The lost productivity of disengaged employees costs the US economy $370 billion annually. However, each engaged employee saves their company 5% or more in costs they are responsible for controlling. Here is a comparison of the average engaged employee versus the average disengaged employee, to show how drastic the difference can be.
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If you’re a business owner, you probably find yourself having to juggle multiple hats and titles at once. You have 101 things to remember, too, and this can leave other things neglected until something goes awry and you remember that you should be focusing on that, too. Your employees and their satisfaction shouldn’t go neglected for too long – many business owners think that a paycheck is enough to appease their team, but there’s a lot that goes into keeping employees happy and ensuring they are satisfied in the role.
Below, you’ll find 15 foolproof ways to improve employee satisfaction.
Firstly, be honest about whether you’re even compensating your team fairly. Of course more goes into this than a paycheck, but paying your team the absolute bare minimum could be a recipe for disaster. Making sure you increase their pay in alignment with the current living wage and that it’s comfortable is key. It may mean taking less money yourself, but your business could well improve as a result.
Approximately 63% of employees are more satisfied with their jobs when they feel that their employer respects and appreciates them. You can do this by getting to know them, remembering their names, and taking an interest in them and their lives. Make sure you find a way that you can show your appreciation for their work, too. Verbal appreciation goes a very long way to making people feel that they have done a good job. Get comfortable with it in a group setting and letting people know they have done a great job individually.
If you don’t have an open communication policy in the workplace, you can expect confusion and uncertainty that will result in lower morale. Your team doesn’t want to feel like they’ve been forgotten about when it comes to company news and other important information. Make sure you have a way to inform your team that makes sense and keeps everybody on the same page. Newsletters and collaboration software can be a big help.
Take a good look at the work environment. If you rarely spend time in there, it could be time to ask for feedback from your team. If they find it too hot or cold, dirty, or simply uninspiring, then improvements need to be made. A great work environment can have a huge impact on productivity and ensuring people are working to the best of their abilities. It should be comfortable, safe, and inspiring. Plants, natural light, comfortable furniture, great equipment, and a little color can go a long way to improving the work environment. Oh, and hiring professional cleaners to keep it tidy and hygienic!
Your company culture is important to 79% of workers. People are always more productive and engaged when they feel connected to their workplace culture and may even be likely to seek advancement. They will also be less likely to leave if they get the opportunity to do so, according to studies. Working on your company culture could be the best way to create a good atmosphere in the office and ensure everybody stays loyal to you.
See if there are ways your business can become more sustainable. Many people are now very conscious of their environmental impact, and your business should be, too. Businesses can have a huge carbon footprint and not even realize it. Find ways your business can improve in this regard and ensure everybody is on the same page for the best results.
Something else many business owners fail to do is listen to their team, and actually ask them for feedback and ways they can improve. Listening to them can and will make a huge difference to their engagement with the company. If they would like you to implement more software to make their jobs easier, introducing something like DocuWare enterprise content management can help with this. If you’re expecting them to use their valuable time and energy on things that automation software and other pieces of software can do, they are going to feel resentful. It’ll free up time and energy in your business and help you to get so much more done.
Giving feedback on what they can improve on can help with satisfaction. No employee wants to stay in the dark about where they are with a company. Just bear in mind that this needs to happen enough so that you can see growth and point it out to them. Make sure that when giving feedback you are clear and stick to what matters. Having one to one bi weekly meetings will help you to give relevant, fresh feedback and build a good rapport with each employee. If you give feedback too sporadically, it may not be relevant or helpful.
Supporting the skill development of your team can help them to evolve. It also shows them that you care about their development, not only in the company but in general. You can do this by providing tuition support for team members who seek relevant degrees or certifications.
You could even consider adding tickets and travel for key industry conferences into your human resources budget. Team building is a good idea, too. You could even go as far as giving them an allotted time each week to work on their own projects in the workplace. It might sound counter productive, but many companies are implementing this with success.
Your core values shape your company culture, define your brand, and unite your employees. Being consistent with your values is a must! Your values should not be confusing or contradict your mission, and they should be clear and concise. Make sure they represent your goals and work ethic, too.
Make sure you’re giving employees a place to unwind. Burnout is a real thing, and you should show them that you take their mental health seriously. In fact, allowing and encouraging them to take mental health or duvet days could go a long way to improving their satisfaction and loyalty to the company. Ensure they have a fully stocked break room to enjoy, at the very least. Many companies are also implementing nap pods with success, as studies show that short naps can massively improve memory retention and productivity.
Having a room for relaxing stocked with games can be a great stress reliever and break time activity. Your team needs to have time away from their desk!
If you hover over your team it looks like you don’t trust them. Micromanaging your team is a bad idea! Take the time to develop your own project management style and allow your team to do the same. This will improve collaboration, quality of work, and productivity.
