It might be concluded at this point that level in the organization, race, tenure, education, and degree of job satisfaction determine why people stay. However, we found a factor more potent than any of these—namely, the work ethic of the people involved in the study.
Human beings exist at different levels of psychological development, and these levels are expressed in the values they hold respecting their work.
This level of psychological development is restricted primarily to infants, people with serious brain deterioration, and certain psychopathic conditions. For practical purposes, employees are not ordinarily found at Level 1. These employees are best suited to jobs that offer easy work, friendly people, fair play, and, above all, a good boss. An employee at this level believes that he may not have the best job in the world, but he does as well as others with jobs like his.
He likes a boss who tells him exactly what to do and how to do it, and who encourages him by doing it with him. The two major requirements of a job for this employee are that it pay well and keep people off his back. He does not care for any kind of work that ties him down, but he will do it if he must in order to get some money.
Because of the raw, rugged value system of this employee, he needs a boss who is tough, but allows him to be tough too. This employee likes a job which is secure, where the rules are followed, and no favoritism is shown. He feels that he has worked hard for what he has and thinks he deserves some good breaks. Others, he believes, should realize that it is their duty to work.
The ideal job for this employee is one which is full of variety, allows some free wheeling and dealing, and offers pay and bonus on the basis of results. He feels he is responsible for his own success and is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities.
A good boss for this employee understands the politics of getting the job done, knows how to bargain, and is firm but fair. A job which allows for the development of friendly relationships with supervisors and others in the work group appeals to this employee.
Working with people toward a common goal is more important than getting caught up in a materialistic rat race. He likes a boss who gets people working in close harmony by being more a friendly person than a boss. This employee likes a job where the goals and problems are more important than the money, prestige, or how it should be done.
He prefers work of his own choosing that offers continuing challenge and requires imagination and initiative. To him, a good boss is one who gives him access to the information he needs and lets him do the job in his own way.
Exhibit IV tabulates the top ten reasons employees stay, based on their psychological level. It shows a startling dichotomy. Employees possessing relatively high tribalistic or egocentric values stay mainly because of environmental reasons, whereas employees with relatively high manipulative or existential values stay primarily for inside-the-company reasons, many of which are motivational.
We also found that the tribalistic or egocentric employees are located primarily in the low-skill manufacturing functions and that manipulative or existential employees are located primarily in management, research, or professional positions. Exhibit IV. Although not all the implications are clear at this point, it seems apparent that corporate managers, in deciding on policies and philosophy, in reality have been talking to themselves about themselves.
That is, they tend to adopt policies and theories of human motivation that appeal to their own individual value systems, under the assumption that all employees have similar values. For example, many a manipulative manager presumes that money and large, status-laden offices motivate other people in the same way they drove him to his present level of success.
He may have climbed the corporate ladder, but as our results clearly show, for many employees the ladder does not even exist. This is not meant as a criticism of managerial value systems, but as a description of reality. One can expect leaders, whatever their values, to adopt policies which most appeal to their own value system.
An individual makes a decision based on what he thinks is right. What is right depends on his values. However, since values of people are not the same, what is right to the manager is often wrong for the employee. We further explored job retention and values by linking data on values and reasons for staying.
This enabled us to determine the values of those people who stay because they like their jobs and those who said that their jobs were not reasons for staying. We found that employees who stay because they like their jobs tend to be relatively manipulative and existential; and those who continue for reasons not directly associated with their jobs tend to be tribalistic and egocentric.
We also found that the tribalistic and especially egocentric workers were relatively more dissatisfied with motivation factors than were employees with other value systems. The least dissatisfied employees had existential values, followed by the manipulative and conformist employees. This is not too surprising, considering the fact that the free enterprise system tends to reward conformist and manipulative values, and existential people stay only as long as they are happy.
Exhibit V demonstrates again the hidden power of environmental factors. It presents the percentage responses of employees scoring the highest ninetieth percentile or greater in each value system—that is, the employees who fit most clearly into each value system.
