.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} What do employees really want? Results of a new statewide survey indicate that Iowa executives may want to rethink what they believe about their employees’ attitudes toward their jobs and their companies.

Executives greatly underestimate the importance their subordinates place on work-life balance, according to the survey, which polled randomly selected workers and executives from 56 organizations in Iowa. The survey also found that executives overestimated their employees’ opinions about nearly every positive attribute of their companies.

“We have never really been in the mind of the employee and understanding what’s important to the employee, whether it’s benefits or anything else,” said David Lind, president of David P. Lind & Associates LLC, which conducted the survey.

So late last year, “we decided to randomly approach employers and ask them if we could have access to their employees and randomly ask them about their workplace values – what’s important to them; do they intend to resign?” Lind said. “But we didn’t just leave it at the employee level. We then asked the same organization if we could have access to their executives to ask them the same questions, but to have them tell us what they think is important to the employees. That’s when we get into some very interesting things.”

Regarding work-life balance, “the executives really have missed the mark,” Lind said. “The ability to have a life outside of the office is more important to employees than executives realize. Generation X employees rated flexible time as the most important reason to stay at a job, while pay was the most important reason for other generations.”

The 537 employees who responded to the Internet-based survey ranked work-life balance as the third most important value, while the 159 executives from the same companies ranked it eighth out of 11 values. Both employers and executives ranked respect and achievement as their No. 1 and No. 2 values. For each of the 11 values, however, the executives’ rankings on a zero to 100 scale underestimated their importance relative to their employees’ rankings.

Executives in small companies, those with fewer than 50 employees, were less likely than their counterparts in organizations with 150 or more employees to correctly identify the workplace values that were most important to their staffs.

Additionally, employees who earned more than $50,000 per year and those who had been with their companies for more than five years tended to be the least positive about their organizations’ strengths. They also had the harshest opinions of their companies’ ability to communicate effectively with employees.

August Home Publishing was among the companies that participated. Michal Sigel, the company’s professional development director, said the survey’s local focus was valuable. “In human resources we see a lot of national surveys about what employees want,” she said. “To have something that drives down to what employees in Iowa want, that’s very helpful.”

Given national data she’s seen, the disconnect between employees’ and executives’ attitudes wasn’t surprising, Sigel said. However, “I was a little surprised about how strongly employees responded that work-life balance was so important. But I wasn’t surprised that employers didn’t get that.

“And the other thing that I got out of it that if employees have strong pride in their organizations, then everything else is good. So pride in the organization seems to be an indicator of how they’re going to feel about everything else.”

According to the survey, employers tend to believe their workers are more satisfied with their jobs than they actually are. A total of 91 percent of employees said they were satisfied with their current positions, but employers thought that 96 percent would say they were satisfied.

However, 16 percent of employees said they intend to quit their current job within the next 12 months. Employees at both extremes of the pay spectrum were the most likely to leave. Twenty-five percent of non-executive employees earning more than $100,000 per year said they intend to quit in the next year.

The survey also found that executives underestimated the importance of five out of six job retention elements. The biggest gap was in flexible time, which employees ranked second in importance, with pay being the most important factor in staying in their jobs. Executives ranked flexible time as fifth most important out of six retention factors, which also included benefits, cooperative work environment, supervisor relationship and opportunity for promotion.

“Employers should also take notice that employees value benefits more than executives realize,” Lind said. Though dental insurance, long-term disability, life insurance and flex spending accounts shared the lowest of nine benefit categories ranked, both small and large employers ranked the importance of those four (on the zero-100 scale) much lower than employees, he noted.

“That may be a reason, in addition to cost, why small employers don’t offer these benefits as often as large employers do,” he said.

Visit www.dplaconsulting.com to see highlights of the survey.