Happy employees equal high profits

Employee satisfaction translates into employee motivation and higher productivity, which in turn can mean higher profits and a lot more satisfaction upstairs in the executive suite. This, according to a Purdue University study that involved 100 employees and the corporate culture in which they worked.

The key factor was organizational communication in both directions — management to employee and employee to management. This makes employees feel they are more involved in the company’s overall policies and helps motivate them to be more productive.

On a related note, there’s a story that an American car company executive studying the disappointing productivity performance of his workers was advised to talk to a Swedish car company that didn’t have that problem. What he learned was a simple lesson in person-to-person dynamics.

His Swedish counterpart said, in effect, that his company saw every employee as a human being first, a worker second. Management was not some aloof entity separated by rank from the workers. Rather, the policy was to make everyone feel they belonged to the same family structure; a feeling that was reinforced by encouraging workers to communicate suggestions and criticisms related to everything involved in every step of production.

Bottom line: Employees who feel valued by their company will enhance their company’s value in the marketplace.

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On Another Note: Pension cutbacks, which until now were felt more by middle-income retirees, are hitting the higher-income retirement bracket. Some observers say this could finally trigger legislation to regulate closer scrutiny of pension fund investments.