Employee job satisfaction equals commitment, which results in employee retention. Corporations are interested in this because of its implications on the bottom line. High numbers of employee turnover mean more recruiting and training time for new employees. But the corporate captains may do well to look more closely at what it’s like in the other guy’s boat: the employee’s vantage point. Otherwise, businesses may find their human resource specialists rearranging chairs on a sinking ship.

Molly Inhofe Rapert, associate professor in the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, found clear applicable practices that can be duplicated in companies to yield astounding results.

Two components of strategic planning are key to employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment, which directly impact productivity and retention. Her findings were presented earlier this year at the American Marketing Association’s 2002 Educator’s Conference.

“We looked at the informal communication within a corporation and how this internal environment influenced job satisfaction and organizational commitment,” Rapert told Newswise.com in April.

Full-time employees at the corporate headquarters and satellite offices of a national logistics company received a survey. Of the 81 participants, a substantial group emerged. Rapert refers to this group as the “participative” segment. These were employees who felt clarity of the strategic vision of the company. They also felt that they were highly involved in strategic decision-making and overall agreement with decisions across the board. Lastly, and most importantly, they displayed high levels of satisfaction and commitment.

“Job satisfaction and organizational commitment were strongly related to the participative cluster,” Rapert reported. This may come to employees on all levels in a corporation when breaking it down into the sections of the company a person works in. Asking an employee for their opinion on what brand of paper towels to purchase for stocking the washrooms is probably irrelevant to the public relations department, but that simple interest may mean involvement to the cleaning crew.

Crossway communication is key to the successful interchange of information at all levels. To target all levels of their corporation for involvement, Toyota Motors encourages regularly scheduled times for information and ideas to be exchanged between employees. “Personal facilitators” arrange meetings between different levels of employees at Singapore Airlines, according to Dr. Leon Martel, author of How the Best Companies Find and Keep Them.

This matches the findings of Rapert’s research. “Too often, critical organizational issues are formulated by individuals in the upper echelons of the firm, then mandated to the rest of the firm without securing employee commitment or involvement,” says Rapert. “This creates major barriers to success, because employee participation and commitment are essential to the implementation of the firm’s strategies.

According to Rapert, evaluating the atmosphere and personality of segments of a corporation help business leaders to see what they are dealing with. These gestalts, rather than independent variables, can give insight into the power of the combined elements as well as the individual roles each employee fills within the organization.

In the end this is what employees want: to be heard and to be acknowledged. While it is not so simple as delivering a “high-service mug” for doing a good deed, business leaders can do even better by giving employees what they really want. As Dr. Leon Martel notes, “Today, the best companies understand that they can indeed talk too much to their employees but they also know that they cannot listen enough to them.”

2002 Sabrina Glidden. Printed with Permission.

About the Author
Sabrina Glidden is a freelance writer based in Eaton, Indiana. A generalist, she writes about family, animal advocacy, business, and women's health issues. Her Web site at www.YourBestWriter.com.