Study: What is the Best Work Environment?

The workplace of today is very different from the workplace of yesterday. With outsourcing, offshoring and compartmentalizing becoming every day words, the nature of the work environment has radically changed and not only in America, but worldwide as well. Stephen E. Humphrey, an assistant professor of management at Florida State University, set out to see just how these differences are affecting the people who actually have to work with them day after day.

The study shows that various efforts that have been designed to increase efficiency by simplifying workers' job responsibilities may not be having the effect that they are intended to and may lead to lower employee job satisfaction and the result of low job satisfaction is low productivity.

Companies are always trying to make things more efficient wherever they can in order to improve the bottom line and make the stockholders happy. One of the most popular ways to accomplish this is to change the nature of jobs to make them more focused on a single task. It has shown to improve productivity in the short term, but in the long term it is showing evidence of doing just the opposite.

For the study, the team used the results of more than 40 years of earlier research. In all there were 259 studies involving close to 220,000 workers. They analyzed the effects of the change of work design on the attitudes and productivity levels of the employees and this is what they found.

When their work tasks were simplified, there was lower worker satisfaction and lower performance ratings.

However, when there was more freedom allowed, there was better performance, a higher level of satisfaction and less exhaustion.

Having a work place that was socially supportive also led to greater job satisfaction, less exhaustion and the employee was less likely to want to leave.

When a worker was allowed to work with others independently, they had the same results so of better performance, lower stress, lower employee turnover and greater satisfaction.