As an employer, it’s often difficult to know exactly what your employees want from their jobs. More often than not, the pay is not the answer and employee satisfaction doesn’t necessarily increase dependant on wage or salary. So that begs the question, what exactly do workers really want from their job? In this blog, we’ll answer exactly that.
Firstly, it’s crucial to understand why employee satisfaction is so important within a business. Other than the obvious, such as improved morale and happier staff, there are a few reasons that can actually benefit the business itself. The main, of course, being that happy employees work harder. In one study, it was found that some employees work up to 20% more productively when they are happy (source here.) Another key benefit to employee happiness is retention. It was found in another survey that 12% of employees would quit their job because they simply don’t feel appreciated (source here.)
So, how do you keep your employees happy and give them what they really want?
One of the best ways to help keep your employees happy in their job and less likely to leave is by appreciating them. One of the best ways to show you appreciate your employees is through speaking with them, asking them questions and gathering feedback. This could be feedback relating to a recent project they carried out, or the way the business is run in general. Don’t forget to actually use their feedback too. Make changes within the business based upon what they tell you. This will all make them feel more cared for and important within the business.
This will have a significant effect on employee retention as you’re using their answers to improve working conditions and in turn employee happiness.
Another factor workers really want is the ability to progress within the workplace. This means climbing up the corporate ladder, experiencing new roles and increasing their workplace responsibilities. What workers don’t want is to be stuck doing the same thing for years on end without a vision of going any further. You should reward those that do well with job progression.
This, again will massively improve employee retention, why move on to a new place of work when you can progress further in your current position?
One thing we often look over in regards to what workers really want is all the little things. These are the things that require little to no effort to give but are generally missed or not appreciated for the significant effect they can have. For example, providing employees with free fruit, having breaks from work for team building exercises, congratulating birthdays, rewarding workers with a free meal or time off for completing projects etc. All of these, although require little input from the employer, will add up to making an all-round more enjoyable experience for staff. A lot of the time workers aren’t too bothered with the normal ways of ensuring employee satisfaction and simply want the little things in order to be happy with their job.
It’s a great place to start when wanting to give workers what they really want as these things require little effort and time but can have a great boost to employee retention and productivity.
In conclusion, there are hundreds of ways to give employees what they really want from their job, this article just covers three of them. However, picking up just one or two of these things will likely have a large benefit both to your workers and the performance of the business itself. You can read further into how to recruit and retain your best employees in our article here.
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