Talent Management
Job Satisfaction Report
The objective of the Job Satisfaction Series is to identify and understand factors important to overall employee job satisfaction from the perspectives of both employees and HR professionals. This knowledge helps HR professionals better understand and appreciate employee preferences when developing programs and policies designated to influence employee satisfaction.
This report discusses the results from the 2008 Job Satisfaction Survey conducted in late January 2008 by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
The survey explored 24 aspects of employee job satisfaction, divided into four topic areas—career development, relationship with management, compensation and benefits, and work environment. Employees and HR professionals were asked to rate the importance of the aspects of the work environment commonly associated with employee job satisfaction. A five-point scale was used, where “1” represented “very unimportant,” “3” represented “neither important nor unimportant” and “5” represented “very important.” New for this year, if an employee answered “very important” to a job aspect, he or she was also asked about his or her satisfaction with respect to that particular aspect. Satisfaction was based on a five-point scale, where 1 = “very dissatisfied,” 2 = “somewhat dissatisfied,” 3 = “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” 4 = “somewhat satisfied” and 5 = “very satisfied.”
In addition, employees and HR professionals were asked about how specific elements of compensation and benefits affected employee job satisfaction. These questions, however, were kept separate from the overall 24 aspects of job satisfaction that were of most importance to employees because only certain aspects were asked about in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and therefore, this would impact the comparison of the job satisfaction surveys from year to year. Last, HR professionals were asked to estimate overall employee job satisfaction at their organizations, and employees were asked to indicate their overall satisfaction with their current or most recent jobs.
The following 24 elements of job satisfaction, and eight special compensation and benefits elements, were examined and serve to organize the presentation of findings in the report: