Contrary to the general consensus of class 19, CEO Jim Clifton disagrees that customer satisfaction is not important for a business to succeed. This blog post is a response to Jim Clifton’s blog itself.

His argument is based on his belief that employees aren’t fundamentally motivated by fringe benefits because he believes that employees don’t want to be satisfied as much as they want to be engaged. He claims that an engaged employee “engaged employees who took less than one week off from work in a year had 25% higher overall well-being than actively disengaged associates”. 

What means being engaged? I interpreted engagement as proactively working and having the initiative to do work because the employee is passionate about the industry and it fits well with his/her personality. I think Jim believes that being enthusiastic about the job itself is more important than artificially satisfying employees to like the job.

I personally think whilst Jim’s view isn’t entirely true, it is also not wrong. I think this is dependent on the organizational culture of the company, from the pulsepress portion in class. i defined organizational culture as the natural formation of employee behavior, culture and attitudes that shouldn’t be forcefully implemented. This is because the company is formed by the employees, although the CEO is responsible for guiding the company, he shouldn’t be forcing a way the company operates because that will cause companies to stick to one way and less able to change.

This is how some companies function because different industries may have different attitude. In the case of Zappos, a predominantly service oriented market, the social aspects of the company is more important than a production oriented company because of the intensive stress that consumers can give to call center employees. Therefore, providing a lot of motivation schemes is greatly beneficial to the mental health of employees.

To conclude, i think employee satisfaction is an important aspect of the firm but more importantly, being in the correct environment in an industry that you’re passionate about is paramount.

Articles (very very interesting reads):

http://thechairmansblog.gallup.com/2014/10/why-being-engaged-at-work-isnt-as.html

http://thechairmansblog.gallup.com/2014/06/employee-satisfaction-doesnt-matter.html