Employee satisfaction is critical for a successful business. It creates the foundation that your business is built on, helping you achieve goals related to customer support, recruitment, positive branding, and more. While it’s easy to keep your employees happy and strong early on, it becomes increasingly more difficult as your headcount grows. The good news is that with little effort you can boost employee morale, satisfaction, and overall work output.
#1 Flex Hours
You know better than anyone that work doesn’t always adhere to a 9:00 – 5:00 schedule, so why care about the exact times your employees are in the office? Modern workplaces have implemented an “as long as you get the job done” mentality, enabling employees to balance their long days with shorter days, and not stress about small schedule changes when needed. Early morning doctor appointment? No problem, just stick around a little late sometime. Need to leave early to get the kids? No worries, we know that you are putting in time on weekends anyway! This approach keeps employees focused on getting the job done and removes the worrying that comes with a strict schedule.
#2 Complain More
Well, maybe not more. Giving employees a space to vent and be heard does amazing things for morale and overall culture. Not providing a safe forum for employees to provide feedback and their concerns creates a poisonous culture that seeps into every cubical and desk in the business. Encourage employees to vet their concerns, complain about processes, and generally just be heard. Some of this feedback will be used, some of it won’t be, but it allows your employees to get things off of their chest and may give you some critical feedback to use!
#3 Goal Oriented Tasks
Work, work, work, work, go home. Work, work, work, work, go home. Work, work, work, work, go home. If reading those sentences was annoying, then imagine how bad it would be to live your entire life like that? It’s been proven that employees are happier when they have specific milestones and achievements to mark their progress. When doing your annual reviews or your onboarding plan, work in specific measurable objectives that employees can accomplish. Even better, create milestones leading up to those objectives, turning a big task into many small tasks. Not only is this a great best practice, but it also instills a sense of accomplishment for your team, driving them to do a better job and be happier with the work that they complete.
#4 Employee Outings
Get out of the office! It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, as simple as a monthly lunch to something as big as an annual offsite kickoff, getting out of the office is a great opportunity for employees to get to know each other better, creates a comfortable space for feedback and banter, and is a nice “thank you” to your employees (what’s better than a free lunch?). If you’re not sure what to do, ask your team! Make them a part of the decision making for employee related events. Lastly be sure to schedule far in advance so that everyone has the opportunity to attend!
#5 Food
Free food is the easiest way to make people happy and your employees are no exception. This also goes nicely with the employee outing idea mentioned above – but feel free to keep it simple just by ordering pizza for the office, or having lunch delivered for meetings that are held over lunch. Full stomachs and free food = happy (and temporarily sleepy) employees!
#6 Measurement
There are countless ways to test employee happiness: interviews, anonymous surveys, suggestion box, etc. These options do a great job of exposing some parts of employee satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), but they come with bias and flaws that prevent you from truly understanding if your employees do in fact enjoy working for your business. So how do you get an accurate measurement of employee happiness and satisfaction? See if they are recommending your business to others and if they are referring their friends/family to work there. Actions speak loudly and honestly, if your employees can’t stop talking about how great your business is and trying to get their friends to join you, then you’re in a good spot. If they never refer anyone to work there, then you may want to ask why.
But be careful, there may be multiple reasons why employees are not telling their friends to work there. They don’t know how the process works, it’s not on-top-of-mind, it’s cumbersome, they may not be thinking of who in their network matches the skills needed, etc. Erin focuses on removing all of the cumbersome distractions of employee referrals and empowers your employees to quickly and easily refer anyone from their network. Learn more about Erin and Smart Referral AI here.
