How to Ensure Employee Satisfaction Across Your Business

Managing a workforce can be a difficult task, especially when juggling with the steering of your business through difficult times. Employee satisfaction, though, is one of the more important variables to manage internally as you chart a path to growth and longevity – having been demonstrably linked to numerous metrics from productivity to profitability. What can you do to ensure your employees are, generally, satisfied in their work?

Transparency of Pathways

One of the driving forces in most career journeys is, naturally, development. Workers are often less incentivised by salary, and more incentivised by opportunities to develop and advance in their niche. As such, one of the better things a business can do to improve employee satisfaction is to be clear and transparent in the progression pathways available to workers – and to actively invest in said progression. Every staff member should know exactly what kind of progression is possible for them, and have the opportunity to train in favour of promotion or career development.

Employee Support

Supporting your staff is a multifarious endeavour, and paying proper attention to each avenue of support can be vital to improving employee satisfaction. From an HR perspective, introducing a People First platform can be useful in creating more time for interpersonal engagement; the platform simplifies the payroll process, at once reducing the risk of payroll issues impacting employees and freeing up man-hours for HR personnel to speak with staff members more directly.

‘Bottom-Up’ Decision Making

A common factor in rising employee disenfranchisement takes the form of disempowerment; that is when employees feel as if their contributions to the direction of the business are minimal, or that their voices count for little in the grander scheme of things. Top-down leadership is naturally a norm in business, but poor business leadership can look more like a dictatorship.

Your business could avoid this possibility by engaging more with employees at every level of the business. Given the strong appetite for growth and development amongst a majority of workers, this could be another powerful way to invest in that appetite. Allowing workers in on more important business decisions can also inject fresh ideas into the business, allowing all workers to feel as if they are part of something unique.

Flexibility

Investment in employee aspirations is a more effective route to cultivating a motivated workforce and a positive company culture, but the provision of individual perks and benefits cannot be overlooked. The most impactful of these, generally speaking, is flexibility: empowering workers to make their own decisions for the betterment of their personal life or work-life balance, as opposed to expecting employee sacrifice in the name of their salary.

Flexitime – enabling workers to choose when they work their mandated hours each week – is a simple policy to enact and can make it much easier for workers to balance their personal lives with their work. Similarly, remote working policies – now a relative norm – can be a major boon for workers in reducing their commute-related expenditure (and time lost to commuting) each week.