What is Job Satisfaction?
Employee retention should be one of the main priorities that any business tackles at any given time. When you provide a thriving company culture and work to ensure your employees are satisfied with their job, you improve loyalty and productivity.
Job satisfaction is not just something that is nice to have. If you want to attract top talent and convince your highest performing employees to stay with your business, job satisfaction is a must.
Every time an employee leaves, they will cost your business the equivalent of 6 to 9 months’ worth of their salary. This is due to the high cost of hiring and training a new hire, as well as
the reduction in productivity as the new hire slowly gets used to their working environment.
What Is Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction is about more than having fun working conditions. There are over 20 unique factors that work towards job satisfaction, and many of these factors are personal in nature. That is why the first step to providing job satisfaction is to create a job descriptive that goes into depth about the role in question, the type of person you are looking for, and your company culture.
Why Employees Stay
Employees stay when they are:
- Satisfied with their jobs
- Have a human resources department that fights for them and helps successfully deal with any issues they have
- Confident they have a future with your company
How (and Why) to Foster Employee Satisfaction
Fostering employee satisfaction improves employee retention, employee loyalty, employee productivity and, most of all, employee health. It can be fostered in four ways:
HR Specialist
Having an HR specialist or department is key for allowing employees to solve and resolve issues amongst their co-workers in a professional space. HR specialists are also the ones who typically keep track of employee performance and will be the ones with whom an employee can make suggestions or leave feedback anonymously.
Feedback
In order to improve, you need to invest in a feedback system that measures job satisfaction amongst your employees. Take this feedback and use it to make the changes that the majority of people want to see in the office.
Benefits
Allow employees to choose from a collection of benefits so that they can enjoy the perks of the job that apply most to them. Parents could take flextime as a benefit or on-site childcare services. Non-parents could take a gym membership discount or extra days off as their benefit instead.
Company Culture
A thriving company culture is one that promotes employee relationships, helps them feel valued at their job, and brings your business closer with your community. You can easily let your employees control aspects of this factor.
For example, offer a sum per month that employees can petition to use outside of work. An employee can then petition to start a jogging group or organize a birthday party amongst co-workers.
You don’t have to just give the money out, but by budgeting some money in advance, you can support employee groups and events that will improve the company culture and working relationships amongst your employees.
How does your job affect your health?
Working life can have a huge impact on your physical and mental health. Physical stress can result in a weakened immune system and make you more susceptible to illnesses. Stress can also worsen your mental health and result in an employee developing mental disorders like GAD.
Low Job Satisfaction Can Impact Your Mental Health
One of the most important reasons to improve job satisfaction is that it actually works to promote mental health and wellbeing. Feeling like you do not belong at work, have no support, or generally feel unsafe will cause greater stress levels in your employees.
By improving satisfaction levels across the board, you can help reduce the stress that causes:
- Burnouts
- Worsening of mental health
- Generalized Anxiety Disorders (GAD)
- And more.
Your Guide to Employee Experience Programs
Employee experience programs include examples such as bike to work schemes, on-site childcare facilities, and so on. They work to help employee health and wellbeing by providing a supportive atmosphere.
What are the benefits of employee wellness program?
Employee wellness programs help promote the health and wellbeing of your employees. They could be in the form of benefits – like a discount to the gym, or a spa package they can redeem once a year – or they can be in the form of systems.
A bike-to-work system works well to help encourage employees to get exercise, reduce their CO2 footprint, and be healthier, for example. In some cases, the benefits you offer might be more hands-on, like with team building or stress-busting classes.
How to Design an Employee Engagement Survey
If you are ever in doubt about where to start with employee and job satisfaction, the best place to begin is with your employees. Designing an employee engagement survey is an effective way to receive this feedback.
Simply make the system anonymous, design questions either with ranking questions or with open-ended questions, and request employees to fill this out on a regular basis.
Some questions you might want to ask on this survey include:
- What matters in your career: money or satisfaction?
- Do you feel challenged at your current job?
What Are the Factors Affecting Job Satisfaction?
Typically, the factors that affect job satisfaction the most can fall under these four main categories:
1. Working Environment
The environment, the break room, corporate policies, anti-harassment policies, how much management cares, how well employees get along, and so on. Employees need to enjoy being at the office in order to be satisfied with their job.
2. Appreciation and Value at the Job
Employees need to feel like they are valuable, and their work is appreciated.
3. Healthy PayScale and Advancement Opportunities
As employees age, they gain experience, and you need to compensate them accordingly. Having a standard pay scale and review program to ensure your employees are being paid fairly and that they can advance within your company is crucial. They need to feel like they have a future with your company, and internal promotions, training and raises are the way to do this.
4. Job Security and Safety
Provide employees with job security and improve their safety at your office. This means you will need to abolish zero-contract hours and invest in additional coverage so that your employees’ job security and physical safety can be secured.
5. Flexibility and Benefits
Be flexible, both with the job and with your benefits. Being flexible and making small concessions to help employees enjoy a more balanced work/life schedule increases job satisfaction significantly.
Flextime and the ability to work from home are some of the top benefits to offer your employees, especially as they get older and are more likely to have children. These two benefits can help keep your employees working. Qualified women, in particular, often fall under the radar or outright quit if there is not enough support from their managers after maternity leave.
Conclusion
Job satisfaction is important at every stage, from the part-time positions in your business right up to the corporate levels. Employees need to feel supported, they need to like their working environment, and they need to know that they have a future with you. With these factors in play, you will see happier employees, better work being accomplished, and have a workforce that is actively working to improve themselves.