Keeping employees happy and satisfied is not the same

Yes, you read it well. Having a satisfied and happy employee is not the same thing, and differentiating the two is crucial for a healthy work-life environment as well balancing both terms in one. While with HeartCount you can measure both, it is important to keep them apart in order to understand how to fix the lack of any (and yes, there’s always something to fix or upgrade). 

Happy is when…

well, mostly, what can drive an employee's well-being and performance. It’s one’s emotional state and yes, often it cannot be only driven by maintaining a good work balance, but that is why keeping a healthy work-private life balance is the key to employee’s happiness (well, one of it, at least). 

Actually, being happy at work could be driven by many things, for example:

• POSITIVE WORK CULTURE

We’re spending more than ⅓ of our day at work and the other third is reserved for a good night’s sleep. So ensuring a healthy relationship and atmosphere at work surely affects your employee’s happiness: from teambuildings to workplace flexibility; everything counts. 

• BUILD RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE HIERARCHY

Encourage Managers to share their positive feedbacks with the employees, as well as train them how to be constructive when criticizing. Also, always ensure that your employees feel included in the decision-making processes allowing them to feel as they had a say in it as well. Two-way conversation is the key! 

• NURTURE THE INDIVIDUALITY, BUT KEEP THE TEAM SPIRIT

Not everyone is the same and you should know it, but at the same time the individuality should be carefully nurtured in order to create a great team spirit. Approach employees individually in order to work on their carriers, but use their strengths to build strong teams that will carry the workloads and your company in the end game. 

If you crunch up the numbers, a survey of 1.024 UK workers One4all Rewards revealed that 39% of employees would work harder if they are happy in their current role or place of work, while 38% of workers said their happiness impacts their performance at work, which means employee productivity and results also see a positive effect from a happy workforce.

So why leave things up to change then?

Being satisfied is when…

all the logical and rational perks of your company ensure that your employees can say “yes, I am so feeling this”. Well, feeling something is actually a good way of describing that satisfaction is often driven by tangible things (one might say they are really concrete): 

• Give out learning opportunities and work on employee’s skills 
• Fair compensations and authentic recognitions
• Meticulous career path and development planning   

Here’s a few end game results on how employee satisfaction actually helps your business or company and they will not be elaborated because they are quite self-explanatory (and most of the times, companies just overlook them): 

• Satisfied employees are less likely to leave their current jobs. 
• High employee satisfaction brings loyalty to the company. 
• Employees feel more satisfied with their jobs when they feel as if their career path is clearly directed and supported by the company.  

How to balance both? 

Well, it’s actually self explanatory. While one does not cancel the other, work happiness and satisfaction are closely related and yet different. It is important to keep them apart in order to know which is lacking when checking in with your employees. We suggest always include both when creating Heart Count weekly question checkups, while also educating everyone on how to know the difference. 

Things to keep in mind:

1. Make sure that all your upper management employees are on the same track with you - company’s growth, ideas, plans and KPIs should always be transparent to all employees. 
2. Keep track of the trends in your industry in order to implement them on your own - if the productivity has been boosted with WFH Fridays (for example), why not try them?
3. Be human. Regardless of your company’s size, always make sure that your employees are taken care of.