While the trend of working from home has been on the rise in the past five to ten years, this has taken a tremendous sprint during the pandemic. Working from home can be a relief for employees and have greatly increased the quality of life, but there are also employees who find social interaction with colleagues and meeting on location so important that they can't wait to fully return to 'normal'.
What about employee satisfaction?
In a world where work-life balance is more important than ever before and the emphasis is on valuable meetings, there are certainly aspects that are subject to change and need to be analysed. One of the aspects is employee satisfaction. How do you get to the core of what employees really think and experience? And how do you convert this into a closed loop feedback circle?
The satisfied employee is an ambassador of the brand. Without satisfied employees no growth, no positive brand image, and no continuity in the workplace. It is therefore crucial to actively measure employee satisfaction. The moment employee satisfaction is measured by asking for it, you can assume that this is not just feedback, but that it is already being discussed in the organisation. It lives among the employees. The feedback that the employee gives is therefore crucial to receive, acknowledge, discuss, resolve, and provide feedback on how it was solved. Employee satisfaction is not only about creating the optimal work environment. It's more than that. In particular, actually acknowledging the feedback and jointly trying to optimise the situation indicates that employee satisfaction is an important pillar in the organisation and that you as a manager are open to actively doing something with it.
Yet an important aspect of the closed loop feedback circle is often forgotten, namely the feedback phase. Being able to give feedback and see that an optimisation is being sought is one aspect of employee satisfaction, but the real experience is in the last phase. How often do you inform that the feedback provided by the employee has been taken up and implemented? It is precisely this that ensures that the conversation in the workplace changes, that the experience becomes more positive and, as a result, employee satisfaction increases. In this way you create a work environment where people want to build the brand, are happy to commit to growth and strive for improvement.