Are your employees truthfully satisfied?
Whilst your employees may tell you that they are satisfied in their jobs, are they truthfully satisfied? How can you be sure that they are telling the truth? Many workplace relationships require trust between one another, but sometimes employees may not feel comfortable enough sharing concerns to their managers or the business owner. How can you find out what employees really think?
If you were to ask them face to face if they are happy in their job, it is likely they would say yes. But like I said, if they don’t feel confident or comfortable speaking up, they may struggle to be truthful.
A great solution to this is to introduce a job satisfaction questionnaire! This enables you to get in- depth, truthful opinions and perspectives from your employees – particularly because you can set it to be anonymous, which is appealing to those employees who’d like to keep it that way, and allows people to be totally honest. Not only that, but it will enable you to improve the business and implement different action points that ensure your employees are satisfied with their job and feel good in the workplace.
What should you include in a job satisfaction questionnaire?
Here’s a few example questions to get you started.
1. What is your least favourite thing about working here?
Whilst this may seem like a blunt question, it can help you see if there is a common thing in the business that employees dislike, and since it can be anonymous you can expect totally honest answers from your employees.
Once you’ve identified the things your employees dislike about the workplace, you can start to implement changes to help improve things. For example, if many people respond saying they dislike the admin side of their job, you could employ an administrator to do all the admin duties. However, it could be a simple fix, for example: there are never enough mugs in the kitchen. In this case you can just buy everyone a mug.
The point is that you can get down to the core problems within the workplace and find the right solutions to benefit your employees.
2. Do your current responsibilities match the job you applied for?
This question gives you a great chance to see if your job descriptions match the actual jobs being carried out within your business. This can help you reduce and distribute responsibilities where appropriate, and also identify if an employee is ready for that next step up the career ladder. You may also want to change some people’s job roles and job titles to cover the job responsibilities they are doing.
This benefits your employees but can also benefit the business throughout the recruitment process by allowing you to streamline job descriptions and accurately promote different positions within the business. This high level of attention to detail will be much appreciated by your team and potential candidates.
3. How could the company culture be improved?
It is no secret that the culture of a company is important to employees. While you may think that your team gets on great and the culture is strong, you could be wrong, particularly if some people aren’t comfortable expressing concerns to management. A confidential job satisfaction questionnaire could answer this question for you. Take the time to analyse the feedback from this part of the questionnaire to see what recommendations and ideas come out on top. As with ‘buying more mugs’; there could be a simple solution.
What about an independent HR Consultant?
Like we discussed earlier, some employees can be hesitant to open up to management about their concerns. However, using an independent HR consultant to do this for you can be a great way to get honest feedback.
If you are struggling to understand whether your employees are satisfied with their jobs, why not give us a call? We can help create job satisfaction questionnaires for you and complete the analysis for you too. Our team of HR consultants can then recommend the changes that you need to implement to ensure job satisfaction across the whole business. Contact our team of professional HR consultants on 01733 739660 to see how else we can help you.
