This Team Satisfaction template uses a simple scale to rate the level of satisfaction of each of your team members.
Knowing how your employees feel about their job is important, for a lot of different reasons. As you likely know, employee satisfaction can play a big part in how successful a business is. Some of the most successful managers in business are those who are able to relate to their employees in a way that makes them feel valued, appreciated, and positive. Failure to do this can lead to even your most valued employees feeling like they are not being given the attention or appreciation that they are worth, which can contribute (in a big way) to them hating or feeling apathetic about their job.
Knowing where you stand with your employees, as well as how they feel about their job, are very important things for any manager to keep up with. Knowing how your employees feel about work, as well as whether their relationship with their job is a love, hate, or apathetic one, should be critical to deciding how you interact with them on a regular basis. This can tell you a lot about whether you are headed in the right direction in regards to how you interact with your personnel, or whether you need to make adjustments in the ways that you delegate, manage, compensate, and reward them.
Learning about how your employees view their job is best done by incorporating policies and procedures that will create an atmosphere where they are expected (and encouraged) to open up a dialogue with you (or your middle management) about issues that may be causing them to hate or behave apathetically towards their position, your company, and/or their responsibilities within it. It may be in your best interest, of course, to initiate this dialogue at first, but most managers will find that communicating about such issues with employees will become relatively easy, especially over time, as employees will tend to open up naturally if the environment of the workplace is conducive to doing so.
In other words, you need to foster an environment where employees feel that their input and feedback is wanted, not tolerated or considered an inconvenience. After all, knowing how your employees feel about their job is information that any effective manager SHOULD want!
Opening a dialogue with your employees can be done in a number of ways. You can…
Hold weekly, monthly, or annual meetings during which you discuss how employees feel about their jobs. Be sure to listen to their frustrations, and remember that you need to try to see things from THEIR point of view.
Schedule one on one meetings with employees on a monthly or annual basis (or instruct middle management to do so) where you sit down with the employees and give them the opportunity to tell you what they really think of how the business is run. Listen to the negatives that they list, and keep in mind that the purpose of this meeting is NOT to tell them why you do what you do, but to listen to their feedback and to brainstorm ways in which you might work towards bettering the work environment for them.
Encourage written comments to be turned in on a regular basis, where employees are encouraged to share their true feelings about how they view their job. What are the negatives about their job? Do they love, hate, or feel empathetically about it? If they don't love their job, what could cause them to?
Keep in mind that the entire focus here is on figuring out how employees, in general, view their job. Do they feel underpaid, overworked, and under-appreciated? Or do they feel like they are doing something meaningful, while at the same time being acknowledged and compensated to their satisfaction?
Employees who love their jobs are going to be MUCH more enthusiastic about their performance than employees who do not. They are also going to tend to care more about what goes on in the company on a larger scale. The only way to foster a team that cares about your business, however, is to figure out where they are, and THEN take steps to get them to where they want to give you the very best of their skills, talents, and determination. When you can foster an environment where your team is giving you 100% of what they have to give, then you will DEFINITELY see a difference in how successful your business is.
You may also be interested in: Team Building, Team Building Principles, Teams in Name Only, Team Building - Development Team Example, Team Building - Customer Support Team Example and Team Building - Steering Team Example.