How to Measure (and Improve) Employee Satisfaction in the Workplace

What is Employee Satisfaction?

Employee satisfaction is the measurement of how satisfied an individual person feels at work. This measurement involves understanding how an employee engages with your company and with other employees, and how much they enjoy their day-to-day work.

Employee satisfaction looks like:

• Employees who find their work meaningful and impactful.
• Employees who have the opportunity to grow in their careers if that’s the path they wish to take.
• Employees who have and maintain positive relationships with other peers and managers.
• Employees who regularly receive recognition for their work and are compensated fairly for their work.
• Employees who trust leadership decisions and feel pride for their organization.

It’s important to understand that employee satisfaction is not a one-and-done strategy—it requires regular maintenance and strategy to ensure that employees don’t become dissatisfied. A dissatisfied employee can be frustrated with their role, potentially burnt out, or bored. Work can come in waves, so while boredom isn’t necessarily a major red flag, it’s important to monitor engagement to ensure your employees stay engaged long-term. Consistent dissatisfaction can lead to absenteeism, decreased efficiency and productivity, or even a high turnover rate.

Measuring Employee Satisfaction

Measuring employee satisfaction is necessary for understanding how employees are feeling at any given time. This information helps HR teams make more accurate decisions when implementing employee engagement strategies.

Here are a few common ways to measure your employees’ satisfaction in the workplace:

• Pulse surveys: Regularly administered surveys that help reflect how satisfied employees are in real-time.
• Exit interviews: An interview administered once an employee is leaving to better understand how employees are feeling once they leave an organization.
• Focus group interviews: Group discussions with cohorts of employees so HR can uncover shared concerns and ideas for improvement.
• HR data analysis: Trends in turnover rates, absenteeism, and general performance ratings are all opportunities that can help indicate employee satisfaction.
• During employee review periods: When employees are going through performance reviews, also provide them with an opportunity to provide feedback for your HR team to give them an additional avenue of communication.
• External review sites: Employer review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed can provide feedback from employees on how satisfied they feel with a specific employer.

When measuring employee satisfaction, it’s important to pull from a variety of different data sources so you can get a well-rounded view of how satisfied employees are. It’s very possible that one employee is extremely dissatisfied and another is very engaged—knowing how employees are feeling as a whole is a good way to understand an entire situation.

9 Strategies to Improve Employee Satisfaction

Once you have qualitative and quantitative employee satisfaction metrics, you can use that data to inform your future employee engagement strategies. Some strategies that you can use to improve employee satisfaction include:

1. Train managers to be engaging: Managers are the front line of your employee satisfaction efforts. Train your people managers on how to be helpful, informative, and supportive of an employee’s career trajectory.
2. Promote a healthy work-life balance: Employees who are well-rested and have a good balance between their personal life and work life are more likely to perform well.
3. Support career growth: High-achieving employees are often ambitious and eager for opportunities to grow. Creating a framework to help foster that growth can help to improve employee satisfaction.
4. Provide all-around support for employees: Your employees have lives outside of work, and anyway that you can support them as an employer can minimize their stressors during working hours. Consider providing benefits like a Carbon Savings Account to help provide financial wellness and decrease your organization’s carbon footprint.
5. Foster an inclusive work culture: Employees want to work in an environment where they feel safe, welcomed, and included.
6. Reward and recognize: Your employees work hard to complete their work, and they should be recognized for the good work they do. Offering a recognition program can help employees feel appreciated and satisfied.
7. Communicate transparently: Host skip-level meetings, solicit and respond quickly to feedback, and provide context on decisions.
8. Localize engagement strategies: Not all teams have the same needs. For example, the needs of an engineering team are different from the HR team. When crafting employee satisfaction strategies, understand the metrics of different teams and departments and create a strategy accordingly.
9. Continuously listen and respond: The needs of your employees are ever-changing. Don’t be afraid to continuously change your strategy and adapt to growing needs.

Employee Satisfaction FAQ

What is the definition of employee satisfaction?

Employee satisfaction is the measurement of how satisfied an employee is in the workplace. This includes environmental facets of their experience, such as their relationship with their manager, their work/life balance, their career trajectory, and how fulfilled they feel in their specific role.

What is the biggest factor that impacts employee satisfaction?

The biggest factor that impacts employee satisfaction is dependent on the individual employee. All employees have different wants and needs to feel satisfied, so there is no one factor that can be considered the “biggest impact” on employee satisfaction.

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