Shift Work and Compensation Strategies - Are You Giving Employees What They Really Want?

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The Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a leading international manufacturing company recently called me with a problem: He was under considerable stress because he was facing a union drive at one of his plants in Ohio. It was clear to him that
employee dissatisfaction was high and that the union had made significant inroads. He wanted to know how much he had to increase pay and other benefits to make sure the union vote didn’t pass. My colleagues at Core Practice Partners and I spent the following weeks researching the company’s labor practices and employee attitudes. The COO was right about one thing: The workers were unhappy, with 72 percent saying that conditions were getting worse on the job. But he was surprised to learn that 77 percent of the employees felt the current pay and benefits were perfectly fine.
Increased compensation would not solve the problem. If salaries weren’t right, attrition would be a key indicator, but employees weren’t leaving or threatening to.
So what did the workers want?

Over the past 10 years, we’ve conducted an in depth study into the attitudes of more than 100,000 shift workers at more than 150 companies around the world. Through face-to-face surveys taken during work hours, we sought primarily to gather information about what employees like and dislike about their work environment, the changes they hope to see, the health and safety issues they face, and how their work schedules
affect their personal lives. Of all the thousands of pieces of data we collected, one stood out: Eighty-one percent of employees surveyed felt that their pay and benefits
were adequate. In fact, when we determined what really affects productivity, compensation paled in comparison to good management–employee communications. In
other words, although most companies try to inflate employees’ morale by shoveling more dollars at them, less expensive strategies will do. Thus, when we looked into the problems at our client’s company, we were not surprised by our findings.
Forty-seven percent of the employees surveyed were working more than 11 hours of overtime each week. At some companies, that can be an attractive aspect of the
job, because it brings in extra income. But in this case, 56 percent said they were working more overtime than they wanted. And they were particularly negative about
the extra time at the plant because, according to 62 percent of the workers, their schedules weren’t sufficiently predictable to permit them to know when they would
need to work and when they would not. In an employee base populated primarily by single parents, workers were struggling both to maintain adequate child care
and to find time to spend with their kids.

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