Chapter 3: Job satisfaction, communication and productivity

Abbreviations

A list of the abbreviations used in this report is available in the Glossary

The main body of this year’s State of the Service report is structured around ‘employee engagement’— a concept associated with improved productivity and retention of employees.¹ By focusing on the areas which are understood to most strongly influence employee engagement—identity and pride, job satisfaction and communication—our objective is to better understand the critical ‘make or break’ points for employee engagement, and what APS agencies can do to maximise the engagement of their workforce. It also allows us to assess the performance of the APS in each of these areas.

Given the relationship identified in the literature between employee engagement and productivity, the chapter also looks specifically at the key factors that employees believe are important to their productivity.

In this chapter

Chapter 3: Job satisfaction, communication and productivity	PDF	Word	Excel
Job satisfaction, communication and productivity
Employee engagement
Figure 3.1 Employee satisfaction with factors identified through factor analysis, 2005–06
Table 3.1: Job satisfaction—employees’ most important workplace factors, 2004–05 and 2005–06
Table 3.2: Job satisfaction—summary index results by group, 2004–05 and 2005–06
Table 3.3: Job satisfaction—most important workplace factors, by sex, 2004–05 and 2005–06
Table 3.4: Job satisfaction—most important workplace factors, by diversity groups, 2004–-05 and 2005–06
Table 3.5: Job satisfaction—most important workplace factors, by age, 2004–05 and 2005–06
Table 3.6: Job satisfaction—most important workplace factors, by classification, 2004–05 and 2005–06
Communication
Table 3.7 Level of agreement by employees that input is adequately sought and considered about decisions that directly affect them, 2005–06
Productivity
Table 3.8 Factors improving employees’ productivity, 2005–06
Key chapter findings

The rationale for the structure of this year’s report, including employee engagement, is contained in Chapter 1.