If you had asked him, Salvatore Scumace probably would have told you he was a very satisfied employee. After all, for 15 years he got paid but never once put in an appearance at work. He earned more than $645,000 over those years, payment for work as a fire safety employee that he never performed. Undoubtedly, there are many who are envious, at least until they learn that he is now under investigation on multiple counts and six hospital managers have been fired for allegedly enabling his absenteeism.

While the hospital where Scumace was supposed to be working never intended to offer this kind of job satisfaction—how they missed Scumace’s decade-and-a-half absence is another issue altogether—it nevertheless serves as a good example of the difference between job satisfaction and engagement, which too often are conflated. They are not the same. Scumace was as disengaged as you can get, yet undoubtedly very satisfied.

In this final post addressing Employee Experience, we will explore job satisfaction, focusing on the kind of satisfaction companies should deliver, why it is important even though it is distinct from engagement, and how employee communicators can support the goals of their companies’ job satisfaction efforts.

This is the latest installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.

The series:
Part 1: Introduction	Part 14: Engagement
Part 2: Overview	Part 15: The Strategic Narragive
Part 3: Alignment	Part 16: Engaging Managers
Part 4: Listening	Part 17: Employee Voice
Part 5: Consultation	Part 18: Organizational Integrity
Part 6: Branding	Part 19: The Customer Experience
Part 7: Channels	Part 20: The Customer Journey
Part 8: Culture	Part 21: Touchpoints on the Customer Journey
Part 9: Vision/Mission	Part 22: Customer Ecosystems
Part 10: Values	Part 23: The Employee Experience
Part 11: Practices	Part 24: The Employee Journey
Part 12: People	Part 25: Daily Interactions
Part 13: Place	Part 26: Work-Life Balance

The four overlapping circles at the center of the model represent the best opportunities for employee communication to affect an organization on a day-to-day basis. This post explores the impact of job satisfaction on the Employee Experience, a critical component of the final circle.

If job satisfaction is not the same as engagement, what is it? Going back to 1935, we find a book with the fitting title, Job Satisfaction, that defines it as “any combination of psychological, physiological, and environmental circumstances that cause a person to truthfully say that they are satisfied with a job.” Another way to look at it is simply the emotional view employees have of their work. As noted above, engaged employees are most definitely satisfied with their jobs while not all satisfied employees are necessarily engaged. Employees may love getting free snacks and logoware, foosball tables, and retreats at the lake. But nobody quits because they don’t get these things. Nobody stays solely because the company makes these perks available. Job satisfaction, according to some, happens when the job meets employees’ basic needs. What satisfies people and what motivates them are not always the same thing. The fact that engaged employees are satisfied in addition to engaged makes job satisfaction an important factor in the Employee Experience (EX), just not in a vacuum, which is how too many companies view it. High levels of job satisfaction lower voluntary turnover, reduce employee absenteeism (with the exception of certain Italian hospitals), lower long-term HR costs, motivate employees to refer others to open jobs at the company, and can even boost productivity.

How Is Job Satisfaction These Days?

The state of job satisfaction in the U.S. depends on whom you ask. One study found about two-thirds of U.S. workers are satisfied with their current jobs, but another found that only 9 percent are happy with their positions—which means only a handful of workers go to work with smiles on their faces. And a little over half of employees are eager to change jobs.

A couple of other statistics may help pinpoint one reason job satisfaction could use a boost:

• 61 percent of workers believe trust between them and management leads to higher job satisfaction
• 40 percent of employees want their managers to ask them how they’re coping with the coronavirus pandemic
• 56 percent of employees believe their managers are promoted too early
• 60 percent of workers think their managers need more managerial training

Remember, engaging managers represent one of four cornerstones of engagement. They are equally important to job satisfaction. If you had a bad boss, how much would you look forward to coming to work every morning? Go back and read the engaging managers post.

There is more to job satisfaction, though.

Three Components of Job Satisfaction

While researching this post, I stumbled upon a way to look at job satisfaction that I had not seen before. (You can find the full post here.) It is worth a quick review.

The Evaluative Component

This refers to an employee’s overall response to the organization. Does the employee like or dislike the company? You can ask this as a straight thumbs-up or thumbs-down question or use a 5-point Likert scale (1 is the most negative response, 5 is the most positive.)

