If you’ve managed people long enough, you’ve probably experienced an unexpected resignation from a valued and trusted employee. Given some exciting personal development or once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we often wish them well and graciously accept their journey into newer and greener pastures. But sometimes we’re completely blind-sided by the loss of a colleague making a seemingly lateral move elsewhere. At these times, we often comb over what we perceived as their level of contentment, looking for missed clues about their satisfaction with the job. However, recent studies suggest that the confusion betweenemployee satisfaction and employee engagement greatly threatens workforce retention.
Search the web, and you’ll be quickly overwhelmed by the literature, and by definitions and measures of both satisfaction and engagement. In the interest of brevity – the former assesses “happiness.” For employees, this typically means that they are surveyed on a wide variety of inwardly focused topics including relationships…