Employee Satisfaction and Employee Engagement Surveys

Why measure employee satisfaction?

Many organisations conduct regular Employee Satisfaction Surveys. They are based on the premise that happy, enthusiastic employees will perform more effectively on behalf of the employer than employees who are alienated from the organisation's objectives. So if areas are found where employees are not satisfied, initiatives can be taken to address the areas of dissatisfaction. This should provide benefits in the areas of

• Individual and corporate performance
• Employee retention
• Sickness / unauthorised absence level
• Employee performance
• Product / service quality
• Customer satisfaction
• Market share
• Profit

So an effort to improve employee satisfaction should lead to an improvement in the quality of your products or services; customer satisfaction and, for commercial organisations, a competitive advantage, increased market share and improved profit.

By conducting an employee satisfaction survey, you send a message to employees that their views are of interest to management. This can affect their perceptions to some degree, and it is most important to remember that it creates expectations. People might conclude that management wouldn't ask about working conditions if they weren't willing to consider improving them. If the results show dissatisfaction about working conditions, however, and you do nothing about them, and then after a year has gone by a further questionnaire comes out asking about working conditions, the employees' perception of your attitude toward them and the survey process will dramatically change. Typically, the response rate will diminish and the cynicism of the responses will increase.

This incidental effect of running a survey must not be overlooked but it is not the main purpose of the project, whose role is as a diagnostic tool, not part of the treatment.

Satisfaction = Performance?

The link between employee satisfaction and employee performance is not as direct as we intuitively assume and there isn't much evidence linking employee satisfaction measures with either individual job performance or corporate performance. One can imagine some people being very satisfied with a job in which they seldom had to do anything but their contentment clearly wouldn't lead to high individual or corporate performance.

There is convincing evidence for a link between employee satisfaction and long term share price improvement.

Measures usually referred to under the headings "commitment" or "engagement" do correlate with performance, though. That is why many employers now conduct employee engagement surveys. However, the small number of questions you need to measure engagement means that it almost always makes sense to include the employee engagement survey as part of a process which also measures wider satisfaction issues. If your objective is to improve employee performance, we can help you to measure and then target for improvement the measures which are known to be performance-related as well as those which most people would expect to be asked about.

What's in a name

When you conduct research to discover how your employees feel about your organisation and their situation in it, we prefer to call them employee satisfaction surveys.

Employee

Instead of employee, you may choose to say staff, provided there is no one in your organisation who might feel excluded from that group.

Satisfaction

The traditional word was attitude, and an employer who wanted to hear from employees conducted an employee attitude survey. In these times, the word attitude has acquired negative connotations, and it now seems inadvisable to suggest that our employees might have "an attitude". Another popular option is opinion, which seems harmlessly accurate, but we still prefer satisfaction. You are probably concerned that your customers should be satisfied with the goods or services you deliver. You should be. You probably expect your employees to be concerned about customer satisfaction too.

You would probably agree that your employees are most likely to be successful in delivering customer satisfaction if they are themselves satisfied with their lot. So we advise that you take as much interest in employee satisfaction as you do in customer satisfaction, and give the project a name that reflects that interest.

Satisfaction v Importance

When you have run an employee survey asking about employees' satisfaction with various aspects of their experience at work, it is tempting to think that you should invest the greatest effort and resources into improving the aspects with which they are least satisfied.

We advise you as well as asking how satisfactory are the various aspects of people's working lives, also to ask in the survey how important each one is to the employee. Then we create a Priority for Action measure for each aspect of people's experience at work by combining its dissatisfaction index and its importance index.

You can see the Priority for Action report illustrated in our outputs illustrations, and explained in more detail in our article about prioritising initiatives after a survey.