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Employee satisfaction is more important than ever.

As your employees continue to evaluate what’s important to them in their lives, job satisfaction is key. It ensures that your top performers don’t look for work elsewhere.

So, whether you’re looking to reduce employee turnover or you need to recruit new talent as your company grows, it’s time to start prioritizing satisfaction.

Keep reading to learn more about how to improve employee satisfaction, boost productivity, and reduce expensive turnover.

Importance of employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is key to the success of your business. If your employees aren’t happy with their bosses or the company as a whole, you can expect lower productivity and less engagement, both of which affect your bottom line.

On the other hand, if you have high levels of satisfaction, your turnover rates will reduce because employees won’t feel a need to start looking for other opportunities.

Having happy employees makes it easier for everyone in the workplace to succeed. These individuals take pride in their work and feel loyal to their employees. Ultimately, happy people are productive people.

Tips for improving employee satisfaction

To improve employee satisfaction, you must first understand why employees are dissatisfied.

Unfortunately, employee dissatisfaction is typically never the cause of one issue or event. Instead, low employee satisfaction is brought about by multiple problems that can all affect the efficiency of their work, their happiness with their job duties, and their overall feelings about the company.

Here are a few factors that can lead to employee dissatisfaction:

Underpayment

Employees deserve to get paid what they’re worth. If you start giving an employee additional duties, they should be compensated for taking on more work. While many people don’t leave jobs due to underpayment, it can contribute to someone looking for another opportunity.

Lack of recognition

Employees need to feel like they are valued. When someone does a good job on a project, they don’t expect a party. However, they might expect someone to thank them for their hard work.

Poor leadership

Very few people leave their jobs because they dislike the work; most people leave because they have bad leadership. Bad bosses come in many forms, including the gossiper and the micromanager.

No opportunity for growth

Most people want careers. Even if someone is hired as a low-level employee, they’re likely hoping for the chance to grow within the company and eventually make more money by learning new skills. However, if your employees are learning new skills and not getting promoted, they might choose to take their skills elsewhere.

No flexibility

Modern employees need more flexible schedules, and more people realize the eight-day workday just doesn’t make sense anymore, especially for parents or those with responsibilities outside of work. While your company may not be able to offer people full days off, people do expect some level of flexibility in their working hours so they can take care of what’s most important in their lives, such as their loved ones.

Understanding the contributing factors of employee dissatisfaction is important because it can help the business understand how to fix employee attitudes and improve their relationships with those who work there.

Here are five ways you can start to improve employee satisfaction.

Give promotions as appropriate

Too many small companies forget to give their top performers the promotions they deserve.

If someone is taking on additional duties without being compensated, they might take their new skills and start applying for other jobs. Your employees are smart, and they know what they’re worth. They can type in their job title on any job board and find hundreds of job listings that align with their skill sets. Many of these listings include the rate someone else is willing to pay them.

If you can’t pay people what they’re worth and invest in your employees, you can’t expect them to be loyal to your company.

Celebrate milestones

Celebrating employee milestones makes employees feel appreciated. It shows you care about them as people and not just cogs in a wheel.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to throw a party every time someone hits their work anniversary milestone. Instead, you can try small gestures, such as giving employees gifts like a snack box or small gift cards on their anniversaries.

Recognition

Recognizing employees for their work goes a long way in building a healthy relationship with them.

By telling someone they did a good job on a project, you can make them feel like their work really matters. Consistently recognizing hard work is key to ensuring employee engagement.

Build a growth plan

Employees may love their jobs. But eventually, they’ll want to start taking on more responsibility to prevent boredom from doing the same work every day.

Providing employees with a growth plan can help them understand what they need to accomplish to get a promotion and start taking on more responsibility.

Be flexible

Some companies give their employees unlimited paid time off because they trust that they are completing their work. However, unlimited PTO might not be a good idea, depending on your industry and the size of your company. Instead, implement a flexible work schedule, allowing people to work when they can and when they’re most productive.

A flexible schedule doesn’t mean that your employees will be working around the clock, though. When offering flexible work schedules, all employees must have the same rules.

For example, you can ensure that everyone works the same number of hours in a day, no matter what time that is. You should also find a way to track projects easily to improve communication when everyone is working on different schedules.

In conclusion

Improving employee satisfaction is easy. However, if you don’t start taking the time to evaluate your employees’ feelings about their jobs and their work, you won’t know when they’re dissatisfied.

Of course, if you have a high turnover rate, that should signal that something is wrong.

Unfortunately, far too many employers care more about sales than finding candidates who can help boost those sales. You can start improving satisfaction and reducing turnover with a few simple techniques.

Have remote employees? Check out our nine tips to better manage your virtual team.

As you’re determining how to improve employee satisfaction, consider leveling up the digital marketing of your entire business with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

About the author

Julia Olivas graduated from San Francisco State University with her B.A. in Communication Studies. She is a contributing writer at 365businesstips.com where she loves sharing her passion for digital marketing and content creation. Outside of writing, she loves cooking, reading, making art, and her pup Ruby.

