Even for the smaller job that does one seek to have an appreciation, from colleagues, boss, and seniors. When one gets acknowledged in front of everyone, it gives up a boost to their morale. When appreciation leads to encouragement, the ultimate result is reflected in the efficiency of work automatically. Money not only helps people attain their basic needs but is also instrumental in providing upper-level need satisfaction. Employees often see pay as a reflection of how management views their contribution to the organization.
Fringe benefits are also significant, but they are not as influential. One reason undoubtedly is that most employees do not even know how much they are receiving in benefits. Moreover, most tend to undervalue these benefits because they do not realize their significant monetary value.
Age is one of the factors affecting job satisfaction. Various studies carried out in this field have shown that job satisfaction tends to increase with age. That is older employees tend to report higher satisfaction, and younger employees say the lowest job satisfaction rates. Promotional opportunities seem to have a varying effect on job satisfaction. This is because promotions take some different forms and have a variety of accompanying rewards.
In recent years, the flattening of organizations and accompanying empowerment strategies, promotion in the traditional sense of climbing the hierarchical corporate ladder of success is no longer available as it once was. Most of the organization fails to understand this fundamental factor, whereas many have started acting towards it.
If an employee feels that he is considered an important part of the team, he belongs to the organization then there are higher chances of job satisfaction. If an employee is given an equal number of opportunities to show their talent, take the lead and initiate then the chances of having a higher level of job satisfaction is more.
Suppose in an organization; no employee is asked to give suggestions, nobody is bothered to inform them of the decision. It is noticed that if an employee has a good bonding with colleagues arid seniors, then the job satisfaction level is higher.
One feels like coming to the office and performing the job. If the environment is not friendly, office politics is at its peak, and malpractices are done, then all these factors together leave no stone unturned in discouraging an employee from not coming to the office.
These days companies are taking endless measures in order to see that an employee is catered to a different kind of facilities like health care and medical checkups.
Hence, this aspect of safety and security plays a major role. There are a few types of employees who love to experiment; they like it when the challenging job is assigned to them. Engaging work is work that draws you in, holds your attention, and gives you a sense of flow. What makes the difference?
Researchers have identified four factors:. The following jobs have the four ingredients of engaging work that we discussed. The key difference is that the second set of jobs seem to help other people. People who volunteer are less depressed and healthier. A randomised study showed that performing a random act of kindness makes the giver happier. And a global survey found that people who donate to charity are as satisfied with their lives as those who earn twice as much. We explore jobs that really help people in the next part of the guide , including jobs that help indirectly as well as directly.
Being good at your work gives you a sense of achievement, a key ingredient of life satisfaction discovered by positive psychology. It also gives you the power to negotiate for the other components of a fulfilling job, such as the ability to work on meaningful projects, undertake engaging tasks and earn fair pay. If people value your contribution, you can ask for these conditions in return. For both reasons, skill ultimately trumps interest. However, you want the potential to get good at it.
And this probably means working with at least a few people who are similar to you. Research shows that perhaps the most important factor is whether you can get help from your colleagues when you run into problems. When we think of dream jobs, we usually focus on the role. But who you work with is almost as important. A bad boss can ruin a dream position, while even boring work can be fun if done with a friend.
So when selecting a job, will you be able to make friends with some people in the workplace? And more importantly, does the culture of the workplace make it easy to get help, get feedback and work together?
To be satisfied, everything above is important. But you also need the absence of things that make work unpleasant. All of the following tend to be linked to job dis satisfaction. Although these sound obvious, people often overlook them. The negative consequences of a long commute can be enough to outweigh many other positive factors. There are famous examples too — Einstein had his most productive year in , while working as a clerk at a patent office.
This is what to look for in a dream job:. Read more about our evidence for these six ingredients. And when we look at successful people, they are often passionate about what they do. The research above shows that intrinsically motivating work makes people a lot happier than a big paycheck. One problem is that it suggests that passion is all you need.
