Management Voice Index
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Satisfied employees aren't necessarily productive. That's the message that came out of a recent ROI seminar we ran in conjunction with Employee Engagement specialists, The European Study Group. Yet organisations spend a great deal of money finding out how their employees ‘feel' about a wide range of issues, and then spend more money trying to make them feel better. So the question is:

How do we balance employee satisfaction and business performance?

Let's look at a few examples:

• A major financial services organisation is seeing business performance fall while employee satisfaction is at an all time high
• One of the worlds largest technology companies experienced its biggest ever quarterly loss in the same period that HR recorded the highest ever employee satisfaction scores
• In some sectors the most successful companies are known to have brutal HR policies – it's ‘up or out' every two years

It is well documented that keeping people under some pressure drives performance, while too much pressure ultimately destroys performance. Just as in sport, if you train too hard or compete too often, you will reduce your performance, but if you don't train or compete enough, you will never make the top.

So the key for us, whether working in large or small businesses, is to assess how much pressure to apply. However, applying pressure may not give you points in your employee satisfaction ratings.

Tip 1 - Be careful what you measure

What gets measured, gets managed. If your measures of employee engagement are really measurements of satisfaction, you may find yourself focusing your resources on the wrong issues. For example, measuring how many people are thinking of leaving an organisation could be very misleading. If very few are leaving, perhaps they are very comfortable, rather than very motivated.

Tip 2 - Goals not Work

Just giving people more work rarely makes them feel better unless they were very bored in the first place. Giving people additional meaningful goals can motivate them to take on more work as well as make them feel more responsible and important. Put simply - work is pressure, goals are responsibility .

Tip 3 - Engagement not Satisfaction

Employees may be satisfied simply because the terms and conditions are much better than other work they could find in the area. Engaged employees are committed to the organisation and its goals. Find measures that will reflect commitment to your organisation. Examples might be: contributing new ideas; giving extra time on occasions; helping out with community support programmes; recommending new employees.

Tip 4 - Communicate the organisational goals

Employees cannot be committed to the success of the organisation if they don't know what it's trying to achieve. No matter how large or small your company, don't leave people to guess what is going on.

Tip 5 - Feedback

People are happier if they know how they are doing. If they know they are doing a good job, and that's acknowledged, they will generally continue to do a good job, and may well strive to do more. If you don't give people feedback, and they aren't doing a good job, you can't expect them to be either satisfied or productive.

Much of this is obvious stuff, yet it remains a challenge for businesses large and small. Linking what people actually do, with the purpose of the organisation is critical. 3C has a wide range of tools and techniques to help you, from interactive DVDs through to web enabled support for aligning people, jobs and goals. If you would like to see more of what we have on offer, just reply to this email.

Management Voice Index
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