Money Doesn’t Buy Employee Engagement – Friday Distraction
(Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by our friends at Kronos, the global leader in delivering workforce management solutions in the cloud. They’ve recently partnered with Google to develop a suite of innovative workforce management solutions for small and midsize businesses. Enjoy the post!)
We’ve heard the old phrase “Money doesn’t buy happiness.” In fact, we were reminded of it quite a bit recently when the Powerball jackpot hit 1.5 billion. Yes, we need a certain amount of money to live. And we need it to save for the future. But a pile of money won’t automatically give us joy.
Today’s Time Well Spent from our friends at Kronos reminds us that money also doesn’t buy employee engagement. To me, this cartoon wasn’t about employee final paychecks. I’ve written about final paychecks before. You can see one of those posts here. This post wasn’t about the money. It was about disengagement and being free from the company.
Organizations need to make sure an employee’s final paycheck is correct. But they also need to make sure that they understand the reason an employee is leaving the organization. Communicating regularly with employees about their work and future, conducting stay interviews, and encouraging employees to give honest feedback during exit interviews can help organizations understand what makes employees stay and what makes them leave.
Once an organization understands those things that employees value, they can make sure those things are preserved in the culture. It can be a huge waste of resources to think employees are leaving because of their pay, when it’s really because of their manager. The company might not allocate resources toward manager training and development because they misread the situation – effectively making the real problem even worse.
Of course, money is important. But the answer to every question is not money. Organizations need to do proper research to understand when money will not a solve a problem and what to do instead.
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