How tech can improve employee satisfaction

It can be a real challenge to know if your employees are truly satisfied or if they’re secretly plotting to make a move to another position in the near future.

Turnover among Millennials alone costs the US Economy about $30.5 billion annually, according to Gallup, but your company doesn’t have to become another statistic. Instead, you can utilize technology to help improve your employee engagement and satisfaction, which will ultimately lead to higher levels of employee retention.

Despite the many fear-mongering proclamations that technology is going to replace your workforce entirely, the truth is that it can be just as useful to help employees feel more engaged and invested in your business. Those satisfied employees can go on to create a lot of satisfied customers, making tech-mediated happiness a win-win!

Technology enables clear communication

There is a huge range of tools that can help foster better communication with your employees. Did you tell Jason to show up at 11 am or 1 pm? Is Cynthia taking off Wednesday or Thursday next week? In a busy environment like a restaurant or retail store, it can be hard to run to get a pen when scheduling issues arise, leading to lots of confusion and frustration.

Communication technology can help your employees become more engaged right away by:

• Giving them clear, efficient ways to schedule time off based on a calendar that can show other workers who are scheduled or off during the same period.
• Allowing you to confirm or deny time off requests based on predetermined rules that everyone agrees to, such as no vacation time allowed during your peak season.
• Producing automated reminders about extra shifts, tasks that are due or mandatory meetings.
• Creating a written record of requests and complaints that is completely unbiased in case of a disagreement.

Giving digital high fives can mean a lot

It’s a little thing that costs almost nothing, but as it turns out, there aren’t nearly enough managers and business owners giving praise and encouragement to their employees, according to a study by Psychometrics. The simple act of thanking an employee can help improve your relationship with them, as well as build trust, according to the Cicero Group. Of course you don’t mean to ignore those workers who are doing a great job day in and day out, so why not give out some digital high fives using technology?

Here are a few ways to do just that:

• Send out emails to your entire team thanking them and recognizing stand-out employees on a regular basis. The public recognition can be a huge motivator.
• Use SMS tools to send praise directly to the phones of employees who are excelling at their position. It’s like a digital thank you note that they can save and show to their family later.
• Ask employees to submit positive feedback about co-workers to a digital dropbox that you can collect to read at your next meeting.

If your company participates in social media, another great way to acknowledge your best employees and motivate others to excel is to share the stories of their hard work with your feed. This can do double duty as a way to increase employee satisfaction and your social media engagement at the same time.

Other ways to improve employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is a multi-faceted metric that should be approached from as many directions as possible at the same time. Often, one element can build on another, for example thanking your employees could lead to their feeling more empowered, as well as cared about as an individual.

Other benefits may then emerge, like improved safety in work-related tasks due to an observation by the very employees performing the duty daily.

Employee satisfaction is everything when you’re trying to foster a team environment.

After all, it’s difficult to have any sense of unity if a quarter of your workers are already mentally halfway out the door. Not only is employee training costly, it’s a big disruption to the business culture you’re trying to build.