I learned from an IPSOS study that’s focusing on employee’s satisfaction is unuseful, and that we’d better focus on their engagement instead. I won’t comment the whole document since you can find a good analysis here, but let me tell you a few conclusions I made.
I see some main topics :
– top-down culture is dead (or have to been killed 😉 )
– you have to valorize and give consideration to employees, and take them into account.
– need for transparency
– sense-driven management (sensemaking)
– trust in indivuduals
This change in focus will suppose deeper reflexions. Satisfaction depends on “global organization politics”, and while focusing on it we didn’t impact on its core : decision making, power, organization. Indivuals were only a subject.
This new focus implies we work on sensible topics and give more consideration and autonomy to employees : that’s to say to trust them and take them into account as individuals and not anymore as parts of a process.
Rethink management ? Adopt suitable tools ? Unavoidable.