Stop Thinking and Find Out

Many companies use surveys to find out the latest status on their service topic and also create some media buzz.

Earlier this year Salary.com released their 2008 Employee Satisfaction and Retention Survey results. What I picked up on were the top reasons given for leaving a job remained the same from the previous year's survey results, namely:

* Inadequate Compensation
* Inadequate Development Opportunities
* and, Insufficient Recognition

Now when you dig deeper into the survey results you discover employers were not in synch with employee perceptions. For example, employers had a good sense of overall satisfaction levels they just tended to overestimate the degree of extremely satisfied by nearly 2 to 1.

Let’s take a look at our area of interest – employee recognition.

When asked to rank the reasons why employees leave, insufficient recognition was the third highest behind compensation and career development. What’s more interesting is only 29 percent of employers thought a lack of recognition was a factor. Employees told a different story with 39 percent of them saying insufficient recognition was a key reason. Not knowing what 10 percent of your workforce is feeling about being under recognized is significant.

Managers and business owners must never assume they know the perceptions and degree of impact their employees perceive of retention factors. In other words stop thinking and find out directly. If you want to know the most valuable solution on how employees want to be recognized...ask!