Employees are your greatest asset, and they are critical drivers in your company’s success (or downfall). That said, employee satisfaction should be one of your top priorities if you want your business to succeed. And to keep employees satisfied, you have to learn more about what causes employees to be unhappy and how you can avoid them.
Although enterprise risk assessment tools help mitigate risks in many technical aspects of a business, they can’t detect the causes of unhappy employees. Hence, it’s up to you to identify the things that can cause or are causing job dissatisfaction in your company, which can be:
1. Poor compensation
The most common cause of employee dissatisfactionandresignation is not being paid enough for their job. Even if you have an immaculate office and a healthy office culture, employees will always find greener pastures if they believe they are not compensated enough.
How do you know if you are paying your employees enough? Look up their company position online and see what the midpoint salary for that particular role is. If you are paying them below that point, you are more at risk of losing your employees to companies that can pay them more. If you pay them higher than the midpoint, it doesn’t guarantee that they will stay, but it does help increase their job satisfaction and willingness to stay.
2. No career growth
Employees will eventually want to climb up the ladder after working in a particular position for some time. If they don’t see a window of opportunity now or soon, it won’t be a surprise if they want to jump ship and find better opportunities.
However, providing career growth for employees is not always easy. If you can’t promote them to a higher position because it’s still filled, at least offer to provide additional training or continuing education to help improve their skills.
3. Work-life imbalance
A healthy work-life balance is essential for all employees, even those who want to speed through the corporate ladder as fast as possible. Providing such balance helps prevent employees from experiencing burnout, which, in turn, increases work performance and improves job satisfaction.
The best way to know if your employees have a healthy work-life balance is to ask them directly. Send a company-wide questionnaire and have HR look into the results to determine if your employees feel overworked. If most of your employees feel that their life consists of more work and less of leisure, start looking into ways on how to balance the workload.
4. Bad management
Even if every other aspect of your company is perfect, a bad boss can easily make an employee quit. From the helicopter micromanager to the awful credit-hoarder, bad bosses can significantly decrease an employee’s job satisfaction, which can also affect their job performance and willingness to say in the company.
That said, monitoring your management team is crucial in maintaining employee satisfaction. Encourage employees to speak up if they are dissatisfied with their bosses and treat their testimonials with complete confidentiality. From there, you can reform your management team as needed and provide re-training to managers who need it.
5. Terrible office culture
Excessive gossip, chronic tardiness, unfriendly competition, and complete disregard of core values are signs that your company is suffering from bad office culture. If you recognize some of these red flags happening within your own office, it might be time to start reforming your culture into something healthier and more positive.
Otherwise, employees will steadily grow to hate their job, become disengaged, and eventually quit. If you want your company to flourish, you should start remolding your office culture before this happens.
6. Boring routines
People tend to grow bored when they do the same thing every day. Although bored employees don’t necessarily hate their job, their lack of interest can affect their job performance sooner or later, resulting in lower productivity.
If you want to keep your employees engaged, offer learning opportunities (training, seminars, classes) related to their job, organize fun parties in and outside the office, encourage employees to pitch ideas, and always look for ways to create purpose and motivation.
Employees are more loyal when they are happy with their jobs. Hence, if you want to retain your best employees and avoid a high turnover rate, make it a point to find the causes of employee unhappiness within your organization and find ways to eliminate them.