Employee Satisfaction

Employees expect more from their jobs now than they used to. Today’s affluent employees often demand work that provides some self-fulfillment, whether it is on the assembly line, in middle management at a multinational corporation, or in managing a fast-food franchise.

Business pays attention to these needs—and to the problems that can occur when they are not met. Poor productivity, high absenteeism, and sloppy workmanship are expensive by-products of worker dissatisfaction. So all sizes of businesses are making efforts to improve employee performance and satisfaction. Involving employees in key decisions, making jobs more interesting, and providing employee counseling are several of the ways in which they are doing it.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Motivation Factors

Motivation factors, such as achievement and recognition, were often cited by people as primary causes of satisfaction and motivation. When present in a job, these factors apparently could cause satisfaction and motivation; when they were absent, the result was feelings of no satisfaction as opposed to dissatisfaction.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Checklist for Processes Improvement

Improvement is made by:

• Viewing all work as a process, whether it is associated with production or business activities.
• Making all processes effective, efficient, and adaptable.
• Anticipating changing customer needs.
• Controlling in-process performance using  measures such as scrap reduction, cycle time, control charts, and so forth,
• Maintaining constructive dissatisfaction with the present level of performance.
• Eliminating waste and rework wherever it occurs.
• Investigating activities that do not add value to the product or service, with the aim of eliminating those activities.
• Eliminating nonconformities in all phases of everyone’s work, even if the increment of improvement is small.
• Using benchmarking to improve competitive advantage.
• Innovating to achieve breakthroughs.
• Incorporating lessons learned into future activities.
• Using technical tools such as statistical process control, experimental design, benchmarking, quality function deployment, and so forth.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

People-Oriented Management

Business executives must strive to maintain a people-oriented philosophy of management. The daily press of commercial activity often makes it easier to deal with numbers, organization charts, inter-office memos, and administrative procedures. But industry is not the only segment of society that should pay greater attention to people. The federal and provincial governments have been under attack for treating people as “files” instead of as human beings. Insensitivity to human needs is a critical problem in nearly all organizations; yet, a humanistic approach to management is always good business, regardless of the industry.

The special needs of some people have been neglected. The physically handicapped have had to overcome some managerial barriers in order to achieve occupational dignity. Individuals who have served time in jails need jobs that will keep them from returning to criminal activity.

These situations reflect dissatisfaction on the part of people involved in or affected by business organizations. Such people argue that business has been too concerned about short-run profitability, machinery, evaluation, and control of corporate personnel and not concerned enough about the people involved. One of the aims of social responsibility is the achievement of a new concept of management that will take into account people oriented concerns.

Workers are more productive when they have a sense of participation in the decisions affecting them. Human resource development has thus become a major organizational objective for many businesses. People-oriented management requires a careful balance between productivity and profitability objectives on the one hand and employee desires on the other.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Change and Satisfaction

Organizational change can be protracted and costly. For example, termination payments to people and penalties relating to changed property arrangements can both be expensive. In some companies it would appear that decisions regarding who should be kept or made redundant are governed more by accumulated rights in the event of termination than managerial merit or quality. Some assets are also difficult to dispose of in a recession.

Occasionally, companies become carried away with concepts and push their application to the extreme. Judgment is needed to decide how far to go in relation to the current situation and context of a company.

For a period, and until the benefits appear to come through, corporate transformation may be accompanied by a slide in the employee satisfaction ratings. The trends need to be monitored, the causes identified and, where appropriate, remedial programs put in place. Opinion surveys can be used to track attitudes to change in various parts of the corporate organization.

Understanding the reasons for dissatisfaction could lead to a change in transformation priorities, if not in direction. Japanese companies, such as Honda encourage their staff to be dissatisfied with whatever has been achieved in order that they will aspire to do even better.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Why Salespeople Sell?

The complexity and competitiveness of most industrial sales jobs makes successful performance a daunting challenge for even the most well-managed sales force. This challenges sales managers to recruit and select the best qualified salespeople, train and supervise them well, keep them highly motivated, and focus their efforts with appropriate sales strategies and account management policies. Unfortunately, the challenge of recruiting talented new salespeople is made an even thornier problem for many firms.

 For most industrial salespeople, it is precisely the complexity and challenge of their jobs that motivates them and makes them satisfied with their choice of careers. A number of satisfaction surveys over the years have found high levels of job satisfaction among industrial salespeople across a broad cross section of firms and industries.  While these surveys did find some areas of dissatisfaction, that unhappiness tended to focus on the policies and actions of the sales person’s firm or sales manager, not on the nature of the job itself.

 Why are so many industrial salespeople so satisfied with their jobs? Different analysts have offered a variety of answers to this question. Some attractive aspects of selling careers most commonly mention by these authors—as well as by sales people themselves—include 1) freedom of action and opportunities for personal initiative, 2) a variety of challenging activities, 3) financial rewards, 4) favorable working conditions, and 5) good opportunities for career development and achievement.

 My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Devoting some thoughts to Attitude

Many managers say they select for attitude—a positive attitude, a team-focused attitude, a service-oriented attitude. They are right to do so, because a person’s prevailing attitudes are a part of his/her mental filter. They are created by the interplay of his/her unique pattern of highways and wastelands. His/her attitudes are talents.

He or she may be cynical or trusting. He or she may be an optimist or a malcontent. He or she may be experimental or conservative. None of these attitudes are necessarily better than any of the others. None of them will prevent a person from playing certain roles extremely well—for example the malcontent might be a powerful entrepreneur, driven by his/her dissatisfaction with the status quo. The cynic might fit right into a role in law, policing or investigative reporting, anywhere a healthy mistrust is a prerequisite.

But all of these attitudes from part of the person’s recurring patterns of thought, feeling or behavior. Managers may be able to change someone’s mood from one day to the next. However, managers will always struggle to change that person’s prevailing attitudes.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Psychology of Entrepreneurs

Some people are more likely to become successful entrepreneurs because of their mental attitudes. Intensive desire for independence, or its converse, high dissatisfaction with operating under the direction of others. Such an urge frequently derives from an authoritarian father, whom the entrepreneur struggles to dominate and surpass. An ironly they point out is that when an entrepreneur finally achieves establishment of an independent firm, the sought-for autonomy may turn out to be a miraj, because the company is still subjected to whims of customers, employees, governmental agencies, financial backers, and others who can ‘boss around’ the entrepreneurs anyway.

Other drives proposed to explain entrepreneurial behavior unclude an urge for power, the will to conquer, and the joy of creating. Most commonly accepted as dominant, however, is ‘Need for Achievement.’ Symptoms of this need are 1) desire to take personal responsibility for decisions, 2) preference for decisions involving risk that is neither very high nor very low, but rather moderate, 3) interest in concrete results from their decisions, tendency to work harder at tasks requiring mental manipulation, 5) not working harder because of financial incentive, 6) tending to think ahead, and 7) preferring to work with experts rather than personal friends.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact http://www.asifjmir.com