With Millennials already at work since over a decade and Generation Z entering the job market, old-fashioned companies finding it increasingly difficult to attract and retain talents.

A carefully designed corporate culture, employee satisfaction measurements and similar concepts have been successfully adopted by forward-thinking companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft, making them the dream employers for many.

At the same time, most small and medium-sized businesses have largely neglected the importance of employee engagement, making their jobs unattractive and less desirable over companies that have put efforts into creating a pleasant work environment.

Employee satisfaction measurement techniques

Today, there are sophisticated tools available to measure employee satisfaction. Traditional software like Peakon and Hive.hr are offering a CRM style system that builds employee profiles from available data like completed projects and feedback received.

Team Analytics — entirely based on Google database technologies — was designed with anonymity, security and practical use in mind. It does not collect any personal information, does not maintain employee profiles and does not collect or create information that could be linked to particular individuals. There are very valid reasons behind this approach, such us compiling with EU regulations, providing freedom for employees to express themselves without the fear of disciplinary actions, and most importantly security.

Most companies neglect employee satisfaction

We have interviewed over 1,000 companies about their employee satisfaction measurement and feedback collection practices. Although most HR managers and directors have shared that they find it extremely important to offer an attractive work environment, only very few of them had relevant actions in place.

It was surprising that even today, over 60% of small-medium sized companies we have asked only collect feedback at the exit interview. This leaves no space for employees to provide feedback about how they feel at work. At the same time, this approach does not allow employers to take a data-based approach to improve their corporate culture.

Slightly over 30% of the interviewed HR managers shared that they do annual or quarterly surveys to understand how their people think and feel about their jobs.

Less than 10% of the companies we have asked are doing more regular surveying, and less than 5%.

Employees do not plan to stay long in below-average work environments

With a survey done on Facebook, we have asked over 5,000 people how they feel at work and if they plan to stay longer at their current company.

Results showed that over 70% of the respondents were unsatisfied with their current work environment. Not surprisingly, 86% of respondents working in an unsatisfactory environment were actively looking for another job, without any plans to stay at their current role.

At the same time, the remaining 30% who were satisfied with their jobs had no plans to leave — only 19% of them had the intention to change jobs, mostly because of seeking a promotion or salary increase that was not possible to get in their current jobs.

The results were self-explanatory, companies that are offering a below-average work environment are not capable to retain employees.