As an employer, you take on a lot of responsibility for your team. You have to make sure they’re receiving the best health and safety, sticking to all of the rules and regulations. You also need to ensure that they have the tools they need to do their jobs properly. The list goes on. But what you need to bear in mind is that you need to keep your team productive and satisfied to not only get the best from them, but to also aid with staff retention levels. Here are just a few areas you might want to focus on to not only provide your staff with the best but to also get the best from them too.
Set Clear Goals
A key element in employee management, that also plays a huge role in giving employees peace of mind, is ensuring that your team know exactly what is expected of them. Setting clear goals can allow you to monitor your team’s performance and will ensure that they can measure whether they’re performing to standard too. A good way to go about this is setting SMART KPIs (or “key performance indicators”). There’s endless information about this online that is more than worth familiarising yourself with.
Consider Hybrid or Flexible Working Models
Since the pandemic, more and more employees are actively seeking out positions that allow them to work from home. Both employers and employees have seen the benefits of this alternative mode of working. From the employers perspective, remote work means they don’t have to provide office spaces or pay commercial overheads and bills. From the employees perspective, working from home can save time and money commuting, hard earned cash parking and allows them to choose a working environment that suits them and their needs. If this is a model that works for your business, consider sticking with it or trying it out if you haven’t before. It can grealty increase staff satisfaction levels.
Provide Kitchen Facilities
If you want your team in office, you’re going to need to provide good quality facilities for them to be able to be as comfortable and satisfied as possible throughout the working day. Part of this involves providing quality kitchen facilities. This will provide your team with a means of making food and drinks that will keep them going throughout the day. Sure, you don’t need a full blown kitchen with oven, but you should have some basics that allow for decent quality lunches. Make sure that you provide a small refrigerator, where your team can store their lunch so that it is fresh by lunchtime. This is also good for storing different types of milk for teas and coffees. Speaking of coffee, you may also want to provide good bean to cup machines. Having good coffee on hand is great for giving your staff a break from their screens and perking them up for the rest of the day. You may also want to provide a microwave so that small and basic meals can be heated up. A sink is essential for washing up cups, plates and cutlery, which should also be provided.
Break Room Facilities
You should also provide your team with a break room, as this will give them a space away from their desks to disconnect and fully enjoy the breaks that they take. It can also become a social space where your team connect with one another away from the topic of work. The break room should be light, airy and comfortable. Provide seating and perhaps a table and chairs where staff can eat their lunch if they wish.
Ongoing Training
The workplace is constantly changing – this goes for every field of specialism. To keep your staff up to date and to ensure that they’re producing the best work possible, you’re going to need to ensure that you’re providing them with ongoing training and opportunities for personal development. This can boost staff satisfaction levels too, as most people want to feel like they’re growing and progressing consistently. Look into good quality training programmes with good reviews for your team members. These can be role specific training courses, or more generalised training courses that endow valuable skills such as healthy and safety or first aid, communications skills, tech literacy skills and more. If you’re unsure which programmes will help your team best, you should reach out and ask. People will more than likely have suggestions.
Ensure Opportunity for Promotion and Payrises
As we briefly touched on above, staff love opportunities for progression. Nobody wants to feel that they’re stuck in a dead end job with no opportunity for advancement. This is why it’s important to offer opportunity for promotions and payrises. Come up with a plan that is suitable for your business and budget. This will differ from one staff member to another, so make sure to spend time on your research in this specific area to make the right decisions for your team and for your business.
Surveys
Of course, there may be areas where you hadn’t even considered your business or its treatment of staff required improvement. The key people to provide you with this information are your staff. Your team know exactly what it will take to make them productive, comfortable and happy in their roles, so you should ask them for feedback too! Of course, most people aren’t going to give completely open and honest feedback with their names attached, so you should make sure that any surveys you carry out are anonymous. This will encourage openness and frankness, giving you direct information about what needs to change to keep yoru staff on board. There are countless pieces of survey software out there, so browse the market to find the one that best suits your needs.
Hopefully, some of the information outlined above should help you greatly when it comes to staff satisfaction in the workplace. Each can make all the difference, so mull each point over and do what you can to keep your team as happy as possible!
