As baseball great Yogi Berra (known for his “Yogiisms”) or Canada’s bombastic hockey commenter, Don Cherry, might have said “it ain’t rocket surgery.” Dissatisfied frontline servers don’t produce satisfied customers. Disengaged employees don’t provide the discretionary effort leading to peak performance. Discontented team members don’t create inspired and energized teams.
In a thriving and highly mobile economy dissatisfied employees will often quit and get another job. In today’s economy job opportunities are scarce and fewer employees quit and leave. What’s even worse is they “quit” — and stay. Or older employees waiting for their pensions to mature or hoping for a severance package slip into “on the job retirement.”
Overall job satisfaction is on a steep decline. Many people feel trapped in their current jobs and increasingly feel like going to work is checking into “day prison.”
However, not all organizations are experiencing these dismal results. A recent assessment of employee satisfaction by Zenger Folkman’s Clients showed a significant improvement over past years, though this company was not immune to the effects of the recession.
ZF has looked deeper at this issue and found very consistent themes over multiple datasets from 94,000 employees in multiple companies. Joe Folkman and his research team factor analyzed the top dimensions to identify seven factors that created a positive increase in employee satisfaction even during the economy’s poorest times.
Joe Folkman recently conducted a webinar on Seven Ways to Increase Employee Satisfaction Without Giving a Raise where he showed Zenger Folkman’s research on key leader behaviors that drive engagement.
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