| HR professionals rate relationships with managers higher in determining a worker’s job satisfaction than employees themselves do, according to the Society of Human Resource Managers’ (SHRM) survey of 713 of its members.
The top five issues rated as “very important” by employees are compensation benefits, job security, work/life balance and communication between them and management.
HR staff, meanwhile, rated their top five as relationship with immediate supervisor, compensation/pay, management recognition of employee job performance, benefits and senior management-employee communications.
Employees ranked management recognition of their performance and their relationship with their immediate supervisor as the seventh and eighth most important influences on job satisfaction.
Placing too high a value on how employees and their supervisors interact may be outmoded thinking.
While HR professionals are in sync with the attributes most important to employees — benefits and compensation — they consistently allow these factors to be over-shadowed by issues that are not among the most relevant to employee job satisfaction.
What is key is the package of benefits, which did not make the top five in HR’s ranking as far back as 2002. “These data illustrate that benefits, along with compensation, are of utmost importance to employees, and this trend is likely to continue,” the report states.
Employers should take steps to better articulate information about the pay structure, make sure that they adjust to changes in the market, and adhere to their policies in an equitable way.
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