Employee Satisfaction – How Elusive is That?
EmPower Research
August 22, 2007
By Shoma Bakre
Satisfied employees are a precondition for increasing productivity, responsiveness, quality, and customer service.” The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action By Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton
In a skills based services company like ours, people are our greatest assets and the organization is only as good as the people we have. With a booming job market in India, especially in cities like Bangalore, and a generation which believes that job hopping for the smallest increment in salary is the norm, it is a tough situation for employers.
Organizations have to differentiate themselves so that they are perceived as employers of choice. It is no longer enough to pay competitive salaries. Many other factors such as quality of work, type of exposure to verticals and global markets, growth opportunities, training programs, and of course, a brand name, all make up the total package that a candidate evaluates while considering a job offer. There are those, of course, who look only at the short-term monetary benefits and make hasty choices only to regret later because they do not get the job satisfaction that they desire.
Welfare initiatives
Increasingly, employers are focusing on initiatives for boosting employee morale and providing overall job satisfaction to their people. This is because employee satisfaction is directly proportional to employee retention and productivity. But the current milieu is such that however much an organization tries, that much elusive employee satisfaction seems to become. So it is no longer about one-time, intermittent, or recurring implementation of employee welfare initiatives, but a continuum of initiatives and activities that management has to keep rolling out, implementing, tracking, and modifying in order to retain employees and get the maximum potential out of them.
Some factors that can impact employee satisfaction positively are: a competitive compensation package; involvement in decision making; recognition for doing a good job; access to sufficient information to do the job well; active encouragement to be creative and take initiative. In our organization we try and provide all of the above. However, that still does not seem to be enough. We are currently in the process of conducting an employee satisfaction survey and some of the common complaints that we have heard so far are about salaries, work hours, inadequate training. While we have our limitations as a small organization and nothing is really perfect in our organization, employee welfare has been our top-most priority and we strive very hard to improve things as we grow. But these attempts do not seem to satisfy a few people who have already made up their minds that so many things are wrong with the organization.
Universal malaise
Despite all the complaints, attrition in our organization has been relatively low compared to industry standards. What is worth mentioning here is that currently we are doing aggressive rounds of recruiting and hiring and interestingly enough, almost all the people who come interviewing for positions in our organization have very similar comments about their current employers, be they small companies or large, well-known MNCs. Either someone is not happy with the salary or the long work hours, or the work content, or something else. Employee dissatisfaction seems to be a universal malaise among the young work-force today. Some of them almost forcing themselves to rationalize and convince themselves that their current workplace is inadequate or not worthy of them and hence they need to jump. Each individual thinks that he or she is a star performer and deserves much more.
During the recently held NASSCOM ITES-BPO 2007 Summit, the most talked about issue was attrition in the industry. In a panel discussion, Mr Pramod Bhasin, President & CEO, Genpact, stated that “attrition is the disease of the developing country”. According to him, attrition is not an industry specific issue but a country wide phenomenon. It is the function of the sudden surge in job opportunities in the country and a finite pool of resources that all employers have to tap into. Essentially organizations are poaching human resources from each other in order to fulfill their resource needs.
However, this was also a common phenomenon during the nineties in the Silicon Valley during the tech boom. There was an abundance of jobs, companies vied with each other for the available talent pool by luring them with inflated compensation and benefits packages, and sign-on bonuses. But this did not stop people from jumping from job to job as fast as they could in their quest for the most satisfactory job with the best compensation package.
Becoming more elusive
An interesting fact revealed at the NASSCOM ITES-BPO 2007 Summit is that there is actually a negative correlation between compensation and attrition at least in the BPO industry! Money can attract people to join an organization but it cannot guarantee retention. Thus employee satisfaction and retention rests more on the culture of the organization and the organizational practices. It really boils down to how valued an employee feels in his or her workplace and how comfortable he/she is with the work content and culture. It is in this context that organizations today have to work towards building a stable, satisfied employee base. Reality is that today’s workforce in India has more choices than ever before and the smallest slip on the part of the employer, be it real or perceived, will lead to the loss of people and attrition.
Needless to say, although some amount of attrition is normal and healthy, large scale attrition is a serious problem to any organization. The amount of time, effort, money that is invested in training each employee is phenomenal and each time an employee leaves and has to be replaced with a new person, the tangible and intangible costs to the organization are enormous. So it is almost to say that in this burgeoning economy, when business is booming, employers these days are treading on egg shells as their most critical asset, their human capital, has become the most fickle element in their business. The current economic forces are changing the definition of employee satisfaction to some extent, thereby making it a more elusive goal than ever before to achieve.
