First let’s define what an attitude is; it references our beliefs, opinions and feelings towards certain aspects of our environment. In the workplace, we generally have two job attitudes that have the biggest insight on how we behave. These are job satisfaction and organizational commitment. As the name implies, job satisfaction constitutes the feelings people have towards their job. According to research this aspect is the most important to measure when you want to know what your employees feel about their job. Apparently all it takes for your workers to be satisfied at work is for it not to feel like a nightmare.
The other aspect, organizational commitment, occurs when there is some kind of emotional attachment towards the company they work for. Jack Rochel, the CEO and president of Epsilon Electronics Inc., tries to get his employees to be more attached and loyal. This reduces employee turnover, raises company moral and gets employees to work better together. The methods used are making sure each employee feels like a valued member of the organization and their work contributes a lot to the success of the company. Another strategy is to get employees to spend some time together in order to work better in teams. This even breaks down the silos within the company for better communication throughout departments.
A question Jack Rochel asks himself is what triggers positive work attitudes. The answer to this question is quite complicated since there are a lot of aspects that affect positive work attitudes. These can include how colleagues and management treat them and the relationship they have. Personality of employees has an effect on job satisfaction. For example, some people are generally more positive and happier than others, which will lead to them being more satisfied and committed to the organization.
Work-life balance affects positive work attitudes since more and more families are valuing time together. Jack Rochel gives his employees the chance to choose their own hours during the week since each employee is at different stages of life. For example, an employee who has children might want to come into work at 9:30 but another employee might want to start at 8 to finish earlier. But there are some days that the whole staff needs to come in at a specific time for a meeting.
It is not surprising that stress is another major component affecting an employee’s attitude at work. It is directly related to their satisfaction and commitment at work. But there is bad stress and good stress. Bad stress is things like role ambiguity, role conflict and organizational politics. Good stress is when there is time pressure and it is making you more motivated to finish your work on time.