Employees Who Feel Important Are Important

Last month, Kansas City Star columnist Jerry Heaster dismissed the latest research from The Conference Board that revealed “an overall job satisfaction drop of about 20 percent” since the survey was initiated in 1995. Mr. Heaster commented that such surveys are “irrelevant to the human experience” and concluded that working Americans should just be happy to have jobs.

While I agree that in the current economy those who have jobs are indeed fortunate, and that it is not realistic to expect everyone to be perfectly happy in his or her job, I am not so cynical as to believe that business should just accept present levels of worker satisfaction.  Yes, the poor shall always be with us, and so too shall the dissatisfied, but that does not mean that their numbers cannot be lessened.

The main reason businesses should not accept declining job satisfaction levels is actually a self-serving one – most happy workers are also productive workers.  There are exceptions to this, of course – we all know satisfied workers who are happy to take their employers’ pay without having earned it.

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