What is job satisfaction?
Job satisfaction is the level of contentment employees feel in their job. Having good job satisfaction means that an employee will have a positive emotional response while they are working and interacting with others.
This encompasses more than just the day-to-day activities that the job requires but also how they feel about the company as a whole, how they get along with coworkers and what they think about the leadership of the company. It is important to think of all these factors when trying to determine the level of job satisfaction among your employees.
Some questions you can ask yourself when thinking about happiness around the office and individuals job satisfaction are:
- Does the company show that they care about their employees?
- Are employees encouraged to pursue their hobbies?
- What is the average interval between promotions?
- Are coworkers respectful and getting along?
- Are workers able to have a work-life balance?
- Do your employees feel secure in their roles?
After answering these questions you should have a good idea if your employees are having a high level of job satisfaction and point to areas that might need improvement.
Why job satisfaction is important
Job satisfaction can improve many things within your business. The following are examples of the few ways in which raising job satisfaction rates can improve business.
Increase Employee Retention Rate
When people are happy at work they tend to want to stick around. When you start to focus on job satisfaction employees are more likely to become more happy and continue to work for your company. This is important for organizations as having employees leaving your company all the time gives you a bad reputation which makes it difficult to find new talent.
Increased Productivity
Job satisfaction can mean that employees work harder, which increases productivity. If people are unhappy in their jobs, they might be less motivated to work hard. It can also be easy for employees to be distracted when thinking about how miserable they are in their jobs. Once you are able to increase your employees’ job satisfaction you will see productivity rates rise.
Good Customer Service
If your company has customers or clients, you want your employees to have good customer service skills. When employees feel job satisfaction they will bring this good attitude into their work, including the quality of their customer service. This can mean that customers are more likely to refer friends to your services and business goes up.
Reduce HR Costs
When people have high job satisfaction they want to keep working for that company and managers can rely on them being good candidates for career development. When looking to gain the new talent, it is more economical if you can promote from within as you do not need to spend money on recruitment. This is also a circular relationship as when employees are able to experience career advancement, their job satisfaction increases.
When looking at the above examples, it becomes obvious as to why job satisfaction is important for the success of a business.
How to improve job satisfaction
In order to improve job satisfaction, there has to be some changes in the way things are done. Take a look at these examples to have a good understanding of how to increase rates of job satisfaction within your organization.
Be Flexible
Workers want to be able to have more control over when and how they work. For example, allow your workers to make their own schedule so that they can work at times that work with their life. Not everyone is at their optimal between the hours of nine and five, so allowing employees to work at times that work for them can increase their overall job satisfaction.
Another area that employees want to be able to have control over is where they work. A lot of people find that the office place is not conducive to high productivity levels. Allowing people to work from home can be the type of benefit that significantly increases their happiness and job satisfaction.
Create Opportunities for Career Development
One of the key ways to create higher job satisfaction is by creating opportunities for your employees to participate in career development. People want to feel as though they are advancing in their careers and organizations that can help their workers do this often have high job satisfaction numbers.
This can also be an opportunity for you to cut costs when looking for new leadership or creating a new position. Not having to go outside of the organization for talent means that you cut costs while showing your employees that they are appreciated.
Related: 5 Steps to Creating an Effective Training and Development Program
Recognize and Reward a Job Well-done
Being appreciated for your hard work can bring feelings of happiness and accomplishment to people. This can then increase your job satisfaction as it feels nice to know that the work you do is being recognized. This can be done by mentioning a successful completion of a project at a team meeting or giving a small reward to the participants of a large team effort. Making sure that your staff knows that their work is being noticed is a great way of increasing feelings of job satisfaction among your workers.
Improve Communication and Transparency
Employees want to know what is going on with the organization even if it is bad news. By sharing how the company is doing with full transparency can create feelings of trust among employees. Being able to trust the organization can allow for job satisfaction to be increased as they feel they are being respected.
Another aspect of this is communication. Having an open-door policy, for example, can allow your employees to feel as though you care about what is going on in their lives. If there are some inter-office politics that you need to be aware of, employees feel like they can trust you with this information and you give them one less thing to worry about.
Promote Good Work-Life Balance
Help promote a good work-life balance by working in a way that brings balance to your life. It can be difficult for people to create balance in their lives and if their manager is not attempting to have balance, they will not feel that they can do the same thing. Try to avoid working too many hours or constantly bringing work home. By being a good example and you will see your employees will follow.
Having balance in life can increase job satisfaction as it means people have less stress in their lives. When employees feel less stressed, they are able to enjoy everything in their life, even their work. By creating a relaxed atmosphere in the workplace you will see people become happier and you will have achieved your goal of increasing job satisfaction.
Team Bonding Activities
A great way to increase job satisfaction is to allow your team to bond with one another. Having work friends is important when thinking about overall happiness and what brings you enjoyment. By having friends at work you have people to go to when you need to vent or simply need a short break from work. This is important as it allows people to feel accepted and they begin to look forward to going to work.
To do this try having social activities that employees can participate in to get to know each other. For example, plan an office party where people can come and socialize without any work actually involved. By creating opportunities for your employees to bond, you will be increasing their job satisfaction.
By using these examples, you will start to see job satisfaction levels go up and your entire organization will thrive.