The Cognitive Component

Measure different elements of job satisfaction to assess how the employee’s perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and expectations influence their response to each element.

The Affective Component

What kind of feeling does the organization produce in an employee? According to the iEduNote post, “In general, positive affect results from information, feedback, and situations that affirms or reinforces the individual’s self-worth and self-concept, while negative affect is evoked by invalidating situations.”

There is a relationship between the cognitive and affective components. For example, in a system focused on reward, the cognitive component addresses developing employees’ expectations around pay; satisfaction increases when expectations are met. From the affective perspective, pay is valued and serves as an indicator of worth and status. The iEduNote also explores this relationship in managerial inducement systems, task inducement systems, and social inducement systems.

Elements of Job Satisfaction

Listing the elements of engagement is easy; researchers and engagement specialists are pretty aligned in their views of engagement’s foundations. Job satisfaction? Not so much. In researching this post, I identified more than 35 elements of job satisfaction scattered across multiple studies, surveys, papers, and posts.

Following are the elements that found their way into multiple resources; I have also grouped together some common elements of job satisfaction that were labeled differently had definitions that were only slightly different from one another.

Working environment, conditions, and safety

It can’t be any fun going to work in an environment that makes you wish you could pop on VR goggles in order to escape it. The types of conditions that affect employees’ view of the environment are varied, from old cracking paint and grimy windows to dilapidated furniture and cheap substitutes for decent accouterments (if any). And if linoleum on the floor is curled up, presenting a tripping hazard, or other impediments to safety are everywhere, employees will know in their hearts that the company simply does not give a rat’s ass about them. I work in the construction industry, where project trailers historically get a bad rap, but at the company where I work, significant effort has been made to make them as appealing as possible, including a biophilia effort introduced by our sustainability department and implemented by our Green Teams.

Learning and career development

The lack of efforts to help employees advance their careers drives employee attrition. Some 40 percent of department employees cite it as a dissatisfying job factor. In 2018, data analysis found employees were kept in the same role 50 percent longer than before the financial meltdown in 2008, in large part because companies reduced middle management as part of their cost-reduction efforts, eliminating many of the jobs into which lower-level employees hoped to move.

Social Opportunities

These include working relationships with colleagues, interactions with other people associated with the company (such as customers, partners, contractors, and the like), and informal association with the people with whom employees work. In-person all-hands updates, holiday parties, and especially community activities like park or beach cleanups or working a food bank or other charitable activities can build connections and raise job satisfaction.

Cultural Alignment

Does the company square up with an employees’ personal beliefs, values, and religious code? If not, the failure probably rests with the recruiting department and/or the hiring manager, who should ensure they are hiring to the culture and not just bringing someone on board who has the right experience and skills listed on their CV.

Fairness

How much an employee makes is less a job satisfaction factor than the belief or perception that what they are paid is fair. It is not just a matter of money, though. I worked in one organization in which a highly valued employee was about to take maternity leave. As the impending date of her delivery grew nearer, she decided she wanted to be a full-time mom and notified leadership she would not return. To accommodate her wishes and retain her services, leadership decided to offer to renovate her office so she could bring her baby to work; they would give her the time she would need to care for and nurse the baby. Leadership was proud of itself for this accommodation until it was pointed out that all the lower-paid admins who struggled with child care would certainly develop a deep, burning resentment toward the company once they learned of this arrangement.

Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance was the theme of the previous post but as it is also part of job satisfaction—and there are those who may find this post and not have an interest in reading the last one—I will cover it briefly here in the job satisfaction context.
There are multiple elements to work-life balance, contrary to conventional thinking that defines it simply as the balance between the time an employee spends at work and how much time they get at home and at leisure. The elements of work-life balance, according to subject matter expert Jeff Davidson, include…

• Self-management—The ability to take care of personal needs like eating, sleeping, and exercising.
• Time management—The ability to prioritize and deal with work and personal obligations.
• Stress management—Finding ways to adapt to environments at home and at work that can cause stress.
• Change management—The ability to manage the many changes life can throw at an individual and ensure the volume of change is not overwhelming.
• Technology management—The tools we use should make our lives easier, not more complex (or stressful).
• Leisure time management—Time off is vital to achieving work-life balance. In the U.S., far too few employees take all their vacation (and some take none). The effect of this can include deleterious mental and physical effects, including burnout, among other things.

