Want to keep your employees happy? Flexible schedules, bonuses and non-monetary perks are well and good, but the best strategy may be to simply sell more flowers. At least, that's a take-away message of a new longitudinal study from the University of Maryland.

The study draws a connection between employee satisfaction and the overall performance of a business or organization using research gathered from 35 companies during an eight-year period.

"Studies like these provide preliminary evidence that aggregated employee attitudes are related to organizational performance," according to the study's researchers, who found that, contrary to past studies that often painted positive company performance as a result of satisfied employees, the relationship between organizational performance and employee satisfaction is often a reciprocal one -- with businesses benefiting from happy employees and employees benefiting from thriving businesses.
 
"In general, people in both the business community and the academic world appear to believe that there is a positive relationship between morale and organizational performance," the researchers explain.

The researchers' full explanation of their study recently appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

--Mary Westbrook
mwestbrook@safnow.org

 

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