Earlier quoted context omitted.
Red Hat.
I wonder how other IBM employees would answer! I genuinely hope you guys manage to carve out a niche and survive. Good luck.
I worked at IBM and it was a no to most of those questions...
Employee happiness and business success are linked
181–190 of 228 posts
Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#182I use a book called "first break all the rules" It is also based on gallup data. They determined that employee happiness was not correlated to company success. They did find that the following questions in order were highly correlated to company success. 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I…
Sadly this book is not available on kindle.
Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#183Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
For you. Some people just want to sit for 8 hours, go home, and watch football.
So you let them sit for 8 hours, go home and watch football. What's next? They're happy forever and don't bother you? No, it's likely something from the list.
The list seems likely to be important, but I note that no form of material compensation is listed, and even people who don't particularly care for material wealth will probably put food-and-shelter above most or all of that list (with a possible exception for point 8, with people and companies that have a particularly strong Cause).
Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that there are many companies that ignore this correlation, but I'm not convinced those companies are making the most rational choice. If Burger King significantly increased the salary of their workers or otherwise found ways to improve their morale, would it benefit Burger King in the long run? I tend to suspect so, but it would be hard to prove. The burger joints known for taking care of their people are al…
>If Burger King significantly increased the salary of their workers or otherwise found ways to improve their morale, would it benefit Burger King in the long run? I tend to suspect so, but it would be hard to prove. It would not benefit Burger King as its clientele’s main goal is purchasing at the lowest price and they will happily go to McDonalds if prices went up. Not all businesses have the luxury of selling to pe…
Worker wages could go up without increasing the cost of a burger (or other food item), it would just mean the owners make less money per sale. If the decreased stress leads to Burger King workers being more productive (and/or more pleasant to customers), that could mean more sales and more money for everyone involved.
Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that there are many companies that ignore this correlation, but I'm not convinced those companies are making the most rational choice. If Burger King significantly increased the salary of their workers or otherwise found ways to improve their morale, would it benefit Burger King in the long run? I tend to suspect so, but it would be hard to prove. The burger joints known for taking care of their people are al…
They tend to be somewhat upscale in terms of ingredients, employee training, overall experience, etc. That's not to say that Burger King or McDonald's couldn't do better. I don't really have enough experience with them as a customer or anything else to have a real opinion. But I suspect that, if Burger King were to try to improve their experience in a way that forced them to raise prices by 25% they'd lose a lot of b…
> A lot of people are pretty much in the position where they have to shop on price.
Keep in mind, though, that if a larger portion of money went to the workers, less of them would be in that position.
Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at the success Trader Joe's and Costco have had. Either company could replace the happy, experienced checkers, who care about what they're doing and how they're doing it with $10/hr people who have no stake in what's going on. The important distinction is the stake that your employees take in what's happening. The people who are closest to and most affected by problems are the best suited to solve them. If you h…
Ultimate stake is that the employees are also the owners themselves.
This is why a (small) grant of stock, or at least options, is a typical way to pay part of the compensation for higher-level employees.
Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#188The connection to profitability by industry is interesting: manufacturing 0.42 finance 0.22 retail 0.14 services 0.10 Correlation coefficient It would be interesting to see how it correlates with value added. I hypothesize that low in value added businesses like retail or manual assembly in manufacturing, you can't increase profits radically by increasing worker satisfaction. In higher value added sectors like like a…
I notice the correlation coefficients there are lowest for retail and services, industries I tend to think of as crappy to work in. That makes me wonder...are companies behaving rationally and only optimizing for happiness where it matters, or is there a statistical artifact here where they can't find a correlation in industries where every company's workers are miserable.
Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
But OP claimed that the two aren't even correlated . Correlation just means that when goes up, the other tends go up (or down, as the case may be). It doesn't make any claim on whether there's a direct influence or not. Hence the common refrain: correlation is not causation.
I read it as "happiness is not correlated to success when you control for these questions".
Which I read as "happiness is not correlated to success when you control for most of the factors that influence happiness in the workplace"
Re: Employee happiness and business success are linked
#190I use a book called "first break all the rules" It is also based on gallup data. They determined that employee happiness was not correlated to company success. They did find that the following questions in order were highly correlated to company success. 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I…
What do you mean when you say employee happiness? Because this list is pretty much what I'd reckon constitutes employee happiness.
I would imagine happiness of employers: "How happy are with your jobs on a scale from 1 to 10"
Could be 8 because of hours and location.