Management at Work

Can’t Get No Job Satisfaction?

“For the most part, the employer contract is dead.”

—Rebecca Ray, Executive VP, Knowledge Organization, The Conference Board

News flash: American workers aren’t happy with rec-room ping pong tables and free massages. Or, to be a little more precise: Such perks aren’t enough to make them satisfied with their jobs. According to Gallup’s most recent State of the American Workplace Report, a mere 30 percent of U.S. workers are “engaged” in their work. That’s up from 28 percent from 2010, but it doesn’t amount to much, especially when you consider that more than half of all workers (52 percent) show up every morning but have very little interest in what they do all day. What’s worse, the 18 percent that’s left are actively disengaged—which means, says Gallup CEO Jim Clifton, that “they roam the halls spreading discontent.” According to the report, those actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. economy $550 billion a year in lost productivity. Admittedly, younger workers tend to find workplace perks, such as Google’s nap pods and onsite roller-hockey rink, more attractive than their older counterparts. “They’re often looking for things they can brag about to their peers,” explains Bob Nelson, author of 1,501 Ways to Reward Employees. But if the boss is a jerk or tasks aren’t stimulating, cautions Nelson, “perks aren’t going to fix it. You may keep [younger workers] for a while, but at some point, they’re going to leave.” Nelson’s opinion would seem to be confirmed by another major survey. According to The Conference Board Job Satisfaction most recent report, while satisfaction among workers aged 25 to 34 came in at 50.5 percent, only 37.8 percent of workers under 25 years were satisfied with their jobs—down from 46 percent in 2012 and about 60 percent 20 years earlier. Baby boomers, observes The Conference Board’s Linda Barrington, “will compose a quarter of the U.S. workforce [by 2020], and since 1987 we’ve watched them increasingly losing faith in the workplace.”

Nelson reports that younger workers tend to leave jobs after about a year, compared to 4.4 years for older employees, and John Gibbons, another Conference Board researcher, notes that 22 percent of all respondents to the survey don’t expect to be in their current jobs for more than a year. “These data,” he concludes, “throw up a red flag because widespread job dissatisfaction” and the resulting turnover “can impact enterprise-level success.” Recent studies indicate, for example, than it can cost an employer from 16 percent to 213 percent of average annual salary to replace every employee who leaves a company. How do workers become dissatisfied, and what happens when they do? Danielle Lee Novack of Penn State University has created an instructive scenario that we’ve simplified to fit the needs of our case: