What Employees REALLY Think About Working at Your Company

Every company believes they’re the best, but the reality is no one wants to admit the ugly truth. Employees don’t enjoy working at your company.

According to Gallup, in 2009 overall employee satisfaction was at 30%. In 2024, that number is down to 18%. While there are many factors that have changed the workforce as we know it today - the pandemic, the rise of hybrid work, and our relation to employment - employee sentiment is an underrated, yet important metric to measure. Retention, burnout, and performance rely heavily on how well employees feel at work, and equally important are the methods to determine what employees feel.

While surveys are companies' modus operandis for figuring this out, surveys alone are an archaic method of measuring employee sentiment; a method used since World War I that Gartner has stated only yields a 22% rate of accuracy. You might as well flip a coin than write up yet another survey.

So what’s the alternative to knowing what your employees feel?

Throughout this piece, we’ll cover two main topics that can help your organization.

• Perception
• Values

Perception: A Tale of Two Lenses

Often the go-to strategies for building camaraderie and connection among employees are the usual company retreats, sports tournaments, happy hour, etc. We as leaders rely heavily on these and assume it is doing what we want them to do: make employees more productive.

And while amenities and in-office benefits have risen in past years, why is there still a gap in satisfaction?

That is due to a lack of perception.

A Dale Carnegie study done in 2023 found that team leaders tend to favorably overstate certain initiatives while those tasked with completing those projects report a less-than-positive response. For example, in the same study, regarding access to learning opportunities, 79% of leaders responded positively, while only 45% of ‘individual contributors’ agreed.

While access to learning opportunities might seem like a trivial example, a 34% difference in perception can be extrapolated as a huge gap in understanding between employees and upper management in general.

One other fallout from misaligning perception, what author Duena Blomstrom says, is an “Us vs. Them” attitude. Not being on the same page is akin to low performance if people are operating in vacuums and collaboration is fragmented. 

A few more important points to consider about perception::

• Increased Turnover: Failing to align on vision will lead employees to look elsewhere for that connection.
• Dips in Productivity: If employees and team leaders are operating from a different lens of favorability the result is always a dip in performance.
• Company Fidelity: If things reach an extreme head with employees feeling one way and leaders another, the result is not only turnover but your employees as staunch oppositionists rallying against you.

Values: The Pursuit of A Happier Workforce

BambooHR conducted a study using the Fred Reichheld-coined metric system “eNPS” (employee net promoter score) based on how likely employees would recommend their workplace. The higher the score, the better.

A few key findings: smaller companies tend to have higher scores than bigger ones. And in 2024, new hires have experienced an 11% drop in happiness in the workplace since 2022. 

Transparency has been a persistent challenge for leaders as it is one of the biggest keys that influence satisfaction. Sharing too much or too little is a delicate balance and not a one-size-fits-all approach. But there is value in transparency.

In 2022, FutureForum did a study that found employees are 12 times more satisfied when they feel their organizations are more forthcoming with them. Boundaries are important when running a company and leaning on the extreme end of transparency can lead to more problems than solutions.

Another key indicator is employee sentiment towards growth. Values aren’t just signposts and flags to wave around to employees, they have actionable consequences depending on how they are presented.

Nectar HR last year found that nearly 34% of employees looked at other companies during the last six months of the year due to a lack of growth amid the “Great Resignation.” 

And why do promotions matter? You guessed it, that’s a big part of retention. 

And one of the biggest ways to foster employee growth? ‘Displaying company values,’ which leads to a more positive environment that eliminates ambiguity on what is necessary to progress. 

Going hand-in-hand with employee growth is support. And for many employees support rests on the shoulders of managers. More than ever, according to Gartner, 77% of employees rely more and more on ‘manager support.’ 

However according to another Gallup study, while managers themselves are looked at even more today to support employees due to lack of budget and higher workloads, much of their difficulty in providing this support stems again back to the fact that employees have many unmet needs, many of them focusing on “unclear expectations” and “feeling disconnected” at work.

We must take values and culture very seriously as they mean much more than just soft, qualitative metrics we need to employ to smooth out the daily grind our employees are engaged in. Values and culture directly affect performance and the physical livelihood of companies.

Can Feelings Truly Be Measured?

Now we are at the crux of our question. With all these various feelings employees have and dissatisfaction abound in the workplace and without any seemingly reliable method to track all of this, what’s the best way to measure all of this?

We’ll talk about this in an upcoming post. Learn more about Worksense.

Sources

1. https://www.bamboohr.com/resources/guides/employee-happiness-q3-2023#smaller-companies-have-happier-employees
2. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230928916534/en/US-Employee-Well-being-on-the-Rise-but-Perception-Gap-Remains-Between-HR-and-Employees-Reveals-Leapsome-Study
3. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/510326/manager-squeeze-new-workplace-testing-team-leaders.aspx
4. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-06-22-gartner-hr-survey-finds-77-percent-of-employees-are-placing-increased-importance-on-manager-support
5. https://nectarhr.com/blog/workplace-promotion-statistics
6. https://www.forbes.com/sites/duenablomstrom1/2019/02/06/why-a-culture-of-us-vs-them-is-deadly/?sh=7326feab7520
7. https://www.betterup.com/blog/transparency-in-the-workplace