Employee dissatisfaction may be one of the greatest threat to the American workplace today. When employees are no longer happy they develop behaviors that are often harmful to the organization, therefore impeding productivity and profit. This blog aims to explore the steps that are essential for organization leaders to acquire and maintain its most valuable resources, its employees. According to Richardson (2014), workers’ engagement plays a significant role in an organization ability to set its culture and keep their employees happy.

Workers who are actively engaged with the organization and have bought into the positive culture and climate have lower levels of stress of low stress. These employees have a higher rate of satisfaction in their personal and work life. An added be benefit to the organization is that these employees take less sick and personal days.

Studies have shown that these same employees stay with the organization for an extended period compared to the rest of the workers who are less engaged. For instance, in the recent decades in the USA, employees with dissatisfaction, research by Oludayo et al. (2018), have cost the US enterprises a loss of $300 billion a year through productivity.

Francine Williams Richardson of Walden University set out with his case study to discover what strategies where critical for business leaders to focus on that would impact the performance in the workplace. Francine Williams Richardson used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as an outline for his research. After the data was collected through interviews of managers of the information was reviewed to find patterns and themes between those interviewed. From Francine

Williams Richardson case study five themes arose:

1. Workplace Environment: Richardson stated that mangers needed to focus “on the level of flexibility given to employees in the organization.”
2. Feedback Sources in Organizations: Richardson stated that mangers needed to provide employees with “measurable standards such as written evaluations and other resources provided to employees.”
3. Management Relationships: Richardson stated that mangers needed to focus on “managers’ influence on the performance of employees.”
4. Barriers in The Workplace: Richardson defined this as “examining internal and external sources that impede performance.”
5. Recruitment & Promotion Strategies: Richardson defined this as “centering on the organization’s compensation incentives.”

References

Richardson, F. W. (2014). Enhancing strategies to improve workplace performance.

Oludayo, O. A., Akanbi, C. O., Obot, B. M., Popoola, S. I., & Atayero, A. A. (2018). Influence of talent retention strategy on employees׳ attitude to work: Analysis of survey data. Data in brief, 20, 698-705.

Many times we’ve heard the usual answer to the question, ‘what does it mean to be a good  citizen?’ Answers such as, ‘it means being an involved citizen,’ or ‘it means voting at election time” are the usual responses. However, I think that with the dramatic shift in how citizens receive their frequent doses of political discourse and commentary, i.e. news at the tap of a screen complete with vitriol and biased viewpoints…wait. Hold on a minute. I probably should have written something like, ‘…how most people in the developed world get most of their information most of the time now.’ It’s in the palm of our hands all the time. How handy. How snappy. How…life changing. The smartphone is here to stay folks. And, perhaps sometime soon that incredibly snappy device will be able to microwave your leftovers too, and not just your brain.

Each day when I walk down the hallways between classes in the high school where I teach, I notice that the majority of students have their noses in their smartphones. In class, I am constantly reminding my students to put their phones away. And, what I find so fascinating about the whole thing is that nearly all of what the students seem to be using, apps such as snapchat and instagram, provide students very limited amounts of information on important subjects. So, I now ask, how as educators in the social studies can we grab the attention of these young students, the future leaders of our country, our businesses, our communities, so that they become more interested and more involved in the civics? Ptuff. That’s easy. Teach to the cell phone culture.

‘Yeah, right,’  your probably saying, Well, I will tell you that in the past I have had my students web-crawl for political commentary concerning appropriate topics that affect us all as citizens; web-crawling on their phones that is. And, you know what? They ate it up. They couldn’t stop Googling. And, they learned  something related to civics and being a concerned citizen.

So, what does it mean to be a good citizen? Next time you feel like asking that question of your students, first ask them to look it up on their phones with the stipulation that the website must be noted or cited. Then, have a discussion on whether the information provided by the website is worthy of impacting their own concepts about citizenship. Last ly, congratulate yourself. You’ve just made the topic of citizenship more pertinent to your students.