Are hourly workers satisfied with their jobs? You’d be surprised!

How satisfied are you with your job? Would you rate your satisfaction high? Low? Somewhere in between? Now how would you answer that question if you were to answer for hourly workers?

If one submits to the stereotypes of hourly workers — that they’re young, perhaps hail from lower income households and maybe aren’t as well educated as their salaried counterparts — you may assume they don’t like their jobs. But, as we’ve been illustrating in sharing our research from the Profile of the Hourly Worker, those assumptions about the hourly workforce are wrong.

And so is any assumption they don’t like their jobs.

We asked our panel of almost 1,100 hourly workers across the country to rate on a scale from zero to 10 how satisfied they were with their jobs — zero being not at all and 10 being extremely satisfied — and guess what? Only 12 percent answered zero to four, or what we deemed “Low Satisfaction.” That means an overwhelming majority of people are at least modestly satisfied with their hourly wage job.

How satisfied are hourly employees with their current job

And 52 percent of those asked scored their satisfaction at 8, 9 or 10. More than half of U.S. hourly workers report a high level of job satisfaction.

What does this mean? For starters, it reinforces our assertion that business owners, executives, internal communications professionals and human resource managers may not know our own workers quite as well as we think we do. But it also begins to shed light on the characteristics of that worker segment we can capitalize on to spark morale, enthusiasm and even productivity and efficiency.

These job satisfaction numbers go along with our previously reported data about hourly worker loyalty, their desire for engagement and yearning for connectivity to their employer. The fact they want more involvement, a bigger role and yet they aren’t dissatisfied with their current jobs means they are far more the type of invested, trustworthy and valuable employee we all hope to hire than one might expect.

With this in mind, isn’t in imperative for the good of the company that we as managers embrace their desire? Feed their enthusiasm? And cultivate their investment in their jobs to make our products better, more efficiently made and our output for valuable?

We think so.  

To learn more about communicating with your hourly workforce in a safe, secure, private and compliant mobile app, request a demo of Red e App today!

Editor’s Note: Profile of the Hourly Worker’s first report, Demographics Devices and Disconnection was released in November 2015. It is an independent survey conducted by Edison Research on behalf of Red e App to discover insights and details about the United States hourly workforce. To request a copy of the report, just drop us your name and email address on the report page.

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