Do We Actually Want Some Dissatisfied Employees?

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MIT researcher George Westerman has written a provocative post on the MIT Sloan Management Review website. The title of his short article is, "The New Digital Mandate: Cultivate Dissatisfaction."  Westerman writes:  

The problem is that employee satisfaction can be a double-edged sword. While satisfied employees are good for current activities, that very satisfaction can inhibit innovation. Transformative innovation is difficult. It is far easier to stick with what we know works and tweak the current process than it is to start over. People who are satisfied with the current way of doing business are not likely to transform it.

People who transform their organizations must be aggravated enough with the current situation that they’re willing to bear the effort and risk to change it. Leaders who want their organizations to continuously transform must not only look for dissatisfaction on which to capitalize, but also be willing to cultivate dissatisfaction in their employees.

Westerman argues that there is a right and a wrong way to be "dissatisfied" in an organization.   A useful form of dissatisfaction involves a willingness to question the conventional wisdom and the commonly accepted ways of doing things.   It means protecting the organization against complacency.   The wrong type of dissatisfaction involves pointing fingers and blaming others for problems that arise, while not offering constructive alternatives.   

I agree wholeheartedly. A certain amount of healthy and constructive restlessness can be a powerful positive force in an organization. Andy Grove, long-time CEO of Intel, once argued that organizations need to have a few "helpful Cassandras" who can bring some healthy paranoia to the table.  Grove once wrote, "I believe in the value of paranoia. Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction."  Of course, what you do not want are naysayers who simply look for all the reasons a new idea won't work.  You don't want people who are stopping innovative ideas in their tracks.  You would like people who are looking broadly for potential threats to a firm's competitive advantage and are protecting against complacency.  

Why People Quit

Why do people quit their jobs?  Fast Company reported this week on a new analysis conducted by Glassdoor.   The firm studied approximately 5,000 workers who switched jobs over the past decade.   They found that three most important reasons for quitting are:

• Company culture
• Employee salary
• Getting stuck in the same job for long periods of time

The firm discovered that, "On average, we find that a 10% higher base pay is associated with a 1.5% higher chance that a worker will stay at the company for their next role."  In addition, the probability of quitting rises by 1% for every 10 extra months someone stays in the same role at a company. 

What didn't matter as much with regard to quitting?  Interestingly, "they found that while work-life balance, liking their senior leadership, and benefits may matter for overall employee satisfaction, they don’t impact turnover."

The Power of Purpose

In this video, Stanford's Jennifer Aaker explains why articulating clearly the  purpose of an organization or team gives meaning to what people do and enhances their satisfaction as well.

Rewarding Employees? Think Experiences Rather Than Material Gifts

Wharton's Cassie Mogilner has conducted some interesting research on gifting behavior.   Her work has implications for managers thinking about how to reward their employees with small tokens of appreciation for the work they have done.   Mogilner finds that experiential gifts foster stronger emotional connections between the giver and the receiver than material gifts do.  Here's her description of one experiment that she conducted:

We conducted a study in which undergrads, as our participants, come in with a friend. We assigned one person to be the gift recipient and one person to be the gift giver. Among the gift givers, we gave them $10 and told them, ‘Go out and buy a gift with this money for your friend here.’ We told them either to buy an experiential gift or a material gift. The gift recipient wasn’t aware of our instructions, they just 10 days later received this gift that their friend had given them. You can’t buy a ton with $10, but you saw some examples of the experiential gifts that people gave. They bought them a ticket to the local movie theater or a Chipotle gift certificate versus material gifts like a pint glass, a teddy bear, socks. And we found that the gift recipients who received the experiential gift felt more connected to the gift giver. Again, I will point out that they didn’t like the gifts any more, but they did feel more connected. Our argument is that a big goal of gift giving is not just to give a liked gift, but to foster relationships.

With this research in mind, think about offering a gift certificate to dinner or tickets to a ballgame to one of your hard-working employees for a job well done.  Perhaps that small token of appreciation may be a more effective way of expressing your gratitude than offering them a material gift.