In a competitive world with
need for businesses to be more streamlined and productive a company can often find itself with a workforce working under pressure resulting in low moral and high staff turnover. The benefits of a company having a highly motivated workforce can be considerable and two goals of having a workforce that is both motivated and productive should not be regarded as being mutually exclusive to one another.Left unattended employers run risk of alienating their employees, events can cause employee frustrations to boil over resulting in employers finding themselves on back foot, faced with a problem that cannot be ignored.
Ideally employers would take time to understand needs of their employees and learn from their experiences of working on front line, but employers are often themselves tied up day to day fighting their own fires.
By automating much of intelligence gathering process and providing findings in a format that can be readily analysed online surveys provide employers with an efficient, effective and low cost method to help achieve a pleasant working environment, where staff satisfaction and productivity is high.
Dissatisfied & Unproductive
The are many reasons why employees may be dissatisfied with their job and more often than not staff frustration is channelled into a demand for higher salaries and less hours. Employers who tackle these issues head on, making it all about salary and hours, will often find themselves dealing with symptoms and not root cause.
It’s not about Money
The following are common barriers to achieving productivity, none of which are likely to be resolved by increasing salaries or reducing hours:-
• Inadequate training • Out of touch management • Out of date working methods • Lack of proper tools and equipment
Many studies have shown that salaries are rarely number one priority of employees and providing an employer is paying market rate they would be fundamentally wrong to think that paying higher salaries is answer to all employee problems.
Take case of a single mother who is juggling a full time job with need to look after two children. Out of frustration she may demand more money so that she feels that she is able to cope where a better solution, for both her and company, may be more flexible working hours.
It is About Communication
It is important for any company to encourage communication. Company's that make communication between personnel and management difficult, or take view that if personnel have a problem they will say something, can often delude themselves into thinking their workforce is content when it is not. It only takes one small problem and one disgruntled employee to feel aggrieved for an entire workforce to develop a destructive ‘them and us’ attitude.
Improving Communication
One to one meetings between employer and employee would be ideal but in practice only practical for very small businesses.
Regular meetings between management and worker representatives are good in theory but they often become talking shops and can begin to loose their edge as participants become familiar with one another and forum runs risk of being hijacked by more extrovert personalities.
Suggestion boxes are useful but can be viewed as token efforts by management as they wait for personnel to highlight a problem.
Newsletters can be a positive step, but their purpose is generally to inform and not discuss issues.
Keeping Initiative
An employee satisfaction survey run on a regular basis is able to ask each employee specific questions and represents a pro-active management initiative where whole workforce can be consulted on various issues. Surveys are able to provide a level playing field between quieter and more vocal employees.
