How Do We Determine Loyalty and Satisfaction?

How Do We Determine Loyalty and Satisfaction?
	What is the litmus test we can use to measure employee loyalty and employee satisfaction?—Unsure of Their Allegiance, retention agent, mining/oil/gas, Texas
	Although related, loyalty and satisfaction are different. Loyalty is easier to measure. Look at your turnover and average length of service. How do they compare with industry averages? Is turnover increasing or decreasing? Also, look at such phenomena as employee theft and sabotage--certainly indicators of disloyalty. And, as you're doing all of this, look for pockets of higher turnover and disloyalty--by organizational unit, job type and level, length of service and demographics (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, age, etc.). For employee satisfaction, I'm not sure there is one best litmus test. Rather, I would recommend a set of tests: 1. Observation. 2. Asking them, e.g., attitude surveys and exit interviews. 3. Business outcomes, which are affected by employee satisfaction. 4. Examining the root causes of satisfaction (or the lack thereof). 1. Observation This test is perhaps the most obvious, but least utilized. Walk around your workplace and watch your employees working and interacting with one another. Chat with them informally. Are they smiling, alert, active, cooperative and energized? Better yet, have an objective third party do this--preferably someone (or a team of people) who has been exposed to many other workplaces for comparison. This could be a professional consultant, but it doesn't have to be. For example, this is what job candidates do, and their assessment weighs heavily in their job choice. 2. Business outcomes In 1998, the Gallup Organization studied the impact of employee attitudes on business outcomes. It found that organizations in which employees have above-average attitudes toward their work enjoy: 38 percent higher customer satisfaction scores. 22 percent higher productivity. 22 percent better employee retention. 27 percent higher profits. If your customer satisfaction, productivity, employee retention and profits are high, you probably have highly satisfied employees. The inverse also is true: Low customer satisfaction is often due to low employee satisfaction. 3. Asking themTo create or select a good attitude survey or process for conducting exit interviews, talk to colleagues at other organizations and contact various HR consulting firms. And consider a unique approach, for example, that I described in Jennifer Koch's January 2000 article onWorkforce.com, or Motorola's "Individual Dignity Entitlement" program, described briefly under Tip 8 in my newsletter. 4. Root CausesThe Families and Work Institute's 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce found that earnings and benefits have only a 2 percent impact on job satisfaction. These need to be fair and sufficient to pay the bills. Period. In contrast, job quality and workplace support have a combined 70 percent impact. Do your employees have meaningful work and an opportunity to learn and grow? Do they feel appreciated and respected and have a sense of esprit de corps? If so, then they must be satisfied. If not, then not. Any of these four "tests" will give you a pretty good handle on employee satisfaction. Using a combination of them--particularly the last two--will assist you in doing something about it.     [SOURCE: Don Grimme, president, GHR Training Solutions, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, November 4, 2006.]