4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

The employee satisfaction survey is a good measure of how happy and engaged your employees are in their jobs. Knowing what the problem areas are in your organization will help you to make the changes needed to have a higher percentage of engaged employees. Below are five of the most popular questions to be asked on employee satisfaction surveys.

Employee engagement is a goal that most corporations spend a lot of time and effort to meet. It is not easy, since in America, alone, only 30% on average of employees are considered to be engaged.

The other 70% fall either in the middle, where they are just striding along, or they are in the category of being actively disengaged. More employees fall in the middle, than actively disengaged, but they are still a problem. Successful companies employ many different strategies to keep their employees engaged. The first order of business is to identify just how many disengaged employees you have. This is easily implemented with a staff satisfaction survey.

This survey includes targeted questions on topics ranging from opinions on policies, to how happy the employee is with his or her job. Open-ended questions are an excellent tool to see exactly how employees feel. Carefully measure management in these surveys. Publicizing the results of the survey will often yield great results. There, the managers can let the employees know that they care and ask for suggestions to improve.

This accomplishes two things:  it tells your employees that you are concerned about them, and it gets them involved in finding a solution as a team. Employee engagement does not really have a secret formula. You have to make it a priority. A common excuse for not doing so is that of finances, but employing a survey and maybe a meeting or two will not add much in additional costs. Plus, with most of your employees engaged, studies show that sales and profits tend to trend upward.  

Having fully engaged employees is the goal of many larger organizations, but they are not as easy to come by as not-engaged and actively disengaged employees. Only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged, but, in the United States, the figures are better, at about 30%.

Still, this is a small number when compared to the 70% of employees who are not engaged in their job. Disengagement is problematic. These employees are unhappy at work and often act out their unhappiness. What does that mean for you? This means low customer satisfaction rates, loss of customers, and a waste of time and money by management. All of your performance metrics within your organization will be low, with high rates of turnover, absenteeism, safety incidents, and low quality work. DIsengagement causes:

• Lower Productivity
• Lower Profitability
• Lower Customer
• Satisfaction
• High Absenteeism
• High Turnover
• Organization shrinkage
• Higher Levels of Safety Incidents
• High Levels of Poor Quality Work

When you consider all of the data, if most of your employees fall into the non-engaged or disengaged group, this means that there is a problem in your business’s organization. However, as with all problems, in time this can be corrected. The first line of defense you have is to create an employee satisfaction survey. It needs to be concise and focused on what you can do to make employees happier.

Once you identify the key issues, you can work on fixing them, so that more employees become engaged. Engaged employees are happy, and they know their opinions and suggestions are acted upon.  

Disengaged employees are a problem that almost every business experiences at one time or another. When an employee is disengaged, this means that he is not happy or enthusiastic about his job. This is harmful because unhappy employees tend to not have the motivation or the desire to have the best performance possible. Some ways to improve engagement are outlined below.

1. Use a good employee engagement survey that asks questions in which the results are actionable. All data collected must be specific and relevant to increasing engagement.
2. Set the tone from the top by choosing the right managers. Company success is based off the employees’ achievements. This means that the managers must be as engaged as employees are expected to be.
3. Hold managers responsible for the engagement of the employees under them. The basis for this is studies have found that managers are directly responsible for their employees’ engagement levels.
4. Engagement goals should be realistic. Realistic goals are measureable and have the ability to be met. They are also more meaningful to employees. These goals should be recorded in everyday terms and broken down to simple ideas. This helps to bridge any gaps in communication. 

Engaging employees starts at the management level and ends at the employee level. When your business considers the changes needed to engage all or most of their employees, the changes must be on all levels of your organization. Studies have proven that engaged employees have higher customer satisfaction and lower absenteeism than non-engaged and fully disengaged employees.  

A new year is upon us – is your business ready to face another year?

The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to do some evaluating of your current business practices. It is the time for change, and you can start making changes by having your employees take a satisfaction survey. One of the biggest problems employers have is keeping employees engaged.

Disengaged employees can bring down the overall morale of your business, as well as its productivity. That is why you need to do what you can to make sure your employees are engaged and active in the success of your business. You can gauge an employee’s job satisfaction with a survey. However, the survey has to do more than just ask a few, basic questions.

Your survey needs to dig deep within the minds of your employees to find out how they truly feel about their jobs. Are they happy with the rate of pay? Are the benefits sufficient? Is the working environment welcoming?

Understanding Employee Attitudes and Opinions

When was the last time you gave your employees an employee morale survey? Last year? Two years ago? Never? You may be long overdue for one of these surveys.

These kinds of surveys are beneficial because they help you, the employer, gauge the morale of your workers. You need to know how they feel about their jobs and their futures. You need to know any areas of concern for your workers, so you can make necessary changes.

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