Increasing employee engagement will lead to more loyalty and satisfaction in the long run. For example, you could look at introducing team building events in and out of the office. This will encourage your team to engage and interact with one another, which in turn can help them to build a rapport and learn more about how they work. This will help them to work together better in the future – and they might just develop a good relationship. You could try a trivia night, escape room, or just a monthly happy hour. Take suggestions from them, too!
Dress codes can cause more stress for employees than you realize. They can force them to buy new clothes, feel uncomfortable, and feel frustrated when having to put outfits together in the morning. Allowing clothes they are happier with within reason can ensure they are happier day to day. This will mean they can personalize their look and dress comfortably, ready for the work day.
Providing bonuses to reward your team for their hard work can make a big difference to their satisfaction. These bonuses don’t have to be monetary. You could provide vouchers, clothing, drink and food – anything you deem appropriate. You should be providing more than a paycheck. Going above and beyond for your team can make a huge difference – how about some extra vacation days? A free gym membership? Make sure that valuable candidates actually want to work for your business because it’s a great place to work! Providing the bare minimum for your team will only ever leave them feeling unhappy and taken for granted. You can also bet that as soon as another opportunity comes along they take it.
How are you going to improve employee satisfaction in your workplace? Leave a comment below!
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In this article, I want to present a number of ideas that help to look at organizational change from a different perspective. The perspective that organizations can prepare themselves for constant change from within, by incorporating the process of change into everything they do on a daily basis. By stopping intrusive change management and making change as invisible as possible to people. Invisible change.
A sunny Friday morning at the end of July.
Bruce drags the last table to a room of sixty square meters in the Solvay office in Paris. Only a month before he received the final go for building this brand new internal Design Studio. Together with his partner in crime from IT, Frederick, he had worked hard to make this happen. The budget was limited, but Bruce’s conviction that this was what Solvay needed, was exponentially bigger.
When he started working at Solvay two years before, building a design studio was not part of his job description. It was not what he had in mind from the start either, it was an idea that emerged from one of the projects he was hired for: finding a good tool for Solvay’s HRIS (Human Resources Information System). The old system was… well … old.
Something had to change for Solvay’s employees. Previous attempts to change the system were blocked by the Management Committee because of the size of the investments and the time needed to see results. Bruce knew he had to do things differently. Before exploring possible solutions, he paused and took a step back.
Bruce started organizing workshops with employees to better understand their needs and wishes. It soon became clear that employees had a number of pain points and that it was first of all necessary to address them. The bottom line was that Solvay employees wanted more feedback, more job mobility and more personalized learning.
Shortly after, Bruce organized a “demo day”, a full day of demonstrations by major HRIS suppliers, during which twenty Solvay employees could evaluate the different solutions. Bruce also invited a number of HR-tech start-ups, that had answers to specific pain points and generally offer more user-oriented solutions.
It was immediately clear that the start-ups’ solutions appealed much more to the employees than the large systems that provide everything and, above all, are mostly set up from an HR process perspective rather than from a more attractive user or employee perspective.
At that time Bruce realized that HR had to change from a process-oriented to an employee-focused way of thinking and that employees had to be central to building a new system and finding answers to their problems and needs. That’s why a group of employees tested solutions, gave feedback, tested again and decided each time whether they wanted to continue a solution or stop it altogether.
This series of pilots ended in the idea of organizing a hackathon by and for employees. Good ideas emerged from the hackathon. But then what? Searching for a partner to bring the ideas into reality was not a problem in itself, but legal restrictions made it difficult to achieve results in the short term. That is why they decided to create a solution internally.
At the same time, Bruce was thinking about how a large oil tanker like Solvay could become more agile. According to him, the key to this is people. The power of people. How can we use employees’ ideas to create Solvay’s future together? Bruce felt that greater co-creation might be the answer.He had already become acquainted with it when he worked for McKinsey and decided to organize something similar within Solvay.
Fifteen people from across the business (business, IT, legal, not too much HR) were invited to the newly established Design Studio in Paris with the aim of developing a new prototype in twelve weeks. Another hundred employees were part of a newly created feedback panel and were consulted weekly by the team to give feedback on their work and to help decide on the name of the solution (“You”) and which functions to add. This is how the first prototype of “You” was developed.
Bruce initiated this change from within the organization. Not because he was instructed to do it this way, but because he listened to what people were saying. From the start, he was looking for a solution for everyone in the organization. The decision to implement an HRIS came top-down, the solution didn’t. Bruce got and took that freedom.
He could have followed the classic route: searching for and choosing a new software and then run a company-wide implementation consisting of a number of waves of communication, migrations and training. He soon felt that that wouldn’t be the right method. He manifested elements of what I like to call invisible change.
The idea is to make the way you make a change as invisible as possible. Think of it as a principle that you apply every time you think about creating change in your organization.