The data show a dichotomy between employees with relatively high manipulative or existential values Levels 5 and 7 and other employees, especially those with relatively high tribalistic or egocentric values Levels 2 and 3. Almost without exception, people of Levels 5 and 7 place less emphasis on external environmental reasons for staying than do people with other values.
Thus whereas age, length of service, type of work and skill level, race, and education describe who stays, and for what reason, the underlying value system explains why. But can we, as managers, really use these facts to improve employee retention? Is there a positive approach to keeping people that is more effective than focusing on the negative element of turnover?
Because managers have habitually concerned themselves with turnover, it will be hard to break the habit. Nonetheless, managers must stop the rituals of finding out why people leave and start investing resources in the positive management of retention.
If managers reinforce the right reasons for employees staying and avoid reinforcing the wrong reasons, they cannot only improve traditional turnover statistics but set goals for retention. However, they must begin to understand and respect employees as individuals with values that differ from their own. As a prerequisite to the development of a program to manage retention, certain difficult questions must be answered:. We have obtained some quantitative insight into the first three questions, but the last two may not have a quantitative solution.
For these we offer our value judgments. Ideally, it seems that the goal of managing retention would be to create conditions compatible to the turn-ons-plus—that is, some balance between job satisfaction and environmental reasons.
This raises some questions. To begin with, managers might make pensions highly portable, a measure that would tend to reduce inertia but raise costs. To balance this, it would then be necessary to improve the conditions for satisfaction so that people stay because they want to, not because they must.
Another influence on inertia is the location of a company. For example, a corporation that locates a new factory, offices, or laboratories in towns that are not highly attractive or requires the relocation of many employees has weakened inertia; thus employees are more likely to leave when they become dissatisfied with their work. Some compensatory maneuver may be called for.
Again, corporations which locate plants in small towns, and draw primarily from the people who were born and reared in those communities, are building in inertia that tends to increase retention and decrease turnover—perhaps too much so.
For another aspect, consider corporations with headquarters in New York City. They may find their employees have very low inertia because it is easy for people to simply get off the subway at a different stop, or even get off the elevator at a different floor, and find themselves in a different corporation.
That is, they can change jobs without changing their outside environment. In this case, inertia to stay with the present employer may be very weak, but there might be strong inertia to stay in the same general locale.
Will an employee leave when the level is —5? Theoretically, perhaps, he will; but realistically, the answer depends on the strength of inertia. At the date of exercise, his inertia will drop to a very low point, other things being equal; and even if his level of job dissatisfaction has remained constant, it may now be great enough to break the present inertia level. Once inertia to stay has been broken and the person is in motion on his way out of the company, it will take great force to counteract his momentum to leave.
One can also find examples where an employee has stayed with a company well beyond a point where he has a sense of achievement and meaning in his work and is waiting only for early retirement. He has probably become a problem to the organization, to himself, and to his family. Focusing on the benefits and positives of a job feeds workers psychologically. Alter Tasks Performed. All jobs will have components that are tiring, boring, and difficult to get through but most employees have some ability to modify their duties.
Even slight modification can increase satisfaction. For example, a college professor that enjoys her work conducting research the most may limit her other voluntary commitments, like managing student groups or serving as a committee chairperson, to make more time for her research. Even when it increases workload, adding fulfilling tasks usually benefits the worker. Ask for New Opportunities. Employees can ask their supervisors and others in the workplace for new opportunities — the opportunity could be large, like a new role, or small, like working on a particular project.
Change and Improve Workplace Relationships. Employees can change relationships and modify who they interact with the most in the workplace to make their job more satisfying since work is a very social construct. Talking to a toxic co-worker for only a few minutes can drain meaning from the most gratifying jobs while a time spent collaborating with a valued colleague can be energizing. People usually try to decide on their dream job by imagining different possibilities and thinking about how satisfying each seems and considering past experiences.
Unsatisfied workers often dream of more money and less stress, thinking those changes will solve their problems. It turns out, this usual approach is all wrong. As people, we are not good at predicting what will make us most happy and are usually unaware of this flaw.
