There is widespread panic everywhere, including the corporate world, and it’s impacting employee productivity immensely. The pandemic has been ruthless in that sense. It has transformed the way we work.
Most employees work from their homes, which has substantially restricted their access to meet and greet others and brainstorm strategies. It is high time that companies should focus on ways to improve employee job satisfaction which is imperative to productivity at work.
When looking to address employee satisfaction and productivity, what practical steps can an organization take?
In this article, you will learn ways to increase job satisfaction and employee engagement so that your team members feel connected and are inspired to perform better.
How to Increase Employee Job Satisfaction
1. Recognize and Appreciate Excellent Work
Everybody likes to feel appreciated for the work they do. According to a recent survey by Pedal Rose, 80% of participants said that happiness at work matters to them even more than getting a good salary. But only 67% reported that they feel happy and only 45% of employees feel appreciated at work.
As your team’s manager, you must ensure that employee satisfaction and productivity are always high. The best way to do that is by recognizing and appreciating your team when they accomplish a crucial task.
You can also create a new group on Skype, WhatsApp, or Slack where everyone sends praises and congratulatory notes to exceptional performers.
2. Set Realistic Expectations
Setting unrealistic expectations can significantly decrease the job satisfaction and productivity levels of your employees and induce stress. The American Institute of Stress reports the leading causes of stress are:
a. Workload (46%)
b. People issue (28%)
c. Juggling work/Personal lives (20%)
d. Lack of job security (6%)
As a manager, your responsibility is to ensure that your team doesn’t feel overwhelmed. Don’t assign too many tasks to employees. Remember that work-life balance is essential for improving employee satisfaction levels.
3. Communication is an Essential Part Of The Employee Satisfaction Model
Communication barriers can cause significant losses for companies across industries. According to the Holmes Report, the cost of poor communication has sky-rocketed to USD 37 billion.
The report further says that an average organization loses about USD 62.4 million per year in lost productivity. Improper communication causes critical business information to fall through the cracks leading to chaos and mismanagement.
As your team’s manager, you should conduct stand-up meetings every morning to ensure that everyone is well informed about the tasks they need to finish each day. You can also hire someone to make an Android app for internal communication and streamline the flow of information within the team.
It’s an excellent way to remove any confusion and clear miscommunications that may negatively impact work. Clear communication is one of the best ways to increase job satisfaction.
4. Involve Everyone While Brainstorming Strategies
Social belongingness is a trait that is hardwired into our brains. Unfortunately, most employees feel left out at corporations that lead to lower organizational engagement and commitment.
According to a recent EY survey, about 40% of respondents feel ignored at work. Further, 39% of respondents feel that they experience a tremendous sense of belonging when their colleagues check in with them personally and professionally.
The best way to improve job satisfaction is to involve everyone while deciding workflows and brainstorming strategies. It has dual benefits.
Firstly, you receive feedback from each employee that helps to fine-tune your initiatives. And secondly, your team members will get a comprehensive understanding of the company’s operations and what it plans to achieve in the near future.
5. Offer better learning opportunities to your employees
Workplace learning opportunities play a significant part in increasing the morale and job satisfaction of employees. According to Middlesex University for Work-Based Learning, 74% of respondents say that they fail to achieve their full potential because of a lack of workplace learning opportunities.
As the manager, you should sponsor employee education to help them gain experience and significantly improve their productivity. You can share essential learning resources to help them grow their skills.
Other ways to increase employee job satisfaction include arranging for conferences, webinars, and training sessions that help employees develop their skills.
6. Keep Employee Well-being at the Top of the List
Employee well-being activities ensure that your employees feel happy and healthy and get a launchpad to take off their careers. Gallup’s study reveals that 76% of employees experience job breakout symptoms due to unfair treatment, poor management, and unmanageable workload.
If you find that any or all of your team members show signs of burnout, you must try to find out the reasons behind it. You can offer various benefits to increase employee well-being, such as:
a. Physical health benefits like sick leaves and health insurance
b. Work-life balance benefits like sabbaticals and paid leaves
c. Financial benefits like income protection plans and pension plans
d. Mental health benefits like counseling, meditation, and yoga sessions
Recommended Read: 80 Employee Benefits Ideas for Remote Workers [2021 Guide]
7. Measure Job Satisfaction and Engagement
As a way to increase job satisfaction, you must conduct surveys to get a comprehensive understanding of your employees. As a manager, quarterly surveys, reports, and studies will help you reflect on vital areas like:
a. Employee engagement
b. Job satisfaction
d. Employee opinion
e. Employee motivation, purpose, and passion
These points will help you gauge how satisfied your employees are and identify pain points that can be improved to increase engagement.
