Personal Story

Employee satisfaction has so many different factors that improving it is a serious process. You need to discover what is leading to low satisfaction scores individually and address each one, because it’s often difficult to figure out which factor is leading to lower levels of satisfaction. One of the easiest things to address, however, is company organization, and there is simply no denying that organizing the company’s hierarchy is an important part of satisfaction.

Back when I was working for an IT company they hired me for a position in their research department – a position that they had not yet thought through. They invented the position to hire me, and as a result they weren’t completely sure what they should do with my skills. While I was supposed to be in their research department, my supervisor was the VP of Sales.

When employees in the research department needed to get work to me, they would have to go through him, which few wanted to do. At the same time, he needed help, so I was consistently working on sales projects while waiting for the research work to come in.

In addition, the person evaluating my work in the research department was not the VP of sales. It was the research department head, whom I rarely had any contact with. For an entire year I was being praised daily by my good work by the VP of sales, who thought I was doing a great job.

But by the time I went to my yearly review, the head of the research department told me I was not doing my job well, because I had not worked on any research projects recently.

It should be clear that this was probably not the ideal organizational chart. Because I was not given a research department supervisor, I was not asked to complete any projects in research, but my yearly review – and the person in charge of growth and raises in the company – was in the research department, judging me based on her limited experience. It was hard to figure out how to connect with the right people at the company because the people I was assigned to were not ideal for my job, and were in very different areas for analyzing my production.

My satisfaction was affected by the lack of flow and logic, as well as the multiple supervisors and awkward method of delivering work. Simply choosing a logical organizational chart that makes it easy to get work and evaluate performance would have done wonders for my satisfaction, and likely the satisfaction of many others within the company.