While being a customer-centric company is key for delivering great customer experience, you can’t forget about the employee experience. After all, happy employees result in happy customers. To identify the happiness level of your employees, you should use job satisfaction surveys.
But before we dig into the two most popular surveys related to job satisfaction, let’s take a look at the current state of employee satisfaction, the benefits of satisfied team members, and the and the influence that job satisfaction has on employee engagement.
The current state of job satisfaction
Even though job satisfaction is on the rise in the U.S, about half of U.S. employees are still unsatisfied with their jobs.
Which is terrible because improving your employees’ satisfaction levels helps the company in every possible way.
Satisfied employees are more engaged, which results in better customer engagement, higher retention, increased productivity, fewer accidents, and higher profits.
Job satisfaction is even a competitive advantage that can help you attract the best people to your organization. In the U.K., 83.6% of professionals believe that enjoying their jobs is a better measure of career success, than having a high salary.
Job satisfaction vs. employee engagement
While these two terms are often used interchangeably they’re not the same thing.
Job satisfaction measures how much an employee enjoys the work that they do. The employee’s current skills and abilities meet the requirements for the job and they’re okay with the responsibilities they’re given.
Employee engagement, on the other hand, is about how committed the employee is to the organization. Engaged employees do everything in their power to ensure the organization’s goals are met.
While satisfied employees are simply happy with their jobs, engaged employees are committed and enthusiastic about it.
So it’s not hard to see why highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability and companies with the highest engaged employees achieve an earnings-per-share growth that is more than four times that of their competitors.
Disengaged employees on the other hand, which is a by-product of job dissatisfaction, cost companies between $450 and $550 billion a year due to turnovers and decreased productivity.
Every business wants more engaged employees and the only path to that is improving job satisfaction. Your employees have to first be satisfied with their jobs before they can be engaged with it.
Using job satisfaction surveys to improve employee engagement
The first step to improving job satisfaction, and in doing so boosting employee engagement, is understanding how your employees currently feel. You can do this through a job satisfaction survey.
Surveying your employees is important because the solution to improving their job satisfaction isn’t always intuitive.
For example, a salary increase doesn’t always improve employee satisfaction. A survey done by Udemy found that 42% of millennial employees consider learning and development as the most important benefit when deciding where to work. See below for more from this study.
The only way to know what your employees feel and what they want is to ask them, and a survey is a perfect way for them to give you feedback and offer solutions.
In fact, a Salesforce report found that employees who feel their voice is heard at work are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.
Things to keep in mind before conducting a job satisfaction survey
Here are a few tips to help you run your next job satisfaction survey.
Make it anonymous: Making your surveys anonymous creates a safe space for employees to tell you how they feel without fear of repercussions.
Survey consistently: Job satisfaction surveys aren’t something you do once. As your business and employees evolve so will the job satisfaction ratings. Getting consistent feedback and making changes based on these responses is the only way to improve the work environment and raise satisfaction and engagement levels.
Keep the language simple: Avoid using complicated words in your surveys. To improve the readability and thus the quality of your survey responses, keep words at a 7th-grade reading level. Your employee survey should be as easy as possible to answer.
Use a surveying software: You don’t have to print out sheets of paper and compile responses into a spreadsheet anymore. Surveying software makes it easy for you to create, distribute, and analyze the results of your surveys.
Don’t ask double-barreled questions: Never ask your employees about two or more issues in a single question. For example, asking employees “How do you feel about your salary and work conditions?” is a double-barreled question because it covers more than one issue. You can easily fix these type of errors in your questionnaire by turning it into separate questions on the survey.
Avoid biased language: When creating your survey make sure your questions and options don’t favor certain responses over others. For example, the question “How good is your manager?” already points to the manager as being good. A better question would break down “good” into something more measurable. For example, you could ask “How often does your manager offer help?” or “How easy is it to ask your manager for help?” Sometimes questions can be biased without us even realizing, so it’s best to have the survey reviewed by a colleague or friend.
Keep the survey brief: Make sure your survey only cover things that really matter. Before adding each question you have to ask yourself, “Can we use this to improve our practices?” All your questions should lead to actionable responses that you can use to implement positive change.
Take action: Finally, use the results from the job satisfaction survey to create change in your organization. Employees will lose interest if they feel their suggestions aren’t acted on.
Job satisfaction survey template
We’ve talked about how an increase in job satisfaction can help your business and we’ve even offered tips on surveying your employees.
Now here’s a handy job satisfaction survey template you can use to gauge your employees’ job satisfaction levels. This survey has been created with GetFeedback.
Of course, you can adjust the questions, design, and length of your job satisfaction survey as you see fit, but this survey template is a great jumping-off point.
Employee engagement survey template
As you now know, job satisfaction and employee engagement are related but aren’t the same. Employee engagement only comes after employee satisfaction.
Here’s another template created with GetFeedback that you can use to measure how engaged your employees are.
Wrap up on job satisfaction surveys
Increasing job satisfaction levels at your company will lead to happier employees, more revenue, and attract more great employees.
A job satisfaction survey gives employees a safe medium for offering constructive feedback on how you can help them do their best work. But remember, you have to survey your employees consistently because people do change and even more importantly you have to act on the responses they give you. Doing so will improve both the employee experience and the customer experience.
If you want to boost happiness and productivity at your workplace then get started with a free trial of GetFeedback.