job satisfaction | Employee job satisfaction

At Last: A proven, guaranteed, intelligent way to reduce job stress and build job satisfaction and motivation for individuals, teams, management and all personnel.

Eliminating once and for all, job dissatisfaction and unproductive energies within your workplace, is the most crucial task facing leaders in the years ahead. So if job satisfaction, motivated employees, work life balance and a stress-free workplace are your goal, you have come to the right place.

Dear Advocate for Job Satisfaction,

Would it shock you to know that only 45% of workers in the US are satisfied in their jobs, the lowest level in 23 years?

Source: Conference Board Poll ‘Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School (HBS) newsletter 2 April 2010.

Commenting on the implications of this finding, Baker Foundation Professor Emeritus at HBS – James Heskett – pointed out that this job satisfaction statistic means well over half of the people working today are dissatisfied in their jobs. A dramatic result, you would have to agree.

And whose fault is this? Certainly not yours, someone who might have been polled in this same survey and are obviously seeking a solution. Take a look around at your workplace. What do you see:

A sense of negativity?
Benefits have been cut?
Experienced and skilled workers downsized?
No consultation about change?
Little control over the way you work?
Prevalence of burn out?
Everyone forced to do more with less?
Job security a thing of the past?
Job dissatisfaction a creeping contagion?

Some people are not satisfied simply because they see their favorite colleagues leave the company. Or they are dealing with issues that there is insufficient time to deal with in this kind of environment.

Any of this could be a result of corporate politics, organizational restructuring, downsizing, economic constraints and any number of internal or external factors.

But

All these things are an inevitable part of the world of work today and they are demotivating to staff as well as to you as a leader in the business you work in.

To compensate, corporate leaders look for ways to boost motivation and often externalize the solution by calling in ‘happiness psychologists’, team building experts, hold ‘motivational ‘ planning meetings, or scare campaigns. Worst of all they suddenly descend with reinvented systems more mature workers remember from twenty years ago.

And not all or in fact any of it works to solve the real problems.

The bottom line is this. If you as a manager are operating within such an environment you will have a lot of dissatisfied workers who won’t be won over no matter what band aid gestures are made!

And you know and I know, whether you are a manager or staff member, none of this is your fault!! You don’t create these problems but you know what? You CAN fix them!!

Don’t believe me?

What if I told you this is a big opportunity for you?

The opportunity to change all of this for yourself through injecting TRULY EFFECTIVE and INTELLIGENT positive changes as soon as possible so that every manager and every staff member is a satisfied employee and stays that way!

Do you think this is an exaggeration??? A wild idea even?

Think again. What I am about to show you in my Employee Motivation Program, works because it’s been proven many times over.

Let me ask you a question:

If you were commenting on the HBS finding of 55% dissatisfied workers, what would you say is the primary cause for this statistic?

Could it simply be due to:

the dreaded GFC with all its implications?
unreasonable expectations from shareholders?
lay offs or fear of lay offs?
lack of balance between work and life (work life balance)?

Yes all of these things were given as reasons by those who wrote about it, but the major factor turned out to be something much more subtle. Almost universally those who commented on this survey at the HBR blog came to one conclusion.

MINDSET was the culprit. Yes the mindset of those in charge was indicating to workers that “employers don’t care about us’. In other words leaders and managers have taken their eye off the employee ball and their focus has moved elsewhere.

So here’s one of the problems.

Jefferey Pfeffer, author of an article on the ‘sustainability of workers’ (Working Knowledge, HBS newsletter 2nd April 2010), maintains that many employers have turned their attention away from their people to spending time and effort on external environmental issues.

While many companies are being praised for their efforts to achieve sustainability in the external environment (such as ‘green initiatives’) they are, at the same time:

exercising cost-cutting efforts (such as low wages, poor benefits, no health insurance for employees).
fining employees for safety violations (BP was given as an example!!)

Why, asks Pfeffer in the face of all this, ‘do so few external initiatives involve the sustainability of workers in these same organizations?’.

Even if these statistics are only half true what does this mean for recovery from the downturn?

Could it be the very thing that is slowing recovery?

If the mindset of employers doesn’t change can a western nation like the USA ever fully recover and assert its leadership in the economies of the world?

What kind of MINDSET would it take to create job satisfaction, and how would you, as an individual employer, manager, supervisor or boss go about doing just that?

