Employee satisfaction: a key focus of employee surveys
Measuring employee satisfaction is often a central focus of employee surveys. After all, how employees feel has a direct impact on workforce engagement and on the working climate within the organisation. The main reason employee satisfaction is considered so important is its strongly positive influence on business success. Over recent decades, researchers (Felps, Wegge, Hoyer, Homburg and others) have demonstrated positive effects on the following factors:
- Workforce involvement
- Customer-oriented attitude
- Employee behaviour towards customers
- Organisational behaviour
- Performance
- Customer satisfaction
Direct vs. indirect measurement of employee satisfaction
To improve employee satisfaction, you first need to establish the current level of satisfaction. You can do this either directly or indirectly. Indirect measurement relies on indicators such as staff turnover, sick days or error rates. However, it does not tell you why exactly your workforce is satisfied or dissatisfied. Without those answers, you can easily draw the wrong conclusions from your results.
Measuring employee satisfaction directly, through a satisfaction survey with a feedback questionnaire, usually reveals not only the status quo but also the reasons behind the current mood among your workforce. Direct employee feedback shows you which circumstances contribute to satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This allows you to identify suitable measures to improve employee satisfaction and implement them in a targeted way.
Caution: indirect measurement carries a high risk
You have identified negative indicators and conclude that your workforce is dissatisfied or that their commitment to the organisation has declined. You take action and initiate change processes. What you have not found out: your employees were satisfied with the previous status quo, and their commitment to the organisation had never been higher. The negative results arose only because the workforce was punishing management for recent decisions. Your measures were therefore not only unnecessary but possibly even damaging.
More on employee satisfaction:
Employee satisfaction surveys are useful:
- ... as part of the onboarding process: Employee satisfaction during onboarding
- ... during organisational change: Employee surveys in change management
- ... as a broad employee satisfaction survey covering the working environment, workplace design, tasks and management behaviour
- ... as regular pulse checks that let you compare results over time
Employee satisfaction surveys show how satisfied employees are within the organisation (for example with their working environment, area of responsibility and management behaviour), which makes them a proven employer branding tool. You can find out more about this topic and other employer branding measures here: Employer branding: definition, examples and measures
Reliable, flexible and GDPR-compliant: our clear recommendation. As a professional football club, we depend on a powerful yet user-friendly survey tool. With LamaPoll, we have found exactly that. We use the tool across the company, both internally for employee surveys and externally for customer and fan surveys. We were particularly impressed by the platform's high flexibility and ease of use. Thanks to hosting in Germany, LamaPoll also meets the highest data protection standards, which is a decisive criterion for us. The customer service is also excellent: enquiries are answered quickly, competently and in a friendly manner. We are completely satisfied and can recommend LamaPoll without reservation.
What is LamaPoll?
LamaPoll is a survey tool for creating employee surveys and measuring employee satisfaction. You can use it to create, conduct and analyse all types of employee survey. Create your employee survey in just a few steps, apply your organisation’s corporate design and invite employees conveniently by email or via your intranet. You can quickly gain insights that help improve employee satisfaction. You can register for our survey tool free of charge and immediately conduct surveys for up to 50 employees with no obligation. If you need more responses to your online employee survey questionnaire, simply choose one of our monthly plans. You can also use our employee survey questionnaire templates and examples.
