So if these problems have been around for two decades, is there a reason we haven't been able to fix them? After all, don't most companies have Human Resource Departments that work on these problems?
You're absolutely right. I worked in HR for over 22 years and I lost track of the programs we launched trying to improve job satisfaction: quality of work-life, work life balance, total quality management, workforce diversity, job analysis, employee ownership, gain sharing, self-directed work teams, telecommuting, casual Fridays, all casual, etc.
Many of these programs didn't work and ran out of steam for two reasons:
- There's a lot of confusion that surrounds the topic of job satisfaction. Each time we tackled a problem it was like opening Pandora's box:
- Do we fix dissatisfactions with jobs or with employees?
- Are the problems extrinsic to jobs or intrinsic to employees?
- You can't satisfy everyone, so which employees do we satisfy?
- How do we increase profits and get more done with fewer employees that are now more dissatisfied than ever?
- And the list goes on…
- This leads to the second problem. By the time we got one issue figured out, the affected generation had moved on and another took its place with all new dissatisfactions. We got excited about fixing something new and lost interest in fixing what we couldn't, so none of the problems ever really got fixed. So here we are 20 years later with the same problems. Is it employee dissatisfaction or job dissatisfaction, intrinsic to employees or extrinsic to the job???
What HR departments have relied upon for years doesn't work. Job dissatisfaction is a moving target that's never been fixed, and affects each new generation with old and new dissatisfactions. And so the problems keep repeating.
