Making sure your employees are happy at work is a great way to retain your best talent, saving hundreds of pounds of recruitment fees and fostering a more productive team. But improving job satisfaction doesn’t have to be difficult – there’s several simple things that can be done with relative ease. Discover four simple ways you can improve job satisfaction in your office below!
Plan regular social events
Social events at work are a great way for team members to get to know each other better outside of work, helping them to really feel part of the team and break down barriers between departments. As a result, work socials can do a lot of good for company culture and by extension, improving job satisfaction.
But in order to benefit, it’s important to facilitate opportunities for the team to bond. A simple way to get started could be just to budget for a round of drinks or a tab at a local pub each month. Further to this, you could also create events based around company values, such as celebrating the completion of a project, or taking the team to an award ceremony your firm is nominated for.
Moving on, it’s a great idea to invite your team to help shape social events. Be sure to involve them by organising events that employees want to be a part of, for example inviting the team to vote for their favourite activity via a Google Sheets form.
Revamp communal areas
Giving employees a welcoming space for some downtime is another great way to improve job satisfaction. Two-thirds of British office workers eat at their desks – with similar figures in the US. Not only does a pungent lunch tend to irritate other co-workers, it also means the employee doesn’t get a real break away from their work or a change of scenery, which could help with their focus when they return.
A simple way to improve the situation would be to ensure employees have an inviting area in the office to take their breaks and an incentive to leave their desks. This might mean having a look at your break room – is it a place where team members would really want to spend their lunch time?
Creating a comfortable communal space in your office for breaks can help you to significantly boost employee morale. Putting an area aside for employees to socialise, relax and arrange informal meetings can help to increase the dynamic nature of an office.
This could involve creating a lounge area to chill out in, which might include table football, ping pong or even a games console. On top of that, adding a few tables of various sizes means co-workers have the choice to eat together or sit down alone to read during their breaks.
There are a number of benefits for empowering your team to leave their desks. First, it’s more hygienic, since the average computer keyboard and worktop is riddled with bacteria. Second, taking lunch “al desko” tends to result in employees remaining hungry and snacking on junk food later in the day. Finally, a change of scenery really does help to increase your creativity, get some exercise and a chance to clear your head, helping you to focus in the afternoon.
Share recent successes with the team
As Forbes reports, people tend to communicate less during bad times, but in reality, this is exactly when they should be communicating more. Telling your team about recent successes that the business has had helps to give employees a sense that their work is delivering results, helping to motivate them. On top of that, sharing success stories among the team is an ideal opportunity to praise employees on their work, a valuable chance to give them the recognition they deserve.
Sharing success is a simple thing to do, too. It can be as easy as emailing your team every time there is something noteworthy to share, no matter how small. That could include a team member winning a new client account, the team completing a long and challenging project, or a new recruit passing their training or evaluation period.
Not only does this help to keep the team in the loop, it also means employees gain recognition for their efforts – another essential part of having a satisfying job.
Regularly track and measure job satisfaction
Finally, an essential task for any HR manager looking to get started with improving job satisfaction is to know where the company is now and what needs to be done to improve things further. This can be done by setting up an anonymous survey to understand why employees like or dislike certain perks, policies or benefits.
As a result of this, it’s much easier to identify what can be done to improve job satisfaction further. It’s this insight that’s essential for making longer term positive changes. While you could spend a lot of money implementing a new scheme to improve job satisfaction, without doing the research beforehand, it will be difficult to know whether the money is well spent. And without a survey after it has been implemented, it will not be clear what benefit that scheme has had.
As a result, it is a good idea to run a regular job satisfaction survey each year to keep on top of any positive or negative changes that have affected job satisfaction. And while it’s a simple change, it is an essential one to continue to drive long term improvement to job satisfaction.
