Increase Employee Satisfaction And Improve Your Bottom Line

Sometimes a person´s mind is stretched by a new idea and never does go back to its old dimensions. --Oliver Wendell Holmes

One of the ways to increase employee satisfaction is by instituting a work/life agenda within your organization.   The research clearly shows that work/life initiatives work.   They positively  impact employees, the organization and ultimately the bottom line.   Following are highlights of research that illustrate this point.

·               Companies with highly committed employees had a 112% return to shareholders over three years, compared to 90% for companies with average commitment, and 76% for companies with low commitment.         Watson Wyatt Worldwide, WorkUSA 2000.

·               Seventy percent of managers from six companies (Amway, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Honeywell, Kraft, Lucent Technologies and Motorola) said that flexibility improved productivity, and 76% thought flexibility had a favorable effect on retention. Boston College Center for Work and Family, 2000.

·               Companies not on Fortune´s list of  "100 Best Companies to Work For" had a lower average in annual stock returns than those companies on the list. Vanderbilt University and Hewitt Associates, 2000.

·               Workers with more control over their jobs and their schedules tend to be more satisfied, less burned out, take more initiative at work, feel greater loyalty to employers and plan to remain with the company longer than other employees. Family and Work Institute, 1994.

·               First Tennessee has found that because of their commitment to work and family programs they have been able to fill positions more than 40 percent of the industry rate ("Time to Fill"), which has equated to a $1.5 million gain in productivity.   In addition, they have a customer retention rate of 96%, one of the highest in the country.

·               SAS says their progressive work-family policies are responsible for a turnover rate of 7% compared to an industry average of 24%.

·               Sears found that improving employee satisfaction improved customer satisfaction and increased revenues.

·               In a survey of 1999 graduating business students from eleven countries, 57% said that balancing work and personal life is their top career goal. PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2000.

In addition, the Ford Foundation did a landmark study from 1990-1996 in collaboration with the Xerox Corporation, Tandem Computer, Inc., and Corning, Inc.  The objective  was to examine how organizations perceive the work and personal lives of their employees, and how they help them integrate the two.  

When viewed as separate entities, they found that work efficiency and family life were both impaired.   In contrast, they  found that creativity was unleashed when traditional assumptions and cultural beliefs concerning work were challenged.  

And lastly, restructuring the way work gets done is a win-win situation for both the employee -- whose needs are addressed, and the employer -- whose bottom-line results improve.

The issue then becomes how to institute a work/life program within your organization.  Resource and referral services that address childcare and eldercare concerns, as well as concierge services, are one aspect of a work/life program.  

Flexible work arrangements (flextime, telecommuting, job sharing, compressed work week and part-time) are aspects.  

Following are the steps to take in order to  implement a comprehensive program:

·               Determine employee needs through utilization of different survey instruments.

·               Develop a pilot program to address a particular issue with a certain segment of  your employee population.   Implement and then repeat with other issues/populations.

·               Educate all levels of leadership about the different aspects and benefits of work/life, and continue to do so until they have fully committed to the program.

·               Educate employees about the program, and address any concerns they may have about being penalized or their career development limited if they utilize the program.

·               Acknowledge and dispel myths about work/life, i.e., that productivity can only be measured through face time, that work/life is mainly for women and not for management or other employee groups, that work/life will not work for customer-service employees or that management will lose control of its employees if they employ work/life initiatives.

·               Monitor the utilization rate of your program.

·               Redesign or readjust any aspects of your program as you evaluate feedback in regards to what works and what does not work.

·               Address any other barriers to the utilization of your program.

·               Communicate about the successful utilization of your program.

·               Employ and/or develop measurement tools that show how a work/life initiative benefits your bottom line.

·               Keep work/life on the agenda at all levels.

·               Readjust business functions (work redesign) when it is clear that doing so would effectively address employees´ needs, and lead to greater efficiency for your organization.

·               Make the necessary organizational changes in order to have a structure that supports your program.

·               Examine cultural myths about work (i.e., in order to show you are a loyal and committed employee you must put work before family), and eliminate or change those that are counterproductive.   Determine or re-evaluate what defines an employee for your particular organization.

Work/life has been around for more than a decade, but is just now gaining momentum.   The impetus for change, in addition to employees´ demands and an increasing awareness about the importance of responding to them, is coming out of research being done at several universities.   Robert Drago from Pennsylvania State University, and Lotte Bailyn and Thomas Kochan both from MIT´s Sloan School of Management have all written extensively about the need to re-evaluate what an ideal worker is in today´s society.  

In a report of the Sloan Work-Family Policy Network called Integrating Work and Family Life, they state that "Integrating work and family life today requires a well-informed collaborative effort on the part of all the key actors that share interests and responsibilities for these issues.   Employers, families, worker and family advocacy groups, government, and communities all have roles to play in integrating work and family life, but none of them can solve this problem acting alone.   Each must reexamine the implicit assumptions of what constitutes an ´ideal worker´ in today´s economy and society, and then engage other groups and institutions in an ongoing dialogue over how to close the gap between today´s work and family realities and the policies and practices that govern their interrelationships."

Thus, in order to embrace this concept we must be open to asking questions, listening to responses, and be willing to act upon the information.   It challenges us to move out of our comfort zone, to shift our attitudes and beliefs.   As such, it is about creating a new paradigm.   In his book, Future Edge: Discovering the New Paradigms of Success, Joel Arthur Barker states, "If you want to be early, you must trust your intuition, you must trust your nonrational judgment and take the plunge; make the leap of faith to the new paradigm."   He ends his book with the following paradigm story, which illustrates what can happen when one stays rooted in a particular belief system.

One Saturday morning a man was driving to his mountainside cabin. The road there was very dangerous, but this did not bother him because he was an excellent driver, he had a great car, and he knew the road well.

As he was rounding a blind curve another car came careening around, almost out of control, and he feared he was going to be hit.  The driver of the other car gained control,  and when she drove by  she shouted out her window, "PIG!!"   He was incensed since it was her car that had clearly been out of control, and yelled after her, "SOW!!"   Feeling good that he had been able to respond back,  he raced around the corner... and ran into the pig!

Reducing the labor force and cutting costs are traditionally thought of as ways to increase profitability.   But research clearly shows that addressing employees´ needs increases their level of satisfaction and leads to increased profitability.   Simply put, when you take care of your employees, you take care of your business.

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