One of the keys to a successful company is employee satisfaction. It is widely known that a number of major issues can arise if your employees aren’t happy and continually seek new jobs. If your company’s employee turnover rate is inordinately high, it falls upon your HR department to get to the root of the problem. After all, there must be something going wrong somewhere or they would ultimately stay on the job. If you know that you are paying a fair and competitive wage, that’s not the problem. So, what is it that HR should, or shouldn’t be doing, as the case may be?
Opening a Dialogue from Day 1
If you were to check out all the mega-corporations in the country you’d see that one of the things they have going for them is an open door policy in their HR department. From Day 1 they offer an orientation that gives all the information a new hire needs in terms of lines of communication. They are given an onboarding survey in which they are asked why they sought out this corporation for a job and what they feel they can contribute. This is tucked neatly away in their file to be referenced periodically during their tenure with your company.
Open Lines of Communication
From that very first day when they are given an onboarding survey like those designed by the HR experts at insightlink.com through to the day they leave your organization, the lines of communication need to remain open. It is only in communicating with employees that you can discover what they like about their jobs with your company and things they are ultimately dissatisfied with. The lines of communication need to remain open, so why not have periodic departmental meetings? Many companies organize these on a weekly, monthly or even quarterly basis.
They call teams together to assess where they are in terms of job satisfaction and then what those teams would like to see handled differently. Here, employee satisfaction surveys are vital. They can remain anonymous or the employee can willingly sign the paper. In either case, it is only by keeping up with the pulse of your teams that you can understand how to keep employees happy and productive on the job.
Exit Surveys a Must
Perhaps nothing is as effective for a large corporation as exit surveys. When an employee leaves your place of employment, it is vital to know why. Some may be unwilling to complete a questionnaire while others may be only too happy to do so – in no uncertain terms! Surprisingly, you’ll find that money is not as big an issue as you may have thought. Some don’t like their supervisor, others don’t like the hours they work and others feel there is a better way of doing things but no one would listen to them or take them seriously. There are so many reasons why employees leave and this is what, as an effective HR department, you need to keep a handle on.
In the End It All Boils Down to HR
Are you keeping a dialogue open with employees? If not, that is the number one priority you should be focusing on. You don’t always need to meet in person, but those little surveys from time to time can help you redesign departments and processes that aren’t cutting it with your staff. Keep the lines of communication open and you won’t be breaking your budget training new employees.
Sometimes that’s all it takes. Listen to what they have to say, work to make necessary changes if appropriate, and you will serve your company well as an HR department that actually serves its purpose – keeping top talent happy and on the job.
Add Comment