There is one additional contributor to work-life balance that doesn’t get much attention. According to data from Gallup, “Having realistic performance goals is actually a better predictor of work-life balance than having flexible work arrangements. Further, among full-time U.S. employees, workers who strongly agree that they have realistic performance goals are 2.4 times more likely to also strongly agree that they have a healthy work-life balance.”

Recognition

People crave recognition and validation for their work. Toiling away at a job that nobody appreciates will eat away at any job satisfaction an employee feels. (Recognition was addressed earlier posts in this series.) Recognition can be delivered through employee-of-the-week and president’s award-type programs, but it’s more important that people managers take just a few seconds to recognize an employee’s effort.

When I was an intern at a daily newspaper, I was assigned to cover a speech to be delivered at a local hotel ballroom by California’s finance director. I arrived at the hotel early so I sat at the bar and ordered a Coke. (I wasn’t 21 yet and besides, I didn’t want to be tipsy when covering the speech.) I sipped my Coke and looked to my right. The speaker was sitting on the barstool next to me.

I took a deep breath and introduced myself. We chatted for about 20 minutes. Never once did he ask if the conversation was on the record. I scribbled notes furiously. The article I turned in covered not only the speech but insights he offered during our conversation.

The next day, I walked to my desk and found some newsprint rolled into the typewriter platen. On it was typed a single line:

When did you become a financial reporter? Great job!

It was signed “Marv”—that was Marvin Sosna, the newspaper’s publisher.

My confidence must have swelled 100 times reading that note. Imagine a 20-year-old intern getting praise from the publisher! I remember it, word for word, 47 years later. And it still has a positive effect every time I think of it. It reminds me that I can do things I didn’t know I could do.

Recognizing employees doesn’t have to take more than that. In fact, it can take less. Just a remark while passing a member of the team can have a lasting impression.

Challenging and meaningful work

Nobody jumps out of bed excited to get to work to do a job that is repetitious, boring, routine, unchanging, or (as far as the employee knows) does no good for anybody other than the company’s bottom line.

Along with meaningful work—knowing why you are doing something—we can add autonomy and mastery. Autonomy is the feeling of being self-directed, while mastery is the sense that you are getting better at things that matter (usually by getting feedback). These are the elements Daniel Pink identifies in his book, Drive, which explains how autonomy, mastery, and purpose deliver higher levels of problem-solving and productivity.

Other elements

Other elements listed in various resources include the following:

• Environmental factors—These include economic, social, technical, governmental, and political influences.
• The employer’s financial stability—Constant worry about whether you will show up to work only to find an “Out of Business” sign in the window can erode satisfaction.
• Paid holidays—Most people get them. If your employer does not provide them, how satisfied will you be?
• Benefits—The absence of health care coverage, paid family leave, paid vacations, life insurance, and the rest of the benefits many companies provide will have most employees on the lookout for a better place to work.

What Communicators Can Do

There is much internal communicators can do to both raise employee awareness of dimensions of the company that can contribute to their satisfaction on the job as well as improve the conditions that lead to job satisfaction.

Research

Employee voice is one of the four pillars of engagement, so give them one. Find out what job satisfaction means to them, how well the company is doing, and where it is falling short. Share those results with leadership along with the data that backs up the importance of taking steps to improve job satisfaction. That feedback can come by way of surveys, focus groups, and the like.

Environment

If the physical environment is dismal and depressing, undertake some research to assess the impact of the workplace on productivity, retention, and other outcomes that matter to leadership.

Work with leadership and your facilities team to come up with low-cost solutions to improving the workplace, if cost is the primary factor. (Sometimes rented facilities don’t offer much leeway for improvement, but there’s always something that can be done to make the place more work-worthy. Even changing the lighting from fluorescent to lights that track circadian rhythms can make a big difference, as can a fresh coat of paint. I’m also impressed with some of the walls I have seen at companies like ConAgra, where brand messages that reinforce values and purpose are painted onto the walls.

