The benchmarks of job satisfaction

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Family friendly practices, getting family leaves and being paid according to performance are the benchmark of an employee"s job satisfaction, says a leading researcher.

According to John Heywood, a professor and internationally known labor economist at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (UWM), at “high performance workplaces" the employer establishes teams of workers and requires a large commitment from them, but is willing to invest in them in return.

Heywood found that high performance firms were no more likely than traditional companies to engage in explicit family friendly practices, but when they did, the practices were much more likely to fulfill the expectations of workers.

In case of performance pay, Heywood and his colleagues studied a group of employees over many years as they moved from traditional time-based pay methods to ones based on measured performance.

The evidence showed that workers had greater job satisfaction when they were paid by performance than when they were not -- and that it improved workers' feelings about job security, something the researchers didn't expect.

When it comes to paid family leave, Heywood's work showed that in countries where many companies offered paid family leave, such as the United Kingdom, wages have adjusted downward to compensate.

But not all family-friendly practices showed that tendency, he says. If a workplace provided child care or kindergarten on site, there was no negative impact on earnings, and workers tended to reduce absenteeism and show up for work on time more often.