How is employee satisfaction measured?

Satisfaction questionnaire, employee poll, satisfaction survey, measuring employee satisfaction… different names for the same basic question: how should employee satisfaction be measured?

What is employee satisfaction?

Employee satisfaction is the result of the benefits of work to an employee in terms of professional, relational and social fulfilment. It varies from one employee to the next but evaluation entails some common criteria such as atmosphere, workload, meaningful tasks, autonomy level, pay level, etc. Employee satisfaction is fundamental to the success of the best-performing companies.

Source : Harvard Business review.

How is employee satisfaction measured?

There are two types of tool:

• Group 1: Inferred indicators or symptomatic indicators
• Group 2: Top-ranking solutions

These solutions are not necessarily very complex to set up but they differ considerably in their approach and the type of data they provide. The solution selected will have a direct impact on ongoing HR progress.

Inferred employee satisfaction solutions

What characterises this group of solutions is that you already have the indicators to hand. They are symptomatic indicators. They reflect the satisfaction of your teams. You can use these KPIs to identify a trend. Is employee satisfaction up or down? But you can’t explain why.

You know these indicators, they are right in front of you. For example:

• Turnover: Turnover rate = [(Number of departures in year N + Number of arrivals in year N)/2] / Staff numbers on 1 January of year N
• Absence = (Number of absence hours in the period / Number of hours worked in theory over the period) x 100
• Recruitment through recommendation: the higher this is, the higher you can assume your employee satisfaction to be.
• Service quality: the quality of customer service has been proven to be directly affected by employee satisfaction.

However, indicators can only indicate. There are many cases where indicators are high and yet employee satisfaction is low. For example, imagine a restaurant where behavioural patterns are standardised and management is old school and tough. This standard/tough management duopoly may mean that employees are forced to smile at every customer – customer service would rate high but employee satisfaction would not.

These indicators are full of bias.

Until something better comes along, you could make up an employee satisfaction cockpit based on these indicators. Comparing and contrasting these will help you remove bias and will provide you with interesting information.

Principle 3: Dispel the fog! Switch to feedback.

Employee satisfaction indicators

To get dedicated indicators you need to go back to the source. These indicators are not inferred. People use questionnaires that are more or less elaborate, more or less designed for HR systems.

A distinction is made between:

• Indicators that measure – for example, the question “Would you recommend a friend to come work here?”
• Indicators that explain “Why would you recommend a friend to come work here?”. These indicators can relate to a set of very precise interdependent dimensions that enable you to understand the why and the how. At Bleexo we survey at least 40 dimensions in real time. These dimensions relate to work content, relations with peers and management, meaningfulness, organisation, workload, recognition, values, etc.

Creating an employee satisfaction questionnaire generically

There are platforms where you can create your questionnaires online. The best known is Google Forms. Available for free and very easy to use, it has its limitations when it comes to measuring employee satisfaction. It is used for data processing, data export, communicating results, recurrence, etc.

Dedicated employee survey platforms

Obviously, we think Bleexo is the best 😉.

With this type of platform you can manage recurrence and can also easily segment, sort, compare and slice data. You get access to  a theme-based question bank. The difference is in how the data are used and how easy the platform is to use.

20 criteria for selecting a dedicated platform

When choosing your platform, look at these 20 dimensions very carefully. The devil is in the detail when it comes to convenience, acceptance by your teams and development options.

1. Data security
2. Question frequency
3. UX (user experience)
4. Support and advice
5. Targeting
6. Question bank
7. Reliability of question engine
8. Question flexibility (recurrence, one shot, etc.)
9. Deliverables in levels
10. Bottom-up conversations
11. Graphic decisions
12. Data analytics, sorting and analysis options
13. Languages
14. Semantic analysis
15. Download or SaaS
16. Computing speed
17. Price
18. HRIS integration
19. Complementary tools
20. Improvements and innovations