Tool Box
Issue No. 33 - February/March 2007
How job satisfaction impacts bottom line
Victor Harbor scaffolding business operator Tony Carter should have been happy, his enterprise Austral Hire had doubled its turnover to $1 million since the turn of the century, but expansion stress was taking a toll.
And during FY2004-05 it started going backwards, recording an 8% drop in sales over the previous year, several months falling 25% short.
A technician who is happiest on the jobsite, Tony knew he had an acute human resource problem but not how to solve it.
He called in Profiles International SA regional representative Les Leane.
An expert in HR metrics, Les uses a system developed in the USA to define job roles and tell what kind of worker is best suited.
Very often, he says, workers find themselves square pegs in round holes because their job description only deals with education and experience, not the actual demands the job makes of a person’s character.
When someone hates their work, they’re often underproductive but reluctant to come forward and say so, leaving management wondering what’s going wrong.
At Austral, misfit roles were causing serious inefficiencies and work overloads.
“Lack of role definition and responsibility made day-to-day work difficult,” Les says.
“Business management had been reactive, and lacked proactive focus and development. The business owner needed to regain control over the business and its people. The brief (for the reform effort) was to ‘get a lot better at what we do, or sell up’.”
Les found that employees’ strengths and preferences were neither known nor properly applied. Employee loyalty was still strong, but communication was poor and workers’ job satisfaction was low.
Simply caring enough to do the surveying was the start of recovery, Les says. Bad job matching can happen from the shop floor to CEO level, and the “at last, someone understands me” relief reaction is common.
In October 2005 Le...
