SHRM has just released their 2006 Job Satisfaction study.

Satisfaction is an important goal for organizations to reach as it has been shown that profitability, productivity, employee retention, and customer satisfaction are linked to employee satisfaction.

Often the debate is centered on what are the top five reasons to achieve superior satisfaction among our employees. This is often the wrong debate. The way to impact employees satisfaction lies within a variety of programs. The most interesting question for us is to understand the disconnect of perception of what is important for the employee versus what HR believes is important. This is the key as HR owns the organization of programs to improve employee satisfaction. It’s also where the slips will happen.

The gap analysis we performed on the SHRM data is normalized to take into account the relative importance of the different factors. The analysis shows some very interesting disconnects.

The absolute top five factors for the employees were compensation/pay, benefits, job security, flexibility to balance life and work issues, and feeling safe in the work environment.

The story is different when we put them in the light of the gap in perceptions.
Meaningfulness of work and job variety are the two areas that employees value way more than HR can even imagine. In absolute terms, the difference is above 20%. On the other side, HR overemphasized the relationship with the supervisor and the recognition that management gives regarding job performance.

So maybe HR should stop sponsoring employee of the month programs and increase job rotation and contextualize the job meaning for their employees instead?