Why measure employee satisfaction?
Many organisations conduct regular employee satisfaction surveys. They are based on the premise that happy, enthusiastic employees will perform more effectively on behalf of the employer than employees who are alienated from the organisation's objectives. So if areas are found where employees are not satisfied, initiatives can be taken to address the areas of dissatisfaction. This should provide benefits in the areas of
• Employee retention
• Sickness / unauthorised absence level
• Employee performance
• Product / service quality
• Customer satisfaction
• Market share
• Profit
So an effort to improve employee satisfaction should lead to an improvement in the quality of your products or services; customer satisfaction and, for commercial organisations, a competitive advantage, increased market share and improved profit.
By conducting employee satisfaction surveys, you send a message to employees that their views are of interest to management. This can affect their perceptions to some degree, and it is most important to remember that it creates expectations. Employees might conclude that management wouldn't ask about working conditions if they weren't willing to consider improving them. If the employee satisfaction surveys show dissatisfaction about working conditions, however, and you do nothing about them, and then after a year has gone by further employee satisfaction surveys come out asking about working conditions, the employees' perception of your attitude toward them and the surveys process will dramatically change. Typically, the response rate will diminish and the cynicism of the responses will increase.
This incidental effect of running employee satisfaction surveys must not be overlooked but it is not the main purpose of the survey, whose role is as a diagnostic tool, not part of the treatment.
Satisfaction = Performance?
The link between employee satisfaction and employee performance is not as direct as we intuitively assume and many "key" satisfaction measures seem to have little link with either individual job performance or corporate performance. One can imagine some people being very satisfied with a job in which they seldom had to do anything but their contentment clearly wouldn't lead to high individual or corporate performance.
Measures usually referred to under the headings "commitment" or "engagement" do seem to correlate with performance, though. If your objective is to improve employee performance, we can help you to measure and then target for improvement the employee satisfaction survey measures which seem to be performance-related.
What's in a name
When you conduct research to discover how your employees feel about your organisation and their situation in it, we prefer to call them employee satisfaction surveys.
Employee
Instead of employee, you may choose to say staff, provided there is no one in your organisation who might feel excluded from that group.
Satisfaction
The traditional word was attitude, and an employer who wanted to hear from employees conducted an employee attitude survey. In these times, perhaps under the influence of the USA, the word attitude has acquired negative connotations, and it now seems inadvisable to suggest that our employees might have "an attitude". Another popular option is opinion, which seems harmlessly accurate, but we still prefer satisfaction. You are probably concerned that your customers should be satisfied with the goods or services you deliver. You expect your employees to be concerned about customer satisfaction too.
You would probably agree that your employees are most likely to be successful in delivering customer satisfaction if they are themselves satisfied with their lot. So we advise that you take as much interest in employee satisfaction as you do in customer satisfaction, and call the surveys employee satisfaction surveys.