If a basketball fan gets a job involving basketball, but works with people they hate, receives unfair pay, or finds the work meaningless, they are still going to dislike their job. The third problem is that it can make people needlessly limit their options. But in fact, you can become passionate about new areas. The six ingredients are all about the context of the work, not the content.
Ten years ago, we would never have imagined being passionate about giving career advice, but here we are, writing this article. Many successful people are passionate, but often their passion developed alongside their success, and took a long time to discover, rather than coming first. Steve Jobs started out passionate about Zen Buddhism.
He got into technology as a way to make some quick cash. In reality, rather than having a single passion, our interests change often, and more than we expect. A quick aside before we go on. Or simply: do what contributes. You can have all the other five ingredients, however, and still find your work meaningless. So you need to find a way to help others too.
For instance, Jess was interested in philosophy as an undergraduate, and considered pursuing a PhD. The problem was that although she finds philosophy interesting, it would have been hard to make a positive impact within it.
Ultimately, she thinks this would have made it unfulfilling. Instead, she switched into psychology and public policy, and is now one of the most motivated people we know.
Read Jess's story. To date, over 1, people have made major changes to their career path by following our career advice.
This employee likes a job where the goals and problems are more important than the money, prestige, or how it should be done. He prefers work of his own choosing that offers continuing challenge and requires imagination and initiative. To him, a good boss is one who gives him access to the information he needs and lets him do the job in his own way.
Exhibit IV tabulates the top ten reasons employees stay, based on their psychological level. It shows a startling dichotomy. Employees possessing relatively high tribalistic or egocentric values stay mainly because of environmental reasons, whereas employees with relatively high manipulative or existential values stay primarily for inside-the-company reasons, many of which are motivational.
We also found that the tribalistic or egocentric employees are located primarily in the low-skill manufacturing functions and that manipulative or existential employees are located primarily in management, research, or professional positions. Exhibit IV. Although not all the implications are clear at this point, it seems apparent that corporate managers, in deciding on policies and philosophy, in reality have been talking to themselves about themselves.
That is, they tend to adopt policies and theories of human motivation that appeal to their own individual value systems, under the assumption that all employees have similar values. For example, many a manipulative manager presumes that money and large, status-laden offices motivate other people in the same way they drove him to his present level of success.
He may have climbed the corporate ladder, but as our results clearly show, for many employees the ladder does not even exist. This is not meant as a criticism of managerial value systems, but as a description of reality. One can expect leaders, whatever their values, to adopt policies which most appeal to their own value system.
An individual makes a decision based on what he thinks is right. What is right depends on his values. However, since values of people are not the same, what is right to the manager is often wrong for the employee. We further explored job retention and values by linking data on values and reasons for staying.
This enabled us to determine the values of those people who stay because they like their jobs and those who said that their jobs were not reasons for staying. We found that employees who stay because they like their jobs tend to be relatively manipulative and existential; and those who continue for reasons not directly associated with their jobs tend to be tribalistic and egocentric.
We also found that the tribalistic and especially egocentric workers were relatively more dissatisfied with motivation factors than were employees with other value systems. The least dissatisfied employees had existential values, followed by the manipulative and conformist employees. This is not too surprising, considering the fact that the free enterprise system tends to reward conformist and manipulative values, and existential people stay only as long as they are happy.
Exhibit V demonstrates again the hidden power of environmental factors. It presents the percentage responses of employees scoring the highest ninetieth percentile or greater in each value system—that is, the employees who fit most clearly into each value system.
The data show a dichotomy between employees with relatively high manipulative or existential values Levels 5 and 7 and other employees, especially those with relatively high tribalistic or egocentric values Levels 2 and 3. Almost without exception, people of Levels 5 and 7 place less emphasis on external environmental reasons for staying than do people with other values. Thus whereas age, length of service, type of work and skill level, race, and education describe who stays, and for what reason, the underlying value system explains why.