You can also share tips on how employees can brighten up their own workspaces. While putting the onus on employees to improve their environment is not an optimal solution, I was impressed with the biophilia effort undertaken at the company where I work, along with the results. Even in our WELL-certified, biophilia-rich headquarters office, employees enthusiastically added terrariums and other greenery to their own workspaces.

At the very least, let employees know why they may be stuck with what they’ve got, assuming it’s a message that will lead them to nod and think, “Okay, I can understand that.” (Some of the trailer situations on construction projects fit in that category, though there is no need to explain it to members of the project teams; they already get it.)

Career development

Employees may not be aware of opportunities available through the company to build their soft skills and improve their technical skillsets. Don’t just list them, though. Tell stories about employees who have advanced their careers by taking advantage of them. Do the same for opportunities to move laterally in the organization and make sure employees know what lateral positions are open.

Many companies offer experiences beyond training and open positions that can help them develop their careers. Where I work, we are always issuing calls to action for task forces and committees. A few have required employees to go through a day of training on group facilitation (which earned them a certificate); several of those who raised their hands were more interested in learning facilitation skills than in conducting the listening sessions we wanted them to facilitate. Serving on a task force or committee also looks good on a resume and can introduce volunteers to knew skills and competencies.

We know that many employees make decisions about their future in an organization when milestones occur in their lives. Birthdays are a no-brainer: Work with managers to develop messages to send around the time of a birthday to talk about goals and plans and how the company can help them achieve these results. Other milestones are less obvious to the organization, like a family reunion, but you can communicate to managers that, if they hear from an employee about such events, it’s a good time to have that goals-and-plans conversation.

Work-Life Balance

If you produce regular communications for managers, dedicate some space to work-life balance and what it really means, beyond just the demarcation between being at work and being home. Encourage off-site team activities. (One of our project directors took his team ax-throwing!) On-site activities can be an effective way to help people feel like the time they spend at work is enjoyable and worth more than just a paycheck. One of our project directors, faced with Covid’s impact on off-site teambuilding, started lunches with employees sharing ethnic meals from their heritage.

There is no understating the importance of helping managers do a better job of setting goals with employees, since (as the Gallup data referenced above shows) realistic performance goals is actually a better predictor of work-life balance than having flexible work arrangements

Through your regular communications, share stories of employees who have taken advantage of little-known opportunities to elevate their work-life balance.

Also, make sure everyone companywide understands the importance of taking vacation time.

Recognition

Recognition—and building a culture of recognition—is one dimension of job satisfaction on which employee communicators can have an outsized impact. To begin with, you can recognize employees whose efforts reflect the company’s values, purpose, or mission. Do this with short articles, digital signage visuals, social media posts—take advantage of every channel available to you.

You should also work with leadership to help them recognize the value of calling out these employees during group meetings and even one-on-one. (It’s too bad they can’t roll some paper into a newspaper platen and type, “Good job!”)

At my organization, we have added a “High Fives” to our intranet homepage, which any employee can use to recognize any other employee for any reason. While it is taking some work to make the cultural adjustments that will lead more employees (and all leaders) to use the system, it is gaining traction.

If your organization already has a recognition program (like a “President’s Award,”) make sure it achieves the primary objective of such programs: Lead those who didn’t win think to themselves, “It’s interesting what they did to earn that recognition. So that’s the kind of thing you have to do to get recognized around here!” That is, the goal of recognition is changing the behaviors of those who aren’t already performing in a manner consistent with company goals.

As with every post in this series, this is not meant to be a comprehensive list of measures communicators can take to improve job satisfaction. Please share how you enhance satisfaction in your organization (or with your clients).

The matrix shown above is from Terryberry.com

Up Next

The only remaining element of the new model for employee communication to cover is measurement. Of course, measurement warrants a series as long as this one to cover all of its various elements and applications. I promise to be brief but to cover the key aspects of measuring employee communication.

After that, I plan a post to cover some elements of internal communication that didn’t neatly fit into one of the themes of the previous 28 posts, followed by a wrap-up post.

The graphics for this series were created by Brian O’Mara-Croft.