A quick summary:
- What are employee satisfaction and staff happiness? 🤔
- How to measure employee satisfaction 🔎
- Employee satisfaction example questions 📋
More than ever, employees are demanding better working arrangements, employee benefits and health and wellbeing in the workplace. The outcome? Leaders who listen realise how significant these needs are for employees. As for employers who are yet to invest in their people, well, the same can’t be said!
It’s time to ramp up your efforts to enhance job satisfaction and general happiness in your company. Failure to do so will see employees dashing for greener pastures - the Great Resignation is a clear indication of just that.
In this blog post, we’re examining the role of measuring employee satisfaction, as well as digging into the reasons why you should start tracking staff happiness.
What are employee satisfaction and staff happiness? 🙂
What good are we if don’t kick things off with a solid definition of employee satisfaction and staff happiness? So, let’s take a look! Firstly there isn’t much difference at all between the two terminologies.
According to HRZone, employee satisfaction (also referred to as ‘job satisfaction’ or staff happiness) is the “extent to which with their job and the role it plays within their life.” So it’s pretty clear what employee satisfaction really means.
It also refers to the extent to which an employer takes prioritises employee satisfaction - including the practices, techniques and strategies they adopt.
On that note, how high of a priority is employee satisfaction in your organisation?
Similar read: 5 Signs employees are unhappy at work
Why should I measure employee satisfaction?
Before we jump into the best way to measure employee satisfaction, let’s discuss why exactly you should measure it.
Employee satisfaction is your company’s best guess at understanding how people feel towards the various functions in your business. It isn’t just whether they enjoy working on that spreadsheet task you gave them, but how they feel towards pay, leadership styles, HR support, company culture and everything between
By understanding these thoughts and feelings, you have a better understanding of the direction you should push your company towards. In all trial and error scenarios, or anything that involves improvements, we must learn from mistakes and take feedback wholeheartedly. That’s the secret to success!
Similar read: 3 Metrics to track employee wellbeing
How can I measure employee satisfaction? 📊
So, how do you measure employee satisfaction in the workplace? What strategies and techniques can we share with you to completely revolutionise your employee satisfaction levels (or begin to recognise the issues at hand).
Staff happiness surveys and questionnaires
Surveys and questionnaires work in just about any industry and for any purpose. Whether you’re collecting customer feedback, staff happiness, or carrying out industry research… surveys and questionnaires really work!
In this scenario, we want to evaluate the effectiveness of our tactics to boost and maintain high staff happiness. Without speaking directly to the people (i.e our employees) how can we know?
Have your HR team put together a series of questions to send across to employees. This way, you can conduct your employee satisfaction survey in the best way possible. There are tools like Google Surveys, Typeform and other free to use software that allow you to have employees submit their responses anonymously.
Its important anonymity is taken seriously when putting together your staff happiness survey. The last thing you want to achieve is well… nothing, as employees feel uncomfortable being open about their thoughts and feelings.
To get you started, we’ve included some staff happiness questions to add to your survey (use these as the foundation for a more robust questionnaire that considers your specific workforce, industry etc.):
- In a typical week, how often do you feel stressed?
- Does your role or the responsibilities involved get you down?
- Do you feel your feelings go ignored in the workplace?
- Does your work challenge you enough?
- Do you feel that your work is meaningful?
- Have you considered leaving your job in the past twelve months?
- Do you feel like a valued employee in the wider team?
- Would you prefer to receive more feedback on your performance?
- Can more be done to make your role more enjoyable?
- Are you content with the company’s pension scheme?
- Are you happy with your current salary?
- How do you feel about leadership and management teams?
- How do you feel about the current company culture?
- Do you have a good working relationship with your manager?
As you’ll notice, these questions touch on various topics and themes, unlike an employee wellbeing questionnaire that focuses entirely on health and wellbeing. Through an employee satisfaction questionnaire, you can dig into the various functions and operations in your business.
Fun fact: Through Heka, our platform asks employees to rate their health and wellbeing in various areas of life. This way, we’re able to provide the best experiences, services and products for that particular Heka member.
That’s how important surveys really are!
Other methods to measure staff happiness:
It isn’t just staff happiness surveys that can help you get a clearer picture of the thoughts and feelings of your workforce. We recommend that you explore the following in more depth to find the strategies that will work for you:
- Employee Satisfaction Index (ESI)
- Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
- 1-2-1 manager and employee meetings
Using Heka to boost employee satisfaction and staff happiness
Employee satisfaction and staff happiness are crucial! A robust employee wellbeing package can also support healthier, happier employees in the workplace. Through Heka, thousands of employees are taking back control of their personal wellbeing.
Across 50+ wellbeing categories, employees have access to 1000s of wellbeing experiences, services and products. If you’d like to find out how a monthly Heka allowance can revolutionise wellbeing in the workplace for your team, get in touch!