What I am about to say here would not be new news to those of you who have studied Organizational Psychology 101. Way back in 1960 Douglas McGregor wrote a book called The Human Side of Enterprise where he described two different workplace mindsets:

The manager with Type X Mindset believed that people who work for them fundamentally dislike work and will do anything they can to avoid it if they can. They believe that these faceless ones ‘feared taking responsibility, craved security and badly needed direction. As a result ‘most people needed to be coerced, controlled, directed and threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort towards the achievement of organizational objectives’.

Yet the Type Y Manager (the alternative to Type X), is a manager with a different mindset who believes that ‘creativity and ingenuity were widely distributed in the population and under the proper conditions people will accept, and even seek responsibility’.

“If you have the right people on the bus they will be self motivated. The real question then becomes: how do you manage in such a way as not to demotivate people” – Jim Collins.

First lets do a little crystal ball gazing, just the two of us!!

What’s going on in your workforce and do you have 55% dissatisfied workers?

Does this mean, or could this possibly mean, that you have overlooked a heap of unmotivated individuals – which must add up to less than optimum performance and for that matter, profitability?

And how can you change all that?

Is it actually possible for a manager to motivate an employee given so many methods have been tried and performed with less than optimal success?

“Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely, they motivate people to get rewards.”

Look… if at this point you are one of those people whose workforce is working at highly motivated levels, everyone at a happy capacity or you have no concerns that your best people will leave to join a competitor when the downturn is over,

then read no further. You probably operate with a highly motivating MINDSET already, so read no further.

However,

if you are even slightly interested in boosting your place in the world of work, getting a promotion, achieving 70-80% levels of staff satisfaction and turning a greater profit, keep reading on.

Consider this evidence:

Recent research in Britain, North America and Australia (early in the downturn) told us that only 14% of workers felt positive about going to work and more than 20 percent whine while they are at work. (IPSOS Research) The Australian Financial Review 10/6/08.
Just as in Australia the number of stress related disability claims by American employees have doubled in the last few years, according to the Employee Assistance Professional Association in Arlington Virginia, while stress related illnesses are estimated to be costing industry between $200 to $300 billion a year.

Wow, $200-300 billion!! You must admit that’s a big budget and some of it would look good on your bottom line!!!!

And of course it can.

If you are looking for the best and most innovative ways to motivate your employees on a daily, weekly, or long term basis, then here are seven proven new areas you can focus on to do it:

Look at your people with new eyes.
Examine your own assumptions about their capacities
Focus on work-life balance initiatives.
Develop your own skills as leader/manager and coach.
Develop a new leadership mindset.
Use empowerment as the predominant people management process.
Undertake your own job satisfaction research on a regular basis.

And:

if your own work would be 50% easier with a satisfied workforce;
you wouldn’t have the distraction of dealing with time wasting rumors driven by gossip;
or the distractions and emotional upheaval of accidents and injuries;
spending $$$$zillions on consultants to tell you how to motivate employees
you could tell if their models were flawed;
you would implement your own solutions in your own time and at your own pace and see change happening right before your eyes;
you would feel motivated and challenged about your work and your relationship with your employees;
for the sake of your own country’s future and the children entering the workforce right now ( some of whom are or might be Your children) you’d like to see a dramatic change in this situation;

And that’s not all.

I’m willing to bet you would experience:

An unshakable confidence in your ability to manage any workplace situation.
A growing respect from colleagues.
More energy.
Sounder more peaceful sleep.
Less work stress at home.
More balance in your life overall.

Consider this:

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the choice to work hard at work worth doing” – Theodore Roosevelt

The truth is people want to be optimistic, they want to be happy they want to contribute to something bigger than themselves (for 242 pages of evidence read Drive, by Daniel H Pink enguin 2009).
It is possible to develop a mindset of change to foster those wants.
Pessimistic comments really are contagious, but you could have the antidote.
It is possible to see the positive side of every situation.
To learn the techniques of changing a dissatisfied workforce into a satisfied one.
After all, dissatisfaction is stressful and stress can cost you your life.

Just like you I have been in the thick of things in big organizations and seen good people made miserable by a culture of negativity. I have also worked in and led inspired organizations with a culture of satisfaction and excitement, with managers who wanted their people to lead satisfying work lives,

and

make a profit and serve their community at the same time!

