Spotting and Handling Employee Discontent

employee discontent

Every good employer wants to have a workplace where employees feel content, happy and satisfied. In as much as this reality may seem impossible since it’s obviously a near impossible task to please everyone. However, as an employer, you may be able to discover and take appropriate measures to curtail it before you lose competent employees. By taking a proactive approach to discovering and curtailing discontentment, you may improve satisfaction.

Using A Survey

Employers can use a survey to reveal widespread discontent among employees in a department. However, this can only be successful in addressing the issue mostly when workers feel secure with their leader. The workers need to be sure that they would not be retaliation for speaking, the truth. Therefore, the leader should show the attitude of unreserved care and trust towards the employees in order to secure their trust. As survey alone may really not give you a detailed day to day communication in the organization, hence a daily hearty communication with your employees on their personal issues and also reminding them about the mission, vision, and purpose of the organization. This is because, employees survey results are not opportunities to take employees to the task, rather handling responses with the workers best interests at heart is the authentic manner to start. Therefore as a team leader or employer, always be open at heart and listen to your workers and if there is a problem, strategize on the best approach to solve it.

Using A Third Party Facilitator

If employees are not comfortable being sincere with their team leader or manager, a third-party facilitator can be very effective. Thus you bringing in an outside facilitator to conduct departmental group and obtain actions for improvement can be a way of getting more ideas for re-establishing lasting relationships. This may also make employees to assured that the time they take out of their day to respond to a survey is worth it. Mostly when they see managers handling responses from the survey with their team in a constructive way, accepting mistakes, asking for ideas on how to improve and making a commitment to the changes.

Therefore as stated earlier, in order to maintain a long-lasting contentment from your employees, after you have discovered and worked to curtail discontent independently, via a survey or a third party facilitator, the work is not completely done. It is still important to use the information obtained through the survey to improve the way that employees feel about the company and to prevent future reoccurrence. You have to also compliment your employees’ performance and checking in with employees to ensure that they feel valued, as it will prevent future re-surfacing discontent.