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How to measure staff satisfaction?

As a businessperson, growth and scalability are top of your mind. You have checks and balances to stay in the black that weave like golden threads around your operational procedures. Checks and balances like customer service, innovative products, and unique selling points. 

All of those strategies, however, may be hindered – even thwarted – if your most valuable asset is not operating at harmony.

What asset is that? Your workforce, of course. 

Your employees are the collective nucleus at the centre of every functioning element of your operation. Their happiness and well-being are tantamount to the happiness and well-being of your business, overall.

Staff satisfaction, then, must be continually measured so that your business doesn’t suffer the illness of a dissatisfied working contingent.

Here are three reliable methods that you can use in your endeavours to get an accurate measurement of employee satisfaction in your business.

Methods for measuring employee satisfaction

An employee satisfaction survey

The staff satisfaction survey is the easiest way for you to get a grassroots understanding of the general happiness within your team.

It’s an easy method that can be entirely managed via free-to-use tools like a Google Form, or even a Survey Monkey template.

In order to be able to glean the most usable information from your survey, though, you need to make sure you’re asking the right employee satisfaction survey questions – those that’ll lend only insight into the collective mindset of your workforce.

Questions must be themed around factors in the workplace that directly influence the crucial day to day duties of your employees, and the atmosphere in which they must exist, while meeting requirements for these duties.

Here are just a few examples of the kinds of questions to include in your employee satisfaction survey:

  • Are you finding meaning in the work you do?
  • Do you feel stressed at work? If so, how often?
  • Are your contributions to your team always considered and taken seriously? 
  • Do you think your team works in harmony most of the time?
  • What things would you change about your role?

The answers your employees give to these types of work satisfaction questions will give you insight into better measuring the status of staff satisfaction in your business. And it is from that info that strategies can be further developed to put improvements in place.

An employee satisfaction index

This method is similar to an employee satisfaction survey in that it’s question-based, and candidates are asked to rate questions according to a weighting.

Where the Employee Satisfaction Index differs, though, is in the fact that it’s more specific to the candidate’s personal space in the workplace, and not just their overall opinion of a general day-to-day.

These three questions are used in each survey, in each business:

  • How satisfied are you at work?
  • Does your workplace meet your personal expectations?
  • How close is your workplace to your ideal job?

The answers here are weighted on a 1 – 10 scale, the result of which is fed into a specific calculation that produces an overall satisfaction score between 1 and 100. The closer the overall score to 100, the higher the general employee satisfaction in your business.

The tried and tested one-on-one

As a businessperson – a leader in your organisation – you are often the greatest measuring tool when it comes to the happiness of your people.
Fancy tests and sums aside, if you’re noticing a shift in employee satisfaction – or if you’d simply like to get an idea of the overall happiness and mental state of your employees – the good old one-on-one is often the best method.
This is where you can sincerely engage with your people, in a personal way, and ask them to candidly share their working life state. Employees are likely to open-up freely and more honestly in a situation that isn’t as anonymous and robotic as a survey.
Here you can talk around their emotional state at work and with peers, their progress in working toward career goals and career development, as well as the aspects of their role that continue to inspire them – also, the aspects that don’t. It’s a time when pressures on the job can be addressed, and you may find more value in an honest face-to-face with an employee than you would with any formal or scientific employee satisfaction survey.
Just something to keep in mind for this method – social distancing is still the directive, so remember to conduct your employee satisfaction survey one-on-ones in a manner that is safe for you both.

Undergoing plans to implement a staff satisfaction survey strategy shouldn’t be seen as a quick solution, but as a preventative measure. The constant monitoring of employee happiness is a vital part of your business plan and should be baked into your very culture. These methods will help you establish sound and effective employee satisfaction measures, to ensure the wellbeing of your business’s greatest asset – its people.

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