Employee Satisfaction Software
Employee satisfaction software is a cloud-based platform designed to help measure the level of satisfaction and engagement of employees by collecting and analyzing feedback for actionable insights.
This type of tool is a major component of human resource (HR) systems and is often seamlessly integrated as part of the organization’s employee engagement solutions. However, this is not to say that employee engagement is the same as employee satisfaction. Employee engagement pertains to the level of commitment that employees have into helping the company they work for achieve its goals. Engaged employees will do their best to help their organization succeed. Employee satisfaction, on the other hand, is all about how employees feel about the work they’re doing, which does not necessarily translate to them being engaged with their jobs. A much simpler way to look at this is all engaged employees are more likely to be satisfied, while not all satisfied employees are truly engaged.
So basically, an employee engagement platform transcends many of the core functionalities of employee satisfaction software. This is why most—if not all—of their features and capabilities are pretty much the same and why both software solutions are one and the same in the eyes of most end users. The software brings together a broad range of functions such as surveys, gamification of tasks and data analytics for the purposes of helping HR teams and managers gain insights into the pulse of their workforce, while also giving employees an outlet to anonymously share their frustrations, concerns and opinions regarding their peers, superiors and the organization they work for.
Employee satisfaction software is used by HR departments and managers to increase their employees’ job satisfaction and to boost their employee retention rate. The main purpose of this type of software product is to provide employees with a sense of importance and appreciation, i.e. make them feel that they are an integral part of the organization’s culture and mission. Engaging employees and keeping them satisfied can result in a highly productive and effective workforce.
The best employee satisfaction tools and employee engagement programs will enable businesses and organizations to create and nurture a strong company culture driven by people leaders with the capacity for continuous improvement. This strategy can lead to higher employee retention rates, better experiences throughout the entire employee lifecycle and an easier and much more efficient hiring process.
Employee satisfaction software leverages a wide variety of survey tools to continuously capture meaningful data about the personal and professional health of an organization’s workforce and the culture it’s trying to promote. These survey tools may vary depending on the type of information or insight you’re trying to collect, from employee engagement surveys to pulse surveys and employee net promoter score (eNPS) surveys. A pulse survey is ideal for measuring employee engagement, while eNPS surveys are best suited for measuring employee satisfaction.
Creating and distributing just any employee survey is no longer as effective as before, especially in today’s modern work environment. If you want real-time insights into how engaged your employees are, you need to implement a survey method that is regular and consistent. This method is known as a pulse survey. These are surveys that can be distributed to employees at regular intervals in order to capture real-time employee feedback. HR teams use this survey method to better understand employee engagement, internal communication and other vital metrics.
Some employee engagement platforms in the market will allow you to customize and segment your pulse surveys. You can choose to include your own questions and segment the surveys for distribution by department, by team or to the entire organization. You also have the option to use any of the prebuilt survey templates from the platform’s library to check-in with your people.
When it comes to measuring employee satisfaction, there are a couple of survey methods you can use, the more traditional employee satisfaction survey or the employee net promoter score (eNPS) survey. Both options will provide you with the information you need to effectively track how satisfied your people are throughout their entire lifecycle working for your company. Moreover, both these options have their own pros and cons as well. Of the two, however, eNPS surveys are quickly becoming the go-to method for measuring employee satisfaction for a lot of businesses and organizations.
With eNPS surveys, employees are required to respond to the questions by choosing a number on a scale, with the lowest number representing a negative response and the highest number indicating the most positive. Some scales with have a range of 0 to 5, while others can go as high as 0 to 10. Calculating eNPS is relatively simple. Individuals who respond with a 9 or 10 are classified as promoters, while those who respond with an 8 or a 7 are considered neutral or passive. Anyone who responds with a 6 all the way down to 1 or 0 are categorized as detractors.
Employee recognition and appreciation is also a common feature in employee satisfaction software that is quite useful to SMBs and their efforts to improve employee satisfaction, engagement and retention. People like to be recognized and appreciated for the work they do, especially when they achieve a milestone or are simply doing a good job. It’s a great morale booster, which is why this feature is a staple in every employee engagement platform. The software gives you and your HR team the ability to recognize and appreciate outstanding employees by giving them awards, certificates, badges, etc. You may even use the software to recognize and celebrate employee anniversaries and birthdays.
A mobile app often comes with these types of software solutions, optimized for different mobile devices and screen sizes. This allows you to manage employee engagement programs on-the-go, create different surveys, distribute them to employees and collect the responses for further analysis. The app is also equipped with automatic notifications for employee recognition. It automatically notifies you and your stakeholders when a milestone or goal is achieved so credit and recognition will be given to the appropriate individual or team.
Employee satisfaction software is mainly designed to measure the satisfaction of employees when it comes to their roles within an organization. This is often accomplished through various types of surveys, which includes pulse surveys and eNPS surveys. The data that is collected from these surveys are then analyzed and used to create action plans aimed at improving company culture and employee experiences.
When employees have great experiences working for an organization, they’re more likely to be satisfied and engaged with their jobs. Engaged employees are more productive and are likely to remain with the company for years to come. This is the ultimate goal for measuring employee satisfaction and engagement, to improve employee productivity and retention.
Higher productivity is probably one of the biggest advantages of using employee satisfaction software as a tool for listening to the sentiments of your workforce. This type of software centralizes a lot of the key functions that HR teams and employees need to effectively share and receive feedback. It contains all the tools and resources that HR managers need to create, distribute and analyze employee surveys, while employees use the platform to view feedbacks and criticisms about their performance so they can identify the specific areas for improvement.
Real-time feedback is also a huge benefit for HR departments when implementing the right employee satisfaction and engagement platform, especially when utilizing the pulse survey method. Unlike the more traditional yearly employee satisfaction surveys, modern cloud-based employee engagement solutions are capable of gathering continuous data in real time. These tools keep you on top of everything that’s happening in your company when it comes to your workforce.
More often than not, companies opt for pulse surveys as their primary mechanism for gathering employee feedback. And since this type of survey often only has one to three questions, it usually yields higher response rates from employees.
One of the biggest issues that HR departments have with annual employee satisfaction surveys is that it can take an awful lot of time to collect and analyze the responses. Moreover, most of the insights that are uncovered often relate to the employee experience in a very general way and it often lacks a clear course of action. You can’t create an effective action plan that is based only on generalized data. A good employee satisfaction tool will give you the ability to capture actionable insights and real-time data with specific pain points that you and your team can actually grasp and act upon.
Employee satisfaction software facilitates the process of collecting employee feedback and analyzing survey data for the purposes of measuring employee satisfaction and engagement. It is a central platform for creating and distributing surveys to employees, collecting results and analyzing the raw data to extract actionable insights. These insights can then be used to drive employee engagement programs and create action plans to better employee experiences and company culture.
The bottom line is that this type of software allows businesses and organizations to have a deeper understanding of the health of their organization, especially when it comes to the satisfaction levels and sentiments of their people. Employee satisfaction software provides HR teams with valuable insights into key aspects of their people management process, i.e. what is working and what needs to be fixed or improved.