Invisible change consists of five strategies that you can use in your relentless pursuit of making change an inherent part of your business. It is my firm conviction that much-needed changes in organizations have a much greater chance of success if everyone who is engaged in change can cover the change management approach with an invisibility coat, Harry Potter-wise. The five materials such a coat of invisibility is made of are:
Those elements didn’t fall out of the sky. I have distilled them on the one hand from the management approaches that are emerging today in organizations that want to become more agile: design thinking, lean startup, agile and on the other hand from a number of philosophies that have been around for a long time, such as systems thinking, the learning organization and creative leadership. I have searched for the essence of these approaches through the glasses of change management. In my opinion, these five elements form the essence of renewal and change.
First Bruce got inspired. He got that inspiration from his previous employer where he founded the People Insights department using methods that Google, among others, already applied (design thinking, scrum, sprints). He also found inspiration in his conversations with employees, by looking for their concrete wishes and needs in this story. He didn’t define them by himself, but discovered them through various workshops. He did not yet have the solution in mind, which enabled him to have an open dialogue. He was sincerely interested in the personal pain points of employees and wanted to get to work on designing a new solution.
Based on these discussions the concrete needs were reduced to getting feedback, increasing job mobility and more personalized learning. Based on these insights, Bruce was able to invite a number of parties to a demo day, where employees were inspired by the solutions that already existed in the market on the one hand, and on the other hand, were able to test those solutions immediately.
After several iterations of testing the software, feedback from the testers, adaptation of the software, the need arose to organize a hackathon with a large group of employees. Solvay went into an initial co-creation phase.A hackathon is a co-creative workshop with a diverse group of participants (software developers, designers, employees) whose assignment is to come up with a creative solution to a certain problem in a short period of time (1 to 2 days). This usually results in a fake app or website (prototype) that is pitched to a jury at the end of the hackathon.
This gave Solvay good ideas about what the new HRIS should look like, but then the question was how to get started with those ideas. Develop it internally or work with a software developer who could tailor it for them?
The systems thinker in Bruce decided to opt for co-creation within the organization in order to work on making the organization more agile at the same time.
He integrated culture change into a concrete project, reducing a big idea (becoming agile as an organization) to the essence (agile project work) through this first project, but keeping in mind that multiple projects could be tackled in this way, and in the long run also lead to a broader change.
The design studio was created, a space of inspiration and co-creation, where a cross-functional team worked for twelve weeks on designing the solution. A panel of staff members provided personalized feedback that the team used to work on improving the design, in successive iterations. It lead to a flexible solution that can be tailored to individual needs and that uses data to come with proper suggestions.
In Bruce’s story, you soon notice that the five elements do not form a step-by-step plan. Inspiration can come before the action, but equally often comes from the action itself. Co-creation can sometimes only come into play late in the process. There is no such thing as a single success formula. The trick is to understand the elements and to estimate what is a good next step at what moment, based on what happens, the feedback you get from the employees and the goal you have in mind.
Nor is it a plea to throw all forms of Change Management overboard. The ultimate goal may well be that a separate Change Management is no longer needed, by building an organization that can continuously adapt itself to changing circumstances, but in order to build it, you should not throw the child out with the bathwater. Some principles of classic change management can still prove their usefulness.
Good organizational change is invisible, non-intrusive, and should de facto require little effort of the people involved. It’s like WIFI, you’re only aware of it when it’s not working or when it’s too slow, or when you don’t have the right password. The best way to make an organization change is to make the change as invisible as possible to the people who are part of it.
Invisible change is “sprezzatura”, Italian for achieving something incredibly difficult and making it look simple. It requires tremendous creativity and a lot of experimentation, but if it works, it leads to effortless change.
With these five strategies, you have the ingredients to throw a cloak of invisibility over the path of change. Whether you want to facilitate new systems, processes, ways of working, work environments or a new culture, you achieve it by constantly working on these five elements. You inspire, you co-create, you iterate, you reduce and you personalize.
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What values do you wish your employees to live and present to others? Are those values clear and apparent throughout your organisation?
One of the easiest ways to demonstrate company values to your employees is to implement an employee recognition programme. Simply put, employees are encouraged to thank and recognise their colleagues for behaviours and actions that support company core values and company objectives.
But what are core values? For Eric Douglas, it is clear: “They should be honest and authentic statements of what’s essential to the organization’s success”. Eric Douglas 2015: Why core values matter and how to instil them. Douglas goes on to explain that your core values need to be linked to specific behaviours. For example: “customer service can be tied to how quickly employees respond to complaints or requests for information”.
So how can you reinforce company values with an employee recognition programme? How do you ‘Mind the Gap’ between what should be happening in respect of recognition, and what is happening on the ground? Employee rewards alone will not drive core values and behaviours. Organisations need a strategic, highly-engaging recognition programme to go to work for them.
Employee recognition has changed dramatically over the years. Senior management now understands that employee recognition plays an important part in attracting, retaining and engaging employees. It is a good decision to invest in a recognition system – but choose wisely and mind the recognition gap!
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Leaders who primarily focused on results were seen as great just 14% of the time, and leaders who primarily focused on people were seen as great only 12% of the time.
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams
