How your employees feel about their job, their responsibilities, and your organization as a whole can have a huge impact on your company. If your team has high employee morale and a sense of real satisfaction with their work, your organization will thrive—and if they don’t, your organization will suffer.

So, if you want your company to continue to improve, you need to make improving employee morale and job satisfaction a priority.

Let’s take a look at exactly how to boost employee morale and make sure your team members are satisfied with their jobs (and make your company the kind of place top talent wants to work for in the process).

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Why is improving employee morale and job satisfaction so important?

First things first—before we jump into how to improve employee morale and job satisfaction, let’s quickly cover why keeping morale and job satisfaction high is so important in the first place.

There are a number of reasons companies need to focus on boosting employee morale and job satisfaction, including:

• Retention. When you have employees who are satisfied with their work, they’re more likely to stay with your organization, which can keep retention high and hiring costs low.
• Engagement. When morale is high and your employees are satisfied with their jobs, they’re going to be more engaged with their work—and that engagement can have an incredible impact on your business. According to the 2017 Gallup State of the American Workplace Report, engaged employees are 17 percent more productive, have 10 percent higher customer satisfaction metrics, and have a whopping 41 percent lower rate of absenteeism than disengaged employees.
• Better work environment. If you have a company full of people that hate their jobs, it’s not going to make for a pleasant work environment. But on the flip side, if you have a team that’s excited about their work and shows up every day with a positive attitude, it’s going to make for a much better work environment—for both employees and leadership. 

Clearly, improving employee morale and job satisfaction is a must if you want to build a thriving, successful organization. But how, exactly, do you do that?

Make sure you’re providing the basics

Before you make steps to drive high morale and job satisfaction, you need to make sure you’re providing your employees with the basics they need to feel happy, satisfied, and engaged with their jobs. This includes:

• Fair wages and on-time, accurate payment
• A safe, supportive work environment
• Competent leadership and/or management
• The tools necessary to do their job

If you don’t have these basics in place, it doesn’t matter what else you do to improve morale and job satisfaction; your employees are very unlikely to be happy or satisfied with their job—and are very likely to look elsewhere for a better opportunity. So, make sure you’re giving your employees the wages, tools, environment, and leadership they need to feel meaningfully engaged with their work.

Go straight to the source

You might think you know how you can boost morale and job satisfaction with your team. But the truth is, the only people who really know what’s going to drive employee morale and job satisfaction are your employees. 

So why not go straight to the source and ask them?

Getting direct employee feedback can be an extremely effective way to improve morale and job satisfaction within your organization. Ask your employees what you can do to increase their job satisfaction and boost morale within the team, either through employee surveys, team check-ins, or one-on-one’s with your direct reports. Leveraging employee feedback tools can streamline this process, ensuring you collect, analyze, and act on feedback effectively.

Your employees know exactly what they need to feel more satisfied with their jobs, more engaged at work, and have an overall higher morale. So, if you want to know how to improve morale and job satisfaction, just ask them.