Employee satisfaction

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Question - Should you focus on your employees’ satisfaction with your organisation?

Answer - It is as important to judge whether employees are satisfied with themselves and the teams they work in. If employees are uncomfortable with their own contributions, it will appear that they are satisfied with their organisation, thereby masking the real issue. Similarly, dissatisfaction with their work team can colour their appreciation of the organisation as a whole

Key action points

Many, if not most, organisations run employee satisfaction surveys nowadays.

Some are paper-based and lengthy. Others use e-survey tools, which require that they be short.

Formal quantitative surveys may be supported by qualitative techniques, such as employee focus groups or workshops.

As with any satisfaction survey, the biggest issue is what you do about the results. Unless employees identify a clear line of sight between completing the survey and a significant improvement in their working environment, an employee satisfaction survey is likely to engender at least casual cynicism.

The survey we have devised, and used, is unusual in that it shares the onus of responsibility for the working environment between three levels:

1. the individual
2. the team within which the individual works
3. the organisation within which the team operates

Undoubtedly, the ultimate responsibility for running a high performing organisation falls on the top management, but there are many issues that can be addressed at team and individual level too.

How individual employees view their organisation will be greatly influenced by how good they feel about themselves as individuals, which will be influenced by how valued they are by their teams and by the organisation as a whole. This should be recognised.

The most concerning results would be if employees consistently had a poor perception of their own performance. If they view their own performance as good, but that of their team as poor, there are clearly issues around teamwork and teambuilding. If they believe that they and their teams are doing sterling work, but that the organisation is letting them down with poor top level performance, you may well question how long the more marketable employees are likely to hang around.

The individual issues addressed within the Individual, Team and Company categories are up to you. The ones we have provided are place-holders. You would need to develop a model of what the individual wants, what is expected of the individual, what the team wants, what is expected of the team, what the company wants, and what is expected of the company by the teams / individuals. The questions are then built around these issues so that there are matching questions at each of the three levels.

What we can say about this employee satisfaction structure is that when we have run it, statistical analyses have confirmed that the levels of Individual, Team and Company have made intuitive sense to the respondents – each category has had a distinctive pattern, separate from the next category.

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