Employee satisfaction is closely tied to performance. When satisfaction levels rise, productivity, customer service, and profits tend to rise too. Employee turnover slows down and it becomes easier to recruit new talent. See how your team, leadership, and shareholders can benefit from a company culture that emphasizes employee satisfaction.
4 Hidden Ways Employee Satisfaction Adds to Your Company Performance
articles
Want to see your company perform better this year? Focus on employee satisfaction.
Employees are behind everything your company does. They build the products, answer the phones, and interact with the customers. And their emotions toward their jobs affect their daily performance.
Employee satisfaction might seem abstract, but it has a huge impact on your company. Here are a few ways satisfaction can help with improving employee performance.
1. Increased Productivity
When employees are happy with their jobs and workplaces, they’re more satisfied with their lives. And when they’re more satisfied with their lives, they have more energy. They work more efficiently and get more done.
Have you ever had a job you didn’t like much? You probably came home exhausted at the end of the workday. You felt like you needed more decompression time to “recharge.” Your dissatisfaction with your job bled over into your life. You found yourself with less energy both at home and at work.
Now think about a job where you were satisfied, a job where you had good coworkers and support from management. A job you genuinely cared about and enjoyed. You probably still felt tired at times, but you had more energy overall, didn’t you? And that energy showed up at work and beyond.
There are three different factors in productivity: time, talent, and energy. When your team lacks energy because they’re dissatisfied with their workplace, time and talent can only go so far.
But when your team has energy, they can be far more productive.
When your team has energy, they can excel.
2. Reduced Employee Turnover
When employee satisfaction goes up, turnover drops. Employees are motivated to stay at the company – and give their best effort.
On the flip side, employees who are unsatisfied with their jobs are far more likely to leave. Research suggests these employees are over 2.5 times more likely to plan on leaving. That has a huge impact on your turnover rate and recruiting budget.
When turnover is high, you have to spend a lot more on recruiting. Your existing employees have to spend more time training new ones. And your company suffers from the loss of experienced team members.
Not every unhappy employee will quit their job outright. Some employees may feel tied to their jobs for financial or location reasons. But this situation creates employee performance management problems, too: people who don’t actually quit may end up “quiet quitting.”
Quiet quitting means employees do the bare minimum to keep their jobs. They’re not just tired and burnt out; they’re intentionally doing less than they could. They’ve stopped trying to achieve. They’ve become far less productive.
If you want to keep more employees from quiet quitting their jobs or quitting outright, focus on employee satisfaction.
3. Improved Customer Service
When employee satisfaction rises, customer satisfaction rises, too.
Employees’ emotions on the job impact their ability to provide good service. Satisfied employees have a better attitude and more energy for solving customer problems. So when a company has high employee satisfaction, customers feel the impact.
One study found that each one-star improvement in a company’s Glassdoor employee rating was associated with a 1.3 point rise in its American Customer Satisfaction Index score. The impact was more than twice as large in industries where employees interacted a lot with customers.
To learn more about the relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, check out our recent blog post.
4. Higher Profit
As we said before, higher employee satisfaction leads to higher productivity, lower turnover, and better customer service. Those are all great for your company’s bottom line!
While employee satisfaction is intangible, it has a tangible impact on your bank accounts. Your accountants and shareholders will notice the difference. You will, too.
Employee satisfaction might mean the difference between being in the red and in the black, between failure and success, between stagnating and growing faster than ever.
When employees are satisfied, the effects reverberate around your company. You almost can’t help but succeed.
OK, I’m convinced. So how do I improve employee satisfaction?
There’s a lot we could say about how to improve satisfaction and employee performance. At a high level, a lot of it can be summed up like this:
- Leaders should make sure each employee is doing tasks they are good at, that they enjoy doing, and that meet the team’s needs.
- Employees’ work should make a meaningful difference, and they should know it. They need to know their work matters.
- Employees need opportunities to grow.
- Leaders may need to reconsider how they “keep score” at work. Employees need realistic expectations, and they also need to be able to track their growth.
- Employees need to know their bosses and coworkers value their contributions.
This is just a broad overview of how companies can improve employee satisfaction. You’ll need more than just a blog post to get into the details.
At Life Engineering, we offer tons of short courses and tools to help you boost achievement, motivation, employee satisfaction, and engagement. You’ll find plenty of in-depth content on improving employee performance in our Achievement Academy for Leadership Excellence, which is only available through our membership program.
Our membership program also includes a new proprietary tool to give you deep insight into your employees’ emotional states: the Employee Sentiment Score (ESS).
ESS goes beyond just tracking employee satisfaction. It gives you insights into your employees’ engagement levels and their impact on your company culture. It lets you know when a satisfaction problem begins to emerge. And with our other tools, you have plenty of ways to fix it.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you’re ready to make a change in your employee satisfaction levels, sign up for a Life Engineering membership now.
Share this
with someone who might need it
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit
Pinterest
Tumblr
Digg
StumbleUpon
XING
Email
Pocket
keep reading
If you want your customers to be happy, you need to think about employee satisfaction. When employees like their workplaces, they are more effective at their jobs and provide better customer service. Learn more about the link between the employee and customer experience and how to measure employee satisfaction.
Company culture affects everything your company does. Research has shown that culture has a strong impact on employees, job seekers, customer service, and more. If your culture is lacking, your employee satisfaction and overall performance will suffer. Learn how to cultivate a strong company culture that motivates people to apply for jobs, stay, and give their best effort.
Employee Satisfaction and Quiet Quitting: How Is Your Organization Doing? articles Many leaders are panicking about the “quiet quitting” movement. For employers, …
If you’re disengaged at work, you may be cheering for “quiet quitters” who aim to focus more on other parts of life. But you still have this niggling sense that something is off. Is quiet quitting really the answer to your lingering unhappiness? What happened to achievement?
Most pianists understand the importance of "Middle C" in orienting themselves as they begin to play. In leadership “middle C” represents compassion – both the ability and the desire to feel for and with those you are called to lead.
Responses