Employee Satisfaction

I found this blog on Saravana Bhavan's employees....and their willingness to serve. Read the blog and the comments. Its pretty interesting. Even at closing time on the late night shift, the waiter "is willing to work for an extra 2 hours". Now that well and truly is an indication of employee satisfaction. The blog/issue finally veers to the IT industry, where employee dis-satisfaction seems to be the order of the day. Its no secret that if you find a satisfied IT employee, you probably need to classify him/her(homo abnormalus ??) and preserve the person for posterity. And I should know this very well.......I as one of the dissatisfied breed until about 18 months back. And some how this dissatisfaction seems to be the part and parcel of almost all "knowledge workers".

But now comes my question - What would it take to satisfy a knowledge worker. Going by the Saravana Bhavan blog, as an IT programmer - we see an equal amount of facilities being provided to us. So why in the world are we not satisfied. Lets not grumble about the "repeatability" of work. all work does become routine after a certain point in time. So that begs the question - we are paid pretty good salaries, we have good facilities.....employees are taken care of. Inspite of this why don't us IT workers have job satisfaction. This is something I always did not understand. Saravana Bhavan workers don't get to go to US or Europe.......earn in USD or Euros....then why is that they are so satisfied when they are provided work conditions which are almost the norm for all IT employees.

Maybe an answer is relativity. The average hotel waiter is treated like a second-class citizen by both customers and employers alike. The bus-boys are treated even worse. So I guess when they see an establishment like Saravana's providing such incentives they are more than willing to stick around. This of course is a very self-denial answer. Denial in the sense that I dont have the heart to call my own breed a bunch of fat, lazy buggers, who probably should be horse-whipped into working.

But seriously, what is the "incentive" that could be provided to an ever growing breed of IT workers to make them work "an extra 2 hours". Extra money might not be the answer.

P.S - I found the link to the Saravana's article on S Anand's blog.

Love is Blind

The caption says it all..... :-)