Creating a customer-friendly business is the objective for many companies. Of course, valuing your customers is essential to keep them loyal to your business and to build up your reputation. While striving to achieve excellent customer service is an entirely reasonable goal, the need to create an employee-friendly business should not be overlooked.
The Importance of Employee Satisfaction
Employee satisfaction is essential for many reasons:
- Happy employees are usually more productive.
- Employees that have job satisfaction are likely to offer better customer service. Everyone has come across a sales assistant with a bad attitude. Employees with a lousy attitude provide poor customer service, as they seemingly hate their job, or are busy moaning about their employer while serving customers!
- Feeling undervalued at work may prompt employees to take more sick days.
- Retaining staff becomes harder if levels of employee satisfaction are low. The knock-on effect of this is more time spent on the hiring process. This is because you will need to recruit and train new employees regularly if your staff turn over is high.
- Dissatisfied employees may speak negatively about your business and cause damage to your company’s reputation.
As you can see, an unhappy workforce can negatively impact on so many different areas of your business. Therefore, it makes sense to try to achieve greater employee satisfaction. Here are some of the ways that you can do this:
Create a Positive Workplace Culture
The culture in an organization is something that can have a significant impact on the way the employees view both the company and themselves. Workplace culture may seem like something that evolves organically, and in some ways that is true, but it is heavily influenced by the behavior of each person in the organization.
Many aspects of an organization’s culture filter down from the top. If senior management displays a bad attitude towards their staff, and fail to treat them fairly and with respect, then this will create a ‘them and us’ divide between management and staff. This divide can manifest itself into lots of time spent by staff complaining about the company as a whole and the management specifically. Over time, resentment can build up, and a negative atmosphere can pollute the organization.
Employers that treat their staff fairly and with respect, help to nurture a positive workplace culture. An organization with a positive workplace culture is a far more pleasant environment for people to work in. Being part of a positive culture and feeling valued is likely to make staff want to work harder to help play their role in the overall success of the company.
Create an Excellent Work Environment
The workplace is where most people spend the majority of their waking hours, so it is crucial to create a workspace that is suited to the needs of your team. Discovering how to design an office the whole team will love may sound tricky. But, with some careful planning, you can create a work environment that your staff love to be in.
Providing your staff with a lovely work environment is guaranteed to make them feel more valued, and make it easier for them to perform their role. Having a pleasant place to work equipped with everything you need to be productive is a sure-fire way to enjoy spending time in the office.
Offer Benefits and Rewards
If your organization is only as good as the team that you employ, then you better make sure that you hire the right team! Great staff makes life so much easier for business owners and managers. Being able to trust your workforce to do a great job every time, means less time spent desperately trying to motivate your staff, and more time to focus on other things.
To attract the best staff to your company in the first place, you will need to have plenty of incentives to entice them. There are many things that employees look for when choosing to apply for a job; here are some possible reasons to consider:
- How competitively you pay your staff is a significant consideration for job candidates, so an attractive salary is a big incentive.
- After the salary itself, benefits packages are the next most significant incentive, that can add value to your offering. This includes things such as the pension scheme that you offer, healthcare, how generous your parental leave is etc.
- How many days off that staff are entitled to is also a big attraction for job applicants.
- Another factor that can make your organization attractive to the best candidates is your business’ reputation. Your reputation encompasses how ethical your business is, how well you treat your staff, and how prestigious your business is. You want people to feel proud to have your company listed on their resumé.
The Importance of Staff Retention
Happy staff means that you have employees that are much more likely to want to stay working for your company. This is the perfect scenario for your business, you want to attract the right candidates for your roles, and you then want them to stay working for you.
Attracting great talent to your organization is good, but when people are good, they are more likely to be head-hunted. Of course, this is a situation that you want to avoid. The hiring and onboarding process is not only expensive, but it is also incredibly time-consuming too. Therefore, when you have the right employees, you need to keep hold of them. Here are some ways to help improve staff retention and keep hold of your most productive employees:
- Offer rewards based on length of service and performance.
- Create an inclusive and positive workplace culture, that people want to be a part of.
- Develop a work environment that makes it a pleasure to come into work each day.
- Provide clear pathways for them to progress through the business and opportunities to take ownership and oversee projects.
- Always treat staff with respect and fairness to show that their work is appreciated and that they are valued.
