Saturday, January 19, 2013

Employee Engagement -V

Are commitment and employee satisfaction same?

When we speak about Employee Engagement, we always discuss about Commitment.
Commitment can be viewed in two ways. 
a)     Commitment of the person to his job
b)    Commitment of the person to his organization.
There are many professionals who say that they are committed to their job and profession. Whenever they are in the organization, they would give the justice to their job. They would definitely add the value to the organization. However commitment to the job comes when they are satisfied with their job. If the person who is MBA and you put him in clerical job, he may not be satisfied with his job and hence he would also not be committed to his job. Commitment comes when employee is satisfied with the job given. But there is a catch line. You can’t say that once the person is satisfied always he will be satisfied and thereon committed.
If you add new person in the team with same competencies to do the same job and you pay him more salary than the existing satisfied and committed person, the existing person will become dissatisfied once he comes to know the salary of new person. In spite of doing good job and being good professional his commitment may go down. It is philosophically right to say that job contents are more important to make the person satisfied, but when it comes to the comparison to the other person, the common human tendency is to loose the interest in the job.
Job satisfaction is crucial in commitment to the organization, but you also need to take care of other factors. It is like creating psychological connection of the person to the organization. While leaving the organization, majority of people don’t blame the organization in totality. They blame either manager or culture or HR practices in the organization. At the end of the day it means that we people are responsible for creating all above three factors.
Are employee satisfaction and job satisfaction same?         
Employee satisfaction may be the result of job satisfaction. If person is satisfied with the job and not satisfied with the culture, manager, his compensation, his seating place, he may not be satisfied as the person. Job satisfaction is one of the attribute in measuring employee engagement. Even satisfied employee may not necessarily be engaged.      
Take the example of the person who is new in the organization and working as the Sr. Manager in his previous organization. When you finalize the offer you give him the title of AGM. He is happy to know that he is AGM. But when he joins the organization, he comes to know that there are so many AGMs in the organization, even junior to him are designated as DGMs and actually these titles doesn’t matter much as finally everything decided here by GM, he gets disconnected the whole organization. He gets dissatisfied though his job is challenging to him.    
Hence employee may get the job satisfaction through his job, but surrounding makes him dissatisfied as an employee and his commitment to the job goes down.  
When you see the satisfaction of employee, you need to take a holistic approach.
(Continued….)

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