Recommended Read: 23 Best Employee Engagement Apps for 2021
8. Provide Feedback More Often
A recent survey by Office Vibe reveals the following essential statistics on employee feedback:
a. 23% of respondents aren’t satisfied with the kind of feedback their manager provides.
b. 17% of respondents feel that they don’t get specific feedback.
c. 28% of respondents report that the feedback isn’t frequent enough to help them gauge improvement.
Employees want feedback at each stage of their professional career. As a manager, you must share constructive feedback frequently. It works as an excellent course correction tool to analyze the employees’ pros and cons and improve over time.
9. Build Fruitful Relationships
Several benefits of building a high-trust company are as follows:
a. 50% higher employee productivity
b. 29% more satisfaction with their lives
c. 74% less stress
d. 106% more energy at work
e. 40% less burnout
As a manager, you should try building excellent employee relationships. You can do this by finding commonalities outside of work that fuels better collaboration and builds solid and trustworthy relationships.
10. Provide Autonomy to Employees
Employees feel a sense of achievement when they have the freedom to work on their terms. A recent survey by Officevibe reports that 18% of employees don’t feel they have enough space to decide how they do their work. Moreover, 32% think that they aren’t involved in the decisions that impact their work.
As a manager, you must make efforts to provide as much autonomy to your employees as possible. It’s because modern employees are always searching for opportunities where they can learn and grow at a fast pace. Autonomy helps build a great talent pool for the company and also attracts the best talent.
11. Perks are the Way Forward
Perks encourage employees to evolve into better versions of themselves and stick with the company for long. Clutch reports that:
a. 53% of employees who get some perks report having a better quality of life.
b. 41% of employees report that flexible timings are the most important perks they receive.
c. More than 66% of employees who receive perks are satisfied with them.
You can offer various types of perks to significantly increase motivation and job satisfaction, such as:
a. Free lunch
b. Company retreats
c. Flexible working hours
d. Gym membership
e. Professional development opportunities
f. Remote work
12. Map Employee Career Goals
Today, employees make decisions regarding their career choices consciously. They know how crucial it’s to stick with companies that provide a long-term learning curve and invest in their development.
A study by Randstad revealed that 73% of employers believe that employee development is essential, but only 49% of employees said that their leadership is deploying development programs.
As a manager, you should design a goal-setting framework and map employee career goals. This step will substantially increase employee job satisfaction levels.
13. Define and Share What Your Company Stands for
A recent study by Gallup shows that 34% of the workforce is actively engaged, enthusiastic about their work, and committed to their workplace. This is the highest figure since they started reporting on workplace efficiency in 2000. On the other hand, employees who have miserable experiences at their workplaces are only 13%, the lowest figure in the past two decades.
As a manager, you should share the company’s vision, mission, and values with your team that helps instill a unified vision and encourages them to put their heart and soul to achieve the company’s objectives.
Recommended Read: How to Create Company Values: the Complete Guide
14. Break the Routine
Building healthy routines allows employees to finish their tasks on time and avoid decision fatigue. But they also induce boredom that impedes creative abilities and leads to employee dissatisfaction.
As a manager, you should implement practices like job rotation that allow employees to learn interdisciplinary skills and kill boredom. It also allows the management to identify talent that ultimately benefits the company.
15. Encourage Your Team to Follow their Passion
Today, the startup world has caught the attention of established enterprises. Most of these startup founders were former employees of multinational corporations who could no longer find any definite meaning in their day-to-day job. They wanted to try something new but weren’t able to do so because of their mundane jobs.
As a manager, you should provide some free time or, as Google calls it, the “20 percent rule”. Google allows employees to follow their passion and work on their dream project for about 20% of their workweek. You will be surprised to know that Gmail, Google News, and Adsense are the products of the 20 percent rule.
Conclusion
How to improve employee morale and job satisfaction is a vital question that each manager needs to ask. It would be best if you designed strategies that benefit both the employee and the employer and look for ways that keep them motivated to achieve more.
As a manager, you should set small milestones for your team and provide constant feedback. You can use any of the 15 strategies discussed in this article to increase job satisfaction and engagement in your team.