But can we, as managers, really use these facts to improve employee retention? Is there a positive approach to keeping people that is more effective than focusing on the negative element of turnover? Because managers have habitually concerned themselves with turnover, it will be hard to break the habit.
Nonetheless, managers must stop the rituals of finding out why people leave and start investing resources in the positive management of retention. If managers reinforce the right reasons for employees staying and avoid reinforcing the wrong reasons, they cannot only improve traditional turnover statistics but set goals for retention.
However, they must begin to understand and respect employees as individuals with values that differ from their own. As a prerequisite to the development of a program to manage retention, certain difficult questions must be answered:.
We have obtained some quantitative insight into the first three questions, but the last two may not have a quantitative solution. For these we offer our value judgments. Ideally, it seems that the goal of managing retention would be to create conditions compatible to the turn-ons-plus—that is, some balance between job satisfaction and environmental reasons. This raises some questions. To begin with, managers might make pensions highly portable, a measure that would tend to reduce inertia but raise costs.
To balance this, it would then be necessary to improve the conditions for satisfaction so that people stay because they want to, not because they must. Another influence on inertia is the location of a company. For example, a corporation that locates a new factory, offices, or laboratories in towns that are not highly attractive or requires the relocation of many employees has weakened inertia; thus employees are more likely to leave when they become dissatisfied with their work.
Some compensatory maneuver may be called for. Again, corporations which locate plants in small towns, and draw primarily from the people who were born and reared in those communities, are building in inertia that tends to increase retention and decrease turnover—perhaps too much so. For another aspect, consider corporations with headquarters in New York City. They may find their employees have very low inertia because it is easy for people to simply get off the subway at a different stop, or even get off the elevator at a different floor, and find themselves in a different corporation.
That is, they can change jobs without changing their outside environment. In this case, inertia to stay with the present employer may be very weak, but there might be strong inertia to stay in the same general locale. Will an employee leave when the level is —5? Theoretically, perhaps, he will; but realistically, the answer depends on the strength of inertia.
At the date of exercise, his inertia will drop to a very low point, other things being equal; and even if his level of job dissatisfaction has remained constant, it may now be great enough to break the present inertia level.
Once inertia to stay has been broken and the person is in motion on his way out of the company, it will take great force to counteract his momentum to leave. One can also find examples where an employee has stayed with a company well beyond a point where he has a sense of achievement and meaning in his work and is waiting only for early retirement. He has probably become a problem to the organization, to himself, and to his family.
Lucrative early-retirement programs sometimes known as late discharge programs have become increasingly popular as a means to break inertia, often to the benefit of both parties. The effects of inertia, of course, are not limited to the employee, but also extend to his or her spouse.
It is not uncommon to find an employee returning to the home town because the spouse is dissatisfied with the present locale. In seeking balance, then, it would be useful for a company to review all benefit, pay, location, and other environmental factors, as well as job satisfaction, to determine whether people are staying for the right or wrong combinations of reasons—always keeping in mind that what is right and wrong to management may not have the same degree of rightness and wrongness to the employee.
A new work ethic is emerging in this society. If organizations resist recognition of the change in values for working, stick with a single approach to people, retain the concept of the average employee, and continue to snap on golden handcuffs, then:.
Most organizations historically have been and still are created and perpetuated by manipulative and conformist philosophies. If management wants employees to stay for reasons that are right for the individual, the corporation, and the society, it must develop existentially managed organizations that truly accept and respect people with differing values. Alfred T. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month.
Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Employee retention. Flowers and Charles L. As part of an ongoing study, employees from three companies completed anonymous questionnaires to provide the following information: Personal data on 21 demographic variables age, sex, race, length of service, education, skill level, marital status, and so on.
Reasons for staying with their companies, including factors both inside and outside the companies. Exhibit I. Job Satisfaction and Environment. Level 1—Reactive This level of psychological development is restricted primarily to infants, people with serious brain deterioration, and certain psychopathic conditions.
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