HR PROFESSIONALS MISS A TRICK TO INCREASE STAFF RETENTION

As UK workers face rising living costs and ever-longer working hours, they are sending a surprising message to their managers and HR departments: the size of payslips does not guarantee happiness and fulfilment at work.

According to the fifth annual City & Guilds Happiness Index, financial rewards are not the answer to recruitment or retention. Instead, having an interest in what you do for a living is the number one factor for ensuring on-the-job contentment. Happiness levels remain constant regardless of salary.

A keen interest in the job not only secures workplace happiness but is the main reason workers in the UK choose to stay with their employer:

• 57% have remained with their present employer as a result of a strong interest in what they do for a living
• 56% stay because of good relationships with colleagues
• 48% of the UK’s workforce appreciates their work/life balance
• In contrast, only 44% remain in a job as a direct result of salary.

Rather than modernising and expanding their reward packages in line with employee expectations, the City & Guilds Happiness Index shows that employers’ offerings are out of touch. While it is encouraging that over half of managers invest in training and career development, only one in five are adopting flexible working practices, despite work-life balance being a demonstrated, major driver of happiness at work. In addition 43% of businesses offer bonuses, tellingly, only one in 10 managers allow their employees to work from home.

Bob Coates, managing director of City & Guilds, said: “With a clear impact on the bottom line, improving workplace happiness is rising up the business agenda and employers cannot afford to ignore it.  Companies can no longer rely on those established reward and recognition policies that fail to resonate with employees and do little to combat stress levels in the workplace. By taking such a blinkered approach, they risk the rise of an unmotivated and unproductive workforce, and even potentially losing their staff to competitors.”

Professor Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University, worked with City & Guilds to analyse the findings of the Happiness Index, providing employers with advice on how to improve happiness levels among their staff. Commenting on the findings, he said: “The City & Guilds Happiness Index provides a call to action for the business community to rethink its reward and recognition strategies and consider employees’ needs on an individual basis. It marks the end of an era for organisation wide HR policies. From now on a flexible approach is needed if businesses are to create a happy, and by association productive, workforce.”