A Direction for Employee Satisfaction

If we’re going corporate…

We might be well served to look at those that have symbiotic relationships with their highly satisfied, engaged, and empowered employees.

Look at all the bad press MacDonald’s has gotten and remember that learning that the burgers only have 15% meat or that the nuggets are filled with ground chicken faces (I’ll let you figure out if that’s a typo) wasn’t what made it happen. Instead, a lot of it can be attributed to their poor treatment of their employees. Let’s not model ourselves after a dying (and irresponsible) fast food chain.

But, we’re in a time of budget crisis, how can we possible do this?!?

Having a good work environment isn’t all about ping pong tables in the break room and new iPads. It turns out, and here’s the shocker…money can’t buy you happiness.

The kind of money that helps is money that we have at UNCG. The biggest salaries go the people least likely to stick around, but that doesn’t mean that the lowest salaries are what keep people here. So, step one: everybody earning under $XXk (note the two digits there…don’t come with cap in hand if you earn six figures) gets a raise. I don’t care how you make it appear in accounting, it can be done, so let’s do it. Partly it might come from skimming off the top (for example, do we need a new Vice Chancellor for University Relations if the department has four people? Not sure, but it’s a question worth asking) and part might come from savings I’ll discuss in a moment. Point is, it can, and should be done, as a baseline, a minimum of what employment should be.

It’s much more than that though.

Liz Ryan, contributing author for Forbes explains it well:

“Rather than focusing on new programs to make employees happy, we should be taking away the obstacles that keep people at work disempowered and disconnected from their mission [and that of their place of employment]. Leadership in the knowledge economy has more to do with removing impediments to teamwork, collaboration and new ideas than with installing even more programs and policies than we already have.”

Basically, it will save us money AND increase our devotion (and therefore energy, creativity, contributions, etc.) to do away with the unnecessary structures that degrade the quality of the work environment AND cost us the most money.

I’ll only give one example, for now, but: In University Relations (back when that was what it was), staff such as David Wilson and Chris English were salaried employees. And yet, they had to fill out time sheets. These time sheets were entered into a system developed by department admin Sherri MacCheyne. The system never worked particularly smoothly and had to be fudged and fussed with just to accept information that it turned out was absolutely useless. It didn’t improve the relationship between Sheryl and her co-workers, didn’t ever actually measure the amount of time spent working, and we can see the countless headaches this ridiculous and unnecessary activity has caused.

Remove the bizarre requirement for time sheets and here is what we would have had:

No UNCG3 scandal, a whole host of dedicated employees still working here, none of the legal fees associated with the prosecution of this idiocy, more time for Sherri to devote to work, more time for Chris, David, et al to devote to work, countless hours of work that never would have showed up on the time sheets anyway happily performed by dedicated employees, whatever the hours were that Imogene Cathey, Benita Peace, and Jamie Herring dedicated to this, whatever productivity was lost as people attended forums and tried desperately to understand secondary employment…

I probably don’t need to go on. All of this from one unnecessary structure. How many more are there that could so easily disappear generally improving everybody’s lives AND the financial situation of the university?

I don’t know, but I’d sure like to find out.