Whether your team has shifted to remote work due to the coronavirus pandemic or you just started a new remote management position, it can feel like uncertain waters to lead a team effectively in a virtual realm.

But being a great manager is more important than ever. According to Gallup research, 50 percent of employees quit their companies because of their boss.

Remote management just has a few additional challenges to plan for.

Here are nine tips to better manage your remote team.

Check-in meetings (on video) matter

The frequency is entirely up to you, but daily one-on-ones are recommended, especially when you’re just starting out.

Emails and instant messages (even phone calls) only go so far. It’s important to see your employees and for them to see you.

Regular one-on-one meetings establish a connection you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to create during larger team meetings. It’s important that these are predictable and consistent so that employees feel that they can ask questions and express any concerns. In essence, you’re creating a space for you to give feedback and/or praise as a manager while also listening to your employee.

According to a study by Interact, about 69 percent of managers are uncomfortable giving direct feedback to employees.

Creating a recurring space to both give and solicit feedback will help with any discomfort.

That being said, larger team meetings should also be scheduled out to keep everyone focused and on the same page. Video, again, is important. Otherwise, it’s just a conference call, but you can easily take advantage of applications like Zoom, GoTo Meeting, Google Team Hangouts, Microsoft Teams and more.

Just like with one-on-one meetings, your team meetings should be predictable, consistent and always with (at least a basic) agenda to maintain focus.

And video cannot be overrated. Every team member should understand that meetings happen on video in a quiet place with few distractions. This professional approach fosters productivity and better connection among participants.

Embrace over-communication in remote work

When it comes to working from home, you can almost never communicate too much.

Two benefits arise from apparent over-communication:

Your team understands your expectations and is on the same page with you.
Loneliness can be combated.

Love it or hate it, the office environment provides a social environment in many ways. Remove the physical office, and remote workers can more easily feel alone and isolated.

Communicate more. It’s rarely too much in a remote work environment.

Use a clear set of communication tools

Technology offers a range of options and applications to stay in touch with your team. It’s tempting to try the next “shiny” tool with upgraded features, but the more applications your team uses, the more scattered the communication.

In addition to the obvious use of email, decide on one communication tool for video meetings and one for instant messaging. More than that and messages could easily be missed by team members. Make sure that everyone on the team is comfortable with using each tool.

Beyond communication, there are definitely many tools that can optimize your remote team’s productivity to be aware of as well.

Whatever you decide to use among your team members, double-check that each tool features adequate security.

Speaking of tools, check out these 15-plus free productivity tools that can help you.

Communication etiquette is relevant

Short of actually training your team on the best ways to communicate via instant message and beyond (never underestimate the power of an emoji when appropriate), a simple conversation about the do’s and don’ts of short-form communication always helps.

First, it’s helpful for everyone to assume the best from one other regarding tone in a message or email. But what else can everyone do to make sure that nothing is misread or taken in a negative light? It’s important to establish those baselines to foster the most productive and positive communication amongst your team.

Explain goals and set expectations

When working from home, it’s important that every team member feels part of the mission.

A big part of that is explaining the “why” behind a particular goal and how each employee contributes to that goal.

Clearly identify the tasks to be done, their priority and who should champion what, along with regular deadlines to check on progress.

Focus on the outcomes with your remote team

Micro-managing is never a good idea, remote or not. But attempting any semblance of managing every detail or every hour your team works remotely could lead to discord among your employees.

Instead, focus on the outcome of your team’s activity. In the end, the goals and deadlines achieved and met are the measure of success, not how each working hour is spent. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to set expectations and monitor employee workloads.

Audit your remote team’s resources

You can’t assume that every remote employee has what he or she needs to contribute as expected. Does everyone have an updated computer, mobile device, access to high-speed internet and so on?

Have a plan to address any gaps in resources among the team.

Support a remote team ‘social life’

It can’t all be about work, work, work from a remote setting. Just like how you’ll find “water cooler” chat in an office, your team will only benefit from a little social lead way here and there.

This can be as simple as leaving the first few minutes of a team meeting open to non-work conversation. You also could organize virtual social hours with possible themes. There’s no limit to your imagination here. Just remember that humans are more than worker bees, and the more you can celebrate that and offer each employee a sense of belonging, the better off your team will do in the long run.

Encourage vacations to be actual vacations

When you’re so connected to your team, it can be hard to disconnect. As the manager, let your team know that you not only consider their “off” time to be off, but also that everyone taking time to recharge is very important.

The technology we all use can make “turning off” pretty difficult, but this is especially true for remote workers. Remember that the power to make that a priority comes from you.

Help coordinate any temporary task hand-offs and plans to sustain an employee’s expected time off to ensure a smooth transition.

The key to managing a remote team successfully is clear communication, a consistent schedule and set expectations. Giving your team the flexibility and understanding they may need while also inspiring them to hit goals will always be a shifting balance you’ll be adapting to every day.

Of course, check out our 11 tips on how you can be more productive while working from home.

As you’re determining how to improve the management of your remote team, consider leveling up your digital marketing of your entire business with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Tag: management

5 tips to improve employee satisfaction