Job satisfaction. Employment trends

TEXT № 1                                       Job satisfaction

"Happiness is having one's passion for one's profession,” wrote the French novelist (and management thinker) Stendhal. The number of people in this fortunate position is limited, but there are all sorts of aspects of office and factory work that can make it enjoyable. Relations with colleagues can be satisfying and congenial. People may find great pleasure in working in a team, for example. Conversely, bad relations with colleagues can be extremely unpleasant, and lead to great dissatisfaction and distress.

Basic work on what motivates people in organisations was done by Frederick Herzberg in the 1960s. He found that things such as salary and working conditions were not the only things to make employees satisfied with their work, but that they can cause dissatisfaction if they are not good enough. He called these things hygiene factors. They aret:

•  Supervision

•  Company policy

•  Working conditions

•  Salary

•  Peer relationships

•  Security

Some things can give positive satisfaction. These are the motivator factors:

•  Achievement

•  Recognition

•  The work itself

•  Responsibility

•  Advancement

•  Growth

Another classic writer in this area is Douglas McGregor, who talked about Theory X, the idea, still held by many managers, that people instinctively dislike work, and Theory Y, the more enlightened view that everybody has the potential for development and for taking responsibility.

More recently has come the notion of empowerment, the idea that decision-making should be decentralised to employees who are as close as possible to the issues to be resolved.

But where some employees may like being given responsibility, for others it is a source of stress. People talk more about the need for work that gives them quality of life, the work-life balance and the avoidance of stress. Others argue that challenge involves a reasonable and inevitable degree of stress if people are to have the feeling of achievement, a necessary outcome of work if it is to give satisfaction. They complain that a stress industry is emerging, with its stress counsellors and stress therapists, when levels of stress are in reality no higher today than they were before.

TEXT № 2                                        Employment trends

The way we work is undergoing constant change as the world moves from the industrial age to the information age. In many industrialised countries, this transition has generally led to a loosening of relationships between employers and employees and far greater flexibility in terms of employment contracts and working hours, with more people working on fixed-term contracts and greater levels of self-employment.

Information and communication technologies, such as the Internet and broadband connections, are having a major impact on the way we work and will continue to do so in the future. Many jobs and careers will become 'extinct', and new ones will replace them. Other jobs will be transformed by technology out of all recognition in today's world. Experts predict that most of today's children will be doing jobs in the future that do not even exist yet.

The trend of moving manufacturing operations to countries with low labour costs has existed for many decades. This drive towards increased productivity and lower production costs, combined with technological advances, has more recently allowed companies to outsource and offshore other parts of their operations to these countries and regions. Companies are now able to distribute their work around the globe and operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

According to the FT's Future of Work Report, Asia is the top destination, with 37 per cent of outsourcing projects. But western Europe also benefited, with 29 per cent - the favoured locations being the UK, Ireland, Spain and Portugal - and eastern Europe with 22 per cent. India has become one of the major suppliers of call centres for the Britain and the United States because of the huge number of English-speaking graduates. However, it is not only the low-skilled jobs that are being transferred to Asia, increasingly, multinationals are recruiting highly skilled engineering and programming staff in Asian countries and transferring their research and development operations to these countries as well.

Free marketeers argue that European countries, like France and Germany, suffer from excessive labour market regulation, such as minimum wage legislation and EU directives controlling working hours. In many eastern European countries, large-scale unemployment and the informal economy are still major oroblems, and ones that the expanded EU will have to find ways to deal with. Many predict there will be greater mobility of the workforce as people move from east to west to find work. Western Europe, Japan and the United Sates are all ageing societies. As the active workforce continues to fall in proportion to the total population, many have expressed concerns about the impact that this will have on these societies.

India and China are now playing an increasing role in the world economy. According to Kim Clark, dean of Harvard Business School, 'We simply have not comprehended yet the full impact of 2.5 billion people coming into the world economy who were not part of it before.' There is no doubt of the benefits and opportunities for those developing economies that have invested in technology in terms of increased employment opportunities and economic development. Secondly, higher incomes in these developing economies not only benefit the domestic economy, but also the global economy, as these are huge potential markets for goods and services.