In March 2022, IDC asked 885 European employees that had confessed to be looking for alternative employment about their motivation for doing so. The top reason was, unsurprisingly, better pay. What was more interesting was that “better working environment (i.e., a better employee experience)” was almost as high among the reasons for job change. It showed that today, work is less about paying the bills and advancing a career. It is much about personal development and fulfillment, as well as being a social and collaborative experience.
One year later, in March 2023, similar questions to 790 employees that were looking for a new job. The proportion of employees citing “better work environment / better corporate culture” was 48%, up from 42% the year before, and just 1% point behind “better pay”. So, not only are the ‘soft’ values important to employees, but they are becoming more and more important. Inflation could also play a role in this detachment from the “hard work” paradigm (i.e. hard as working hard to reach higher levels in the company / higher level of salary). The price increases undermined salaries and dream of the salary-based buying power that we saw previously.
Is it become the strenuous, ‘blue collar’ jobs are disappearing while ‘white collar’, knowledge worker jobs are taking over? The data does not support this hypothesis. All workers, regardless of whether they are desk workers or store/factory/field workers have “better pay” as the #1 motivation to look for a new job. Also, all workers have “better work environment / better corporate culture” as a key motivation for looking for a new job. Knowledge or desk workers are relatively interested in a better corporate culture, while store/factory/field workers are relatively interested in better teams / change of colleagues. Instead, it looks like all work types are becoming more knowledge intensive and bigger part of the individual identify, which prompts all employees to place higher value on work environment, culture, leadership, etc., as opposed to pay.
Dissecting “Employee Experience” to Understand Employee Work Motivation
In the March 2022 European employee survey, we also set out to understand which aspects of “employee experience” were more important to employees. We defined seven fundamental aspects of employee experience and asked the employees to rate these in terms of importance. We discovered that relatively ‘soft’ aspects of work, namely corporate culture and leadership & employer brand, were the most important factors of the seven, and more important for employees than we previously assumed.