Satisfied employees are a precondition for increasing productivity, responsiveness, quality, and customer service.” The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action By Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton
In a skills based services company like ours, people are our greatest assets and the organization is only as good as the people we have. With a booming job market in India, especially in cities like Bangalore, and a generation which believes that job hopping for the smallest increment in salary is the norm, it is a tough situation for employers.
Organizations have to differentiate themselves so that they are perceived as employers of choice. It is no longer enough to pay competitive salaries. Many other factors such as quality of work, type of exposure to verticals and global markets, growth opportunities, training programs, and of course, a brand name, all make up the total package that a candidate evaluates while considering a job offer. There are those, of course, who look only at the short-term monetary benefits and make hasty choices only to regret later because they do not get the job satisfaction that they desire.
Welfare initiatives
Increasingly, employers are focusing on initiatives for boosting employee morale and providing overall job satisfaction to their people. This is because employee satisfaction is directly proportional to employee retention and productivity. But the current milieu is such that however much an organization tries, that much elusive employee satisfaction seems to become. So it is no longer about one-time, intermittent, or recurring implementation of employee welfare initiatives, but a continuum of initiatives and activities that management has to keep rolling out, implementing, tracking, and modifying in order to retain employees and get the maximum potential out of them.
Some factors that can impact employee satisfaction positively are: a competitive compensation package; involvement in decision making; recognition for doing a good job; access to sufficient information to do the job well; active encouragement to be creative and take initiative. In our organization we try and provide all of the above. However, that still does not seem to be enough. We are currently in the process of conducting an employee satisfaction survey and some of the common complaints that we have heard so far are about salaries, work hours, inadequate training. While we have our limitations as a small organization and nothing is really perfect in our organization, employee welfare has been our top-most priority and we strive very hard to improve things as we grow. But these attempts do not seem to satisfy a few people who have already made up their minds that so many things are wrong with the organization.
Universal malaise
Despite all the complaints, attrition in our organization has been relatively low compared to industry standards. What is worth mentioning here is that currently we are doing aggressive rounds of recruiting and hiring and interestingly enough, almost all the people who come interviewing for positions in our organization have very similar comments about their current employers, be they small companies or large, well-known MNCs. Either someone is not happy with the salary or the long work hours, or the work content, or something else. Employee dissatisfaction seems to be a universal malaise among the young work-force today. Some of them almost forcing themselves to rationalize and convince themselves that their current workplace is inadequate or not worthy of them and hence they need to jump. Each individual thinks that he or she is a star performer and deserves much more.
During the recently held NASSCOM ITES-BPO 2007 Summit, the most talked about issue was attrition in the industry. In a panel discussion, Mr Pramod Bhasin, President & CEO, Genpact, stated that “attrition is the disease of the developing country”. According to him, attrition is not an industry specific issue but a country wide phenomenon. It is the function of the sudden surge in job opportunities in the country and a finite pool of resources that all employers have to tap into. Essentially organizations are poaching human resources from each other in order to fulfill their resource needs.
However, this was also a common phenomenon during the nineties in the Silicon Valley during the tech boom. There was an abundance of jobs, companies vied with each other for the available talent pool by luring them with inflated compensation and benefits packages, and sign-on bonuses. But this did not stop people from jumping from job to job as fast as they could in their quest for the most satisfactory job with the best compensation package.
Becoming more elusive
An interesting fact revealed at the NASSCOM ITES-BPO 2007 Summit is that there is actually a negative correlation between compensation and attrition at least in the BPO industry! Money can attract people to join an organization but it cannot guarantee retention. Thus employee satisfaction and retention rests more on the culture of the organization and the organizational practices. It really boils down to how valued an employee feels in his or her workplace and how comfortable he/she is with the work content and culture. It is in this context that organizations today have to work towards building a stable, satisfied employee base. Reality is that today’s workforce in India has more choices than ever before and the smallest slip on the part of the employer, be it real or perceived, will lead to the loss of people and attrition.
Needless to say, although some amount of attrition is normal and healthy, large scale attrition is a serious problem to any organization. The amount of time, effort, money that is invested in training each employee is phenomenal and each time an employee leaves and has to be replaced with a new person, the tangible and intangible costs to the organization are enormous. So it is almost to say that in this burgeoning economy, when business is booming, employers these days are treading on egg shells as their most critical asset, their human capital, has become the most fickle element in their business. The current economic forces are changing the definition of employee satisfaction to some extent, thereby making it a more elusive goal than ever before to achieve.
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