Employee Satisfaction Driven By Compensation and Work/Life Balance
Overall, Job Satisfaction Remains High
Nearly eight out of every ten employees are satisfied with their jobs and say
benefits, compensation, and work/life balance are the most important factors to
their overall job satisfaction, according to the Society for Human Resource
Management’s (SHRM) Job Satisfaction Survey released recently.
“For organizations to be successful at competing for new talent and retaining
employees, they have to know what workers want, what keeps them happy, and what
makes them stay,” said Susan R. Meisinger, SPHR, president and CEO of SHRM.
“Addressing the essentials, including fair compensation, valuable benefits, and
the ability to balance work and life are critical components of an
organization’s overall retention strategy.”
SHRM has conducted a series of job satisfaction surveys to discover what is
important to employees. The survey questions were e-mailed to randomly selected
SHRM members, yielding 505 responses from human resource professionals, and 600
randomly selected U.S. employees. The human resource professionals reported
their perceptions of employee satisfaction while the employee sample reported
how satisfied they were with their work. The findings are compared with previous
surveys in the series to examine trends and shifts over the past three years.
Women and workers younger than 35 report work/life balance as the most
important component to their overall job satisfaction. Men say that work/life
balance is the fourth most important component to their overall job satisfaction
and workers 56 years old or older do not rate work/life balance as one of their
five most important components to their overall job satisfaction.
Changing demographic trends, a possible labor shortage, and retiring Baby
Boomers makes addressing the needs of younger workers increasingly important.
This group of workers will need to fill the knowledge and skills gaps in the
near future. Younger workers value work and life balance more than the
generations before them and will likely join organizations that best meet their
needs. Businesses that know how to create an organizational culture that
accommodates the needs of their targeted workforce will have the advantage in
the competition for talent.
Some factors of job satisfaction are universal and consistent. Both employees
and HR professionals note compensation and benefits are important to employee
job satisfaction. However, HR professionals say that there are more important
factors that contribute to job satisfaction, such as relationships with
immediate supervisors, management recognition of employee job performance, and
communication between employees and senior management. These factors have more
to do with the organizational culture and working conditions in the company.
Although employees did not rate these items high on their list, HR professionals
know that when there are problems in these areas, employees note these factors
as reasons for leaving.
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is the world’s largest
association devoted to human resource management. Visit SHRM Online at
www.shrm.org.
|