Understanding what drives employee satisfaction is key to building an engaged and productive team. While compensation is important, the ability to have a flexible work schedule is one of the top factors impacting an employee's happiness at work. By offering workplace flexibilities like hybrid work schedules, flexible hours, and remote work options, you can significantly increase job satisfaction among your team.
What Are the Things Employees Value Most in a Job?
When examining how to improve employee job satisfaction, it helps to know what things your employees value most. Surveys show that along with fair compensation, the top things full-time employees want in a job are:
- Work-life balance
- A sense of purpose/meaningful work
- Flexibility/autonomy
- Great managers and colleagues
- Growth opportunities
Of these, non-traditional work schedules most directly impact flexibility and work-life balance. Employees want flexibility over their time to pursue personal needs outside of work. They also want to avoid burnout from excessive work hours that invade one's personal life.
Alternative work schedules provide employees with flexibility while facilitating a healthier work-life integration, increasing both employee happiness and engagement.
How Does a Flexible Schedule Improve Job Satisfaction?
Offering an alternative work schedule meets an important need and directly feeds into higher employee satisfaction. There are a few key ways a flex schedule achieves this:
Allows Employees To Find a Healthy Work-Life Balance
Rigid work schedules with long hours and no flexibility frequently result in employee burnout. It makes employees struggle to meet personal needs and life demands. This leads to decreased engagement, performance issues, and higher turnover.
Conversely, flexible schedules with adjustable work hours or remote work options allow for a healthier work-life balance. Employees can more easily attend to personal matters, including health appointments, family obligations, and other needs that arise.
Alternative work schedules directly enable employees to achieve harmony between their jobs and outside lives. This ability to effectively pursue work and personal goals, in turn, helps increase productivity and boosts employee morale.
Increases Autonomy by Providing a Sense of Control
Micromanagement and strictly enforced policies leave little room for personal choice or discretion in how and when work gets done. Apart from feeling restricted and demoralized, this sense of lost independence is hugely dissatisfying for employees.
Alternatively, offering flexible arrangements empowers staff with far more autonomy over their time. As long as core hours, meetings, or other critical team activities are covered, employees can adjust other working periods to match their personal schedules.
With this freedom comes an increased sense of ownership, choice, and the ability to organize work around preferences rather than inflexible demands. These factors directly feed into feeling more satisfied and engaged on the job.
Reduces Stress While Increasing Performance
Inflexible schedules force employees to structure their lives around work in ways that may not fit their needs or preferences. This rigidity, coupled with a long work week and intense demand, leads to stress, fatigue, burnout, and diminishing returns on output.
While occasional overtime work can meet important deadlines or challenges, regularly overworking employees diminishes health, focus, creativity, and performance over time.
Flexible work options allow individuals to take breaks when needed or shift intense work periods to align with natural productive rhythms. Accommodating changes in energy, mood, outside stressors, and other personal factors enables employees to sustainably balance their workload without compromising quality, priorities, or health. As a result, uplifted and empowered team members get more high-value work done in less time, boosting productivity and job satisfaction.
Easily Coordinate Flexible Work Arrangements With Scoop
As a leader aiming to boost employee satisfaction and performance, providing flexible work schedules is key. However, coordinating flexible and hybrid team schedules brings obvious challenges. Without the right tools, tracking employee availability and planning collaborative in-office work sessions can quickly become a logistical headache.
That's where Scoop comes in. Our planning tools integrate directly with your existing calendar and communication platforms, making it effortless for employees to indicate availability and coordinate coverage for set team days. With a few clicks, you gain a clear overview of employee availability and timings, thus empowering you to manage flex arrangements seamlessly across a distributed team.
By leveraging Scoop's simple yet powerful functionality, providing increased schedule flexibility becomes easy and sustainable at any scale. Give your team the autonomy they crave while gaining the oversight needed to drive alignment, engagement, and productivity. Get started for free today.