People also struggle to remember accurately how satisfying different experiences were compared to one another. Often, we judge experiences only by how they ended, forgetting the middle which could be very different. These biases can cause workers to make bad choices on the search for meaningful work and are likely why people think money and low stress are the keys to job satisfaction when, in fact, two decades of research have proven them wrong.
An easy, high paying job does not lead to job and life satisfaction. Many people say they are looking for a job with little stress.
Historically, doctors and psychologists believed that stress was always a negative for the person experiencing it.
However, the modern medical and psychiatric view of stress is more complicated. For example, high ranking government and military officials with demanding jobs that left little time for sleep actually had lower levels of anxiety than less pressured workers.
Many believe that this is because a greater sense of control over how and when to do their job helps insulate these high-level workers from the potential negative impact of their positions. There is a sweet spot between a very easy job where workers get bored and an overly demanding job where workers get burnt out and experience harmful stress.
The middle ground is where workers find a comfortable challenge that increases their job satisfaction. Employees should look for these comfortable challenges rather than avoiding stress altogether. The objective evidence is that income is not important after a very low threshold is met. Most college graduates in the United States will have salaries that take them above this threshold and into the area where income has virtually no impact on happiness.
Work that is Consistent with Life Values. Employees are more satisfied when their work aligns with their life values and hobbies. Workers like jobs that work with their hobbies and with goals that align with their values. A triathlete might value a flexible schedule so that he can get in morning training rides during the workweek. Say, an average tenure of your organization is three years. Here, your promotion appraisals should take place between 2 years.
Adopting this method will bring a rise in the job satisfaction of your employees. Most of the time, employers fail to deliver on the promises and contracts to employees. Despite the circumstances, it always has a very negative effect on employees. Delaying promised increment of promotion due to rising competition or lack of revenue is one such example out of many.
A loss of trust upon the employer by the employee leads to massive job dissatisfaction and attrition. Micromanagement is a killer of time, trust, productivity, and job satisfaction.
Constant scrutiny of employees makes them feel suffocated and limits their creativity and productivity. Furthermore, the employer's absent trust factor upon the employee's work harms work satisfaction to an enormous extent. This aspect of management style often chases employees away. Here, you must understand that satisfaction is a relative term and it might differ from person to person.
For example, while constant official traveling may bring employee satisfaction to one employee, it may not be the case for others. The same can be the case with an informal office environment, variety with work allotted, changing work shifts, etc. Always be quick to reward excellent work. Timely recognition of a worker's efforts will boost their confidence and make them happy and satisfaction.
Here, you must deliver proper rewards and recognition in place beforehand to further sweeten the deal. Be sure to keep the workers for the long-term instead of the short term. It means reassuring workers that they can rely on a future with the company. Make your workers understand that they are there to be a part of the family and not a project. In making them stay, you should have better employee development opportunities like promotion, training, etc. Employee health is a big deal in the workplace today.
Nowadays, millennials want to work in an office where they care about their workforce. In his regard, you must have good corporate health programs in order. Every employer must understand that they need constructive feedback to grow as a unit.
In this regard, you should give importance to your employee's opinions. When you act on your worker's view, they feel valued. It makes them feel great about the company and themselves, which results in better satisfaction.
Most employers disregard any criticism they get from their employees. It is an unfair practice that diminishes job satisfaction. You must respond well to constructive criticism and work on developing yourself.
For better job satisfaction, you must avoid micromanagement at all costs. It shows that you don't trust your workforce's ability, which hurts their work and attitude.
In the end, it is sure to bite into your workforce's satisfaction levels. That marks the end of the list—a few facets of job satisfaction for you to know. You must know here that there are no definite elements of overall job satisfaction. As managers, you must go the extra mile to meet max employee satisfaction in your workforce and go beyond the myths.
The days where it was perceived that only a big salary is much more important than job satisfaction are over. To avoid job dissatisfaction in work-life today, you must know your employees first.
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