Employee Satisfaction KPIs

With discussions around company culture, work-life balance, and mental health at the center of the workplace, it should come as no surprise that understanding and responding to employee satisfaction is at the forefront of HR strategy.

But with something as broad and ambiguous as satisfaction, where do you begin?

Firstly, it is important to have a concrete definition of employee satisfaction to work from. Generally, employee satisfaction is defined as the level of contentment employees feel with their job. This encompasses satisfaction with daily tasks, team members/managers, satisfaction with organizational policies, and the impact of their job on employees’ personal lives.

While having a concrete and all-encompassing definition is great, its comprehensive nature means that measuring employee satisfaction is more complicated than simply asking your employees “are you happy.” Rather, you should work to construct a data-collection process that captures the many facets that comprise employee satisfaction. According to research by Edmund Thompson and Florence T. T. Phua, we should be measuring job satisfaction at a cognitive, affective, and behavioral level to fully understand its nuances and impact on employees’ personal and professional lives. Other research has broken employee satisfaction down into a two-factor model that outlines and measures the components contributing to both satisfaction and dissatisfaction.