As HR leaders, you leave no stone unturned to level up your employee satisfaction score. You offer competitive pay packages, try to build a healthy work environment, recognize their achievements on time, and offer rewards like paid vacations or ESOPs.
You may agree that while these things are good facilitators, they don’t guarantee high employee satisfaction. Satisfying your employees can be tricky. However, you can take some steps to keep your staff happy.
But first, let’s understand what exactly employee satisfaction means.
What is Employee Satisfaction?
Employee satisfaction indicates how satisfied your employees are with their jobs. It indicates how healthy the workplace culture is in your organization. A business with a satisfied workforce enjoys better productivity and results.
A recent study shows that only 21% of your employees feel engaged. The remaining 79% make American businesses lose $550 billion annually due to a disengaged workforce.
While 33% of employees enjoy overall mental and physical well-being, up to 77% of full-time American employees face burnout in their current jobs.
Employee satisfaction needs close evaluation metrics like workload, work-life balance, organization leadership, workplace relationships, and continuous improvement in the office environment. Another powerful metric is the Employee Satisfaction Index.
What Is the Employee Satisfaction Index?
The Employee Satisfaction Index (ESI) is a barometer to track your employees’ level of satisfaction with their jobs and the company. It is conducted as a company-wide survey at regular intervals, like half-yearly, to understand the viewpoint of your workforce.
The survey is conducted anonymously so your employees can open up without feeling pressurized. Besides indicating the workplace health of an organization, the ESI offers a glimpse into your employees’ minds and personalities.
The ESI asks your employees three main questions:
- Their satisfaction level with their workplace.
- How well does the company workplace meet their expectations?
- How close is their workplace to an ideal one?
The other questions revolve around their satisfaction with the working hours, compensation and perks, and the workplace environment. The survey asks your employees to rate their company and their work profiles on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest rating.
After collecting the data, you can calculate the ESI value using the below formula.
ESI = [((mean value of a question ÷ 3) – 1) ÷ 9] *100
The results of the company’s ESI may vary between 0 to 100. The higher the number, the more satisfied your employees are. Companies use the ESI values as a benchmark for future performance or to compare with another company’s ESI figures.
Regularly conducting and monitoring ESI values highlights employee satisfaction scores for your company and can help you retain skilled employees. Although, you need to consider the factors affecting your employee satisfaction levels and promoting positive employee experience.
Here’s a list of what impacts workplace satisfaction.
What Factors Affect Employee Satisfaction?
Here are the factors that affect employee satisfaction.
1. Compensation and Benefits
A competitive pay and benefits package offered by your company can add to the employee satisfaction score. Up to 10% of your employees quit their jobs due to poor benefits and compensation below market standards.
2. Career Development Opportunities
Your employees always seek new skills to advance their careers. In fact, 14.2% of your workforce quits because of a lack of opportunities for career growth.
3. Work-Life Balance
Flexible and reasonable working hours, hybrid work options, an adequate number of leaves, and an option for time-out are some things that help employees balance their official and personal lives. These matter because up to 34.3% of your staff quit their job due to work-life imbalance.
4. Job Security
Your company's financial standing and how you ensure job security for your employees matter. Sharing access to your accounting books with your employees provides transparency and gives them a sense of security.
5. Company Culture and Values
Your company’s values and ethics shape its culture and work environment and impact how employees make decisions and contribute to business goals, which affects their workplace satisfaction score.
6. Job Design and Responsibilities
Your employees need clear job responsibilities and autonomy in their work. Plus, if their job roles fit their skills and interests, it can become a win-win situation for the employer and the employee.
7. Performance Management
How you measure and evaluate employee performance and if the methods are fair and transparent impact employee satisfaction levels.
8. Employee Benefits
Any additional benefits that you may offer, for example, health insurance, retirement plans, health and wellness programs, and parental or caregiver leaves, impact employee satisfaction. 9.9% of your employees exit because of a lack of physical and mental well-being initiatives.
9. Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)
Diversity and inclusion and its related policies prevent discrimination. In fact, 62% of employees consider D&I critical to business success. That’s why they are crucial to employees’ well-being and job satisfaction.
10. Organizational Leadership
A company's leadership team most impacts employee satisfaction and engagement levels. Up to 15% of your workforce quits without managerial support and a poor management style.
You may strive to improve these factors to up your employee satisfaction score. But you also need to measure it.
Here are 7 proven techniques to evaluate employee satisfaction scores.
7 Proven Ways to Measure Employee Satisfaction Like a Pro1. Pulse Surveys
As the name suggests, it captures the pulse of your employees with a quick survey. In a pulse survey, you can include questions about their job roles, workplace relationships, and environment, and how open communication is.
2. Milestone Surveys
These surveys collect employee feedback on important occasions in their lifecycle, especially during exit. They try to capture the employees’ genuine feelings, like the reasons behind their departure. You can also conduct surveys anonymously to encourage your employees to open up.
3. Anonymous Questions During Open Forums
You can provide a safe space for your employees to ask their questions anonymously in open forums like a company town hall. This nudges them to voice their genuine opinion without the fear of coming into the spotlight.
4. Open Door Policy
It shows you are approachable as a leader and available for a conversation whenever an employee needs it. Open doors encourage uninterrupted communication one-on-one or for the team. And when sitting individually with each employee becomes challenging due to a strict work schedule, you can rely on Amber to share your load.
5. Skip-Level Meetings
These meetings are held between you as the leader and an employee who reports to a manager reporting to you. So you skip a level to learn how things are managed under your nose. It helps you gain deep insights into the business activities conducted from an employee’s viewpoint.
6. Online Public Forums
Online portals like Glassdoor offer a goldmine of data about what your employees think of the organization, the leadership, and how satisfied they are working with you.
7. eNPS Score (Changed to eNPS as NPS doesn’t apply here)
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) helps companies measure employee loyalty and workplace engagement. It gathers data through a survey to gauge your employee’s willingness to recommend your organization as an employer to their friends and families. It captures their short to medium-term intentions for the company.
It can be calculated as
eNPS= [(Number of Promoters – Number of Detractors) / Total Number of Respondents] x 100
A higher employee satisfaction score indicates that your workforce is happy working with your company, is more productive and loyal, and is less likely to quit early.
As HR leaders, you can lean on inFeedo’s employee engagement platform to give accurate and in-depth insights about employee feedback and improve workplace satisfaction.
Amber had 1.3 million conversations, or around 5,000 conversations a day, with 700,000 employees across 230 companies in more than 95 countries.
Book a demo today to learn how she can assist you.
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