As a consultant for many years I have seen these changes happen. On one occasion I was called in to work with an organization after their problems had hit the city’s headlines, industrial turmoil had brought services to a halt and the organization’s public image had been badly damaged.

Twelve months after my company’s intervention the company’s Marketing Manager wrote me this letter:

“You came into the organization in the middle of so much industrial turmoil, and yet still managed to heal our problems in such a manner that (you) encouraged participation from over three quarters of the workforce (2000 people) a critical mass in my view…

Your work here has managed to contribute to a type of solidarity among what was a fractured workforce, and this itself is a major achievement.”

The client believed these results were extraordinary but the methods used were not. It took some expertise, sure, but primarily a collaborative kind of mindset and some respectful participatory processes.

Two years later I was asked to come back. The leaders had made some changes after our last assignment, like:

Work teams had been redesigned.
Supervisors had been sent on courses to upgrade their communication skills (eg how to treat their workers with respect!).
Workers were happier, much happier.
Absence and accident statistics were both dramatically spiralling down.
Leaders had learned the art of coaching their people rather than hitting them over the head with a truncheon.
The bottom line was 25% healthier than two years earlier.

The point is, as important as they were, these had been once only interventions and more needed to be done over time. Leaders now focus every day on creating a work environment where job satisfaction is the primary objective and as a result, reap the rewards. It’s an ongoing process.

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Neither does bathing that’s why we recommend it daily.” – Zig Zigler

This is your opportunity to learn some of the inside secrets that we used in that situation and are not generally shared with anyone except those prepared to pay big dollars for the privilege. And if you request it now you not only get the 80 page program manual on how to create job satisfaction, but three other bonus reports valued at $78 each as well, a total value of $234.

Bonus#1: Work life Balance. Settled into a way of thinking that assumes stress and a lack of balance between work and home is inevitable in today’s world? Wrong!

The Motivating Work Life Balance report blows a hole in that thinking. It tells a different story of a man who nearly fell into the trap of believing that myth, but found a way to achieve his work goals and maintain his family goals as well.

Bonus #2: Scenario Planning. How many of your colleagues predicted the GFC? Had they thought the financial sector could go on making obscene profits forever on unsecured credit?

The fact is, scenario planning helps us understand the uncertainties that lie before us, and what they might mean. It helps us “rehearse” our responses to those possible futures. And it helps us spot them as they begin to unfold. No business should ever open their doors without it.

Bonus # 3: A survey template to test the level of satisfaction amongst your staff. You don’t need to know how to design an employee motivation survey. It’s all here for you ready to go. You can have people fill it in on line, add questions, remove those that may not be relevant for your business and then process the results to get all the answers. How good is that?

There are seven other reassuring reasons to find the answers to motivating individuals. Go through the program. Introduce yourself to the methods we provide on how to create a workforce of satisfied people. These will change your work life:

Reason #1: You spend maybe 45-60 hours a week at work, and more than half your life working. If you want to live longer and obtain a better quality of life, then anything you can do to make things better in the workplace must provide major benefits to you and your family.

Reason#2: Most of the techniques we offer are commonsense solutions. You will immediately say ‘YES YES YES that makes sense to me’. But like every obvious solution, it is only after you learn another way of doing things, or better still develop another MINDSET, that you begin to understand how blindingly obvious they were and how easy to implement.

Reason # 3: You can study and learn to put these into practice in private and in your own time and place. Keep a diary. Begin with small steps.

Reason # 4: Every method we roll out here is proven by our own experience, by over a century of research, and one might claim, by over 4,000 years of western values.

Reason # 5: Once you sign up to this 70 page Program you become part of our job satisfaction club and the first to hear about other Job Satisfaction Resources at discounted prices as they become available.

Reason # 6: Our experience is your guarantee. You know you are getting advice that has no hidden agendas, no axes to grind, with only the interests of you and your people in our minds.

Reason # 7: FREE no obligation report on Toxic Work Environments, what they cost, and why you should avoid them in every way possible.

Reason #8: Three bonus reports that go with the 70 page manual: a report on toxic emotions and two other bonus free.

Reason # 9: Finally, there is absolutely no risk. We offer a 100% guarantee. That’s right!! I absolutely insist you get your money back if after 40 days you have not gained a benefit from this program. And I absolutely insist you keep the bonus reports if you do return the program.