All Posts Tagged With: "employee satisfaction"
A Healthcare Innovator
The Henry Ford Health System built its first new hospital since 1915 a couple years ago in West Bloomfield, 30 minutes from downtown Detroit. According to William C. Taylor, the hospital “truly must be seen to be believed.” (“One Hospital’s Radical Prescription for Change,” HBR, June 2, 2010)
Here are a few things that made Taylor a believer:
- The hospital sits on a wooded 160-acre campus
- All 300 rooms are private and designed so that family members can stay overnight if they wish
- All patients go right to pre-assigned rooms when they arrive
- A concierge helps patients and families with errands
- A “tea sommelier” recommends different teas for different situations
- There’s a day spa and an indoor farmer’s market every Wednesday
- There’s a 90-seat demonstration kitchen to teach patients’ families and the community how to prepare better food
- A celebrity chef spent two years creating 3,000 healthy recipes for patients to choose from
- The atrium features more than 2,000 trees lining paths to shops that sell products that can improve health
There’s a Baldrige connection to this story: West Bloomfield’s new CEO is Gerard van Grinsven, who joined Henry Ford after a long career with two-time Baldrige Award winner Ritz-Carlton. Skeptics questioned the wisdom of hiring someone with no healthcare experience to run the new hospital. Van Grinsven thinks it was a smart move. “I had a fresh pair of eyes and no baggage when I arrived,” he said. “The real opportunity for reinvention is to rethink…
3Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLayoffs and the Failure of Leadership
Susan Marvin wrote an insightful column that the StarTribune published in yesterday’s paper. Marvin and her three brothers run Marvin Windows, a privately-held window and door manufacturer in a small town in northern Minnesota. Their grandfather started the company in 1912.
Marvin begins by noting that, last year, her company cut the weekly hours of more than 1,000 workers from 40 to 32. Upon hearing the news, the workers cheered. They had feared layoffs during the housing downturn. The Marvin family decided that was not the best option. (“Do layoffs really help the bottom line?” StarTribune, April 2, 2010)
The Baldrige Criteria ask how your organization prepares for situations like this, although few leaders had expected a recession as deep and long as this has been. Such preparation includes determining the impact of decisions on all stakeholders, on the quality of your products and services, and on your culture.
Too many leaders ignore these factors and focus on just one: Laying people off cuts costs. When you grow, you add people. When revenues fall, you lay people off. From a financial standpoint, the logic makes perfect sense. As an added benefit, you can rid your organization of some of the “dead wood” that often accumulates over time.
The Marvins disagree with this approach. Susan Marvin points to a study by Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford University. According to Pfeffer’s research, layoffs lead to lower worker productivity, lower company profits,…
5Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIs Your Job Ideal for You?
If you had to guess, how many of the people who work at your organization would say that their jobs are ideal for them?
Gallup asked 18,000 U.S. adults this question in January. Survey says: 70% think their jobs are ideal.
While that number is higher than I would have expected, the breakdown of the data provides fewer surprises. For those whose annual household income is less than $12,000, 57% said their jobs were ideal, a pretty high number for minimum wage jobs. At the top end of the scale—those making more than $120,000—77% say they have the ideal job. I guess the remaining 23% are just in it for the money.
Business owners topped the list of people who think their jobs are ideal (87%) with farming/forestry/fishing a close second. The bottom five are manager/executive at 68%; sales/retail at 64%; manufacturing/production and clerical/office at 61%; and service at 60%. In other words, pretty much anyone who works in a cubicle, manages people who work in cubicles, or stands for hours on a retail sales floor or a production line, which sounds like most of the workforce.
The older you are, the more likely you think your job is ideal. Seventy-eight percent of people 50-65 years old said so while only 52% of workers age 18 to 29 years agreed.
Education is a mixed bag. Those who had done postgraduate work ranked highest (77%), while those who completed some college…
19Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThis Year’s Best Employer
According to Fortune magazine, SAS is the best company to work for. Here’s why:
- A 300-acre campus near Raleigh, North Carolina for 4,200 employees
- Average tenure for employees of ten years with annual turnover at 2%
- Typical work week is 35 hours with many employees setting their own schedules
- No sick day policy: If an employee is sick, he or she decides whether to stay home (the average taken annually is two days)
- A healthcare center with a staff of 56 including four physicians—and services are free to employees (last year 90% of employees and their families made 40,000 visits)
- An on-site 66,000-square-foot recreation and fitness center with gym, weight room, billiards hall, sauna, hair salon, manicurist, Olympic-size pool, and massage
- On-site workday sports leagues
- Two subsidized daycare centers for 600 children
- Dry cleaning, car detailing, a book exchange, a meditation garden, an in-season tax-prep vendor, and an orthotics store
- Three subsidized cafeterias (and they provide takeout for family dinners)
- Off-campus SAS family nights
- Two paid artists-in-residence
- Free M&Ms—22.5 tons a year or 11 pounds per employee
CEO Jim Goodnight explains the SAS approach this way: “My chief assets drive out the gate every day. My job is to make sure they come back.” (“SAS: A new no. 1 best employer,” David A. Kaplan, January 22, 2010)
SAS is the world’s largest privately-held software business with revenues of $2.3 billion. It has been on Fortune’s list of Best Companies to Work For for 13 straight years.
