation because work is collaborative by nature. Therefore, having a positive energy flow between co-workers is vital. This flow is dependent on a good communication as well as the tools that support it. But in a less than ideal world (i.e. realistic), you also have to deal with conflicts and tensions.
So make sure you’re able to take action in case issues arise. Besides, you should let others know to inform you if frictions develop, so that you can react fast.
Too often, conflicts are neglected and snow ball into giant monsters causing many inconveniences. That’s why you need to encourage your teams to communicate, in both the good and bad moments.
The decisions you take can have a dual impact on employee satisfaction. Either positive or negative. Improving job satisfaction is a work of endurance that requires the collaboration and involvements of all. Job satisfaction brings motivation and triggers engagement, turning your employees into your organisation’s best allies.
Originally posted on medium.com by EmployeeConnect