High “Satisfaction” Scores, Low Results

We’ve been saying for a long time that “employee satisfaction” isn’t a bad thing, it just isn’t the right thing.  It measures things that are largely irrelevant to the main reason why we even have an organization – to achieve results, preferably at a high level.

We’ve seen this over and over again with our clients.  We’ve even had them start meetings about “how to have a passionate organization” by saying something like, “You know, we’ve had great employee satisfaction scores for years.  We score in the 90+% ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied.’  We thought that would make a difference for our organization, but it obviously has not.  Our results haven’t improved, and in some areas have actually declined.  What gives?”

The latest proof coming from a major organization that is not a Luman client is from United Healthcare.  In a recent survey of many organizations from a variety of industries, they reported both the highest employee satisfaction scores and the poorest results.  To us, that shows no correlation between satisfaction scores and results – or worse, that there might even be a negative correlation. 

How can that be?  We’ve worked with some clients who had become “entitlement,” even “welfare” states.  Employees were “satisfied” – they had great working conditions, great pay and benefits, extras like fitness centers and onsite restaurants and daycare, the whole magilla.  What we often found as we dug in was that people were not only not grateful and working hard because of this, they were complaining that there wasn’t even more, or that a few trinkets had been removed or cut back a bit.  And they were not infrequently facing very low or no expectations, and were because of all of this lazy and apathetic.

Our conclusion?  If you want a Passionate, Pure-Performance Organization, one of the things you can’t be is “satisfied.”  You need plenty of people who are positively discontented and constructively disengaged.  If passionate people are working on something meaningful, it isn’t very important to them what their work conditions are – you could put them in a cardboard box as long as you don’t kill their passion.  We teach and assess on the 10 key elements you have to have if you want a passionate organization.  If you want a “satisfied” organization, you’ll have to go somewhere else.

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