12 Questions on Job Satisfaction
In a recent conversation, I was reminded of a set of questions that Marcus Buckingham developed to measure job satisfaction. This list is several years old, but it still provides great insights. I challenge you to consider going through these questions with your team. (My team will.)
- Do I know what is expected of me at work?
- Do I have the materials and equipment that I need in order to do my work right?
- At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
- In the past seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
- Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
- Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
- At work, do my opinions seem to count?
- Does the mission or purpose of my company make me feel that my job is important?
- Are my coworkers committed to doing quality work?
- Do I have a best friend at work?
- In the past six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
- This past year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
Which one of those 12 questions challenges you the most? You can check out the rest of the magazine article originally published in Fast Company.
By the way, Buckingham also has a new resource available called The Truth about You (Thomas Nelson, 2008). It’s a toolkit including a DVD, interactive book and a “rememo” pad to help you enjoy higher satisfaction with life and work. Among other things Buckingham confirms, “You’ll never turn your weaknesses into strengths.” Hope that sets you free.
Great thoughts, Tony. I appreciate the stuff you share! Good to see you (at least from a distance at Catalyst).
I worked for a Fortune 500 for a long time, and this was the list of questions we used to gauge employee engagement. I’ll tell you something odd about the way we interpreted the results – if it wasn’t strongly agree, it wasn’t considered a positive – in other words, out of strongly disagree – disagree – neutral – agree – strongly agree, on the last choice was a positive; neutral and agree were both “non-positives” and impacted our action items. I know I’m not explaining that very well, but I think the gist was, if you feel like your opinions count most of the time, we, as leadership, had to work on it still. I thought that was very odd, since the “best friend at work” question requires a binary answer to me.
Anyway, they are great questions, and I still use them to this day.
As both an employee of the church, and as a department leader… #4 strikes a big chord for me.
Those questions similar to or the same as Gallup’s Q12 survey. My employer uses those questions every year. And if leadership takes the responses seriously employee satisfaction will really improve. And if your employees are happy, your customer’s satisfaction will really improve. My employer just received Gallup’s Great Workplace Awards for 2008. One of 20 companies in the world to receive this award. And Gallup has came out with a Q12 survey for churches. I have no idea what the survey looks like, but I plane on checking it out.
We do these 12 questions at the end of each year with our LifeChurch.tv teams. We then discuss the anonymous responses in front of each other… one thing for sure is it can be helpful to confront any elephants in the room.
We took these questions to our Pastors and Directors then all talked about the answers and it definitely helped us identify some sacred cows
Wow, this a great list, but very challenging, both for employees and the supervisors who try to address these issues.
If you are a pastor and are interested in Buckingham’s work, you should definitely check out a book called Your Child’s Strengths by Jenifer Fox, published last year by Viking. A lifelong educator, she writes about why we must and how we can bring strengths discovery to our work with young people. It’s a great book for fostering partnership with parents and teachers in kids’ lives. Buckingham wrote the forward.