Companies make the list based on the…
1Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedPaying Disengaged Employees
The Workforce Focus category in the Baldrige Criteria is organized into two Items, the first of which explores how you engage your workforce to achieve organizational and personal success. I’ve written before about the Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement, which Gallup states can be as much as a 70% boost in bottom-line results, and Employee Engagement and the Bottom Line, which looked at the financial performance at Best Buy and J.C. Penney.
Fraser Longden is the head of talent and engagement at Kingfisher PLC, the parent company for B&Q, the UK’s equivalent of Home Depot or Lowe’s. In an interview in the Gallup Management Journal (“Do-It-Yourself Engagement,” January 12, 2010), Longden offers an interesting perspective on the flip side of increasing the bottom line: the cost of disengaged employees.
“The harsh reality is that in 2005, 29% of our workforce was actively disengaged,” he says, “and we were spending £120 million a year just on wages of these individuals. So, from a cost perspective, we were spending a whole lot of money on people who didn’t want to be there. In the last survey, that figure has dropped to £31 million, which is a massive turnaround.”
Longden calls it a tug of war, the actively disengaged pulling against the engaged. “The only way you’re going to move forward is by having a lot more people on the engaged end.”
He describes the steps B&Q took to improve employee engagement including:
- Removed…
Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline
Employee satisfaction appears on a lot of companies’ balanced scorecards. Most of the ones I’ve seen have annual goals to increase this number by one percent or less, which doesn’t seem like much of a challenge until you realize that employee satisfaction in the U.S. has been spiraling downward for twenty years.
The Conference Board released a report today on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households conducted by TNS. Only 45% of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61.1% in 1987. You can read a summary of the report here.
According to the summary, “no age or income group is immune. In fact, the youngest cohort of employees (those currently under age 25) expresses the highest level of dissatisfaction ever recorded by the survey for that age group” (64%). Only 51% find their jobs interesting, 43% feel secure in their jobs, and 51% are satisfied with their boss.
Why is this important? Lynn Franco, one of the report’s authors, says, “What’s really disturbing about growing job dissatisfaction is the way it can play into the competitive nature of the U.S. workforce down the road and on the growth of the U.S. economy—all in a negative way.” (“Don’t love your job? You’re not alone,” Jeannine Aversa, Associated Press, January 5, 2010)
Jobs are tight, pay is stagnant, out-of-pocket healthcare costs are skyrocketing, and fewer and fewer workers consider their jobs interesting. It’s no wonder employees…
5Jan2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedBest and Worst for Employees
Glassdoor.com just announced its second annual Employees’ Choice Awards for best—and worst—places to work. Nearly 100,000 employees completed a 20-question survey on the site in 2009. Survey questions addressed employee attitudes about career opportunities, communication, compensation and benefits, employee morale, recognition and feedback, senior leadership, work/life balance, and fairness and respect. Once the overall ratings are calculated, Glassdoor.com may exclude a company from the list for detrimental acts by management or other negative company events.
This list is obviously not scientific but it does provide a general sense of who does well or poorly on employee engagement. At the Glassdoor.com Web site, you can click on a company in the list or search by company name and get more details about how many people rated it and their pros, cons, and advice to senior management.
The top 25 best places to work are:
- Southwest Airlines
- General Mills
- Slalom Consulting
- Bain & Company
- McKinsey & Company
- MITRE
- Boston Consulting
- Continental Airlines
- Procter & Gamble
- Juniper Networks
- Northwestern Mutual
- Kraft Foods
- National Instruments
- NetApp
- Goldman Sachs
- FactSet
- Medtronic
- Publix
- Chevron
- FedEx
- Apple
- Edelman
- Edward Jones
- QUALCOMM
Companies in the next 25 included Caterpillar (#35), Turner Broadcasting (#36), Intel (#41), Best Buy (#45), and Whole Foods (#48).
The 10 worst companies to work for, according to Glassdoor.com, are:
- Gibson Guitar
- United Airlines
- Spherion
- AutoZone
- Rain Bird
- DHL Express (USA)
- Level 3 Communications
- Dominion Enterprises
- Hertz
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
To learn more about employee satisfaction, read:
- 10 Critical Questions: Your Workforce
- Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement
- 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
- Effective Employee Communication
- What Employees Want
…
22Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
