When it comes to negotiating a new job or a senior role at your current company, it’s all about the money. Right?
Wrong.
A new analysis by Glassdoor finds that as pay rises, employees care less about compensation and benefits packages and more about the company’s culture and values, the quality of senior leadership and career opportunities.
Looking at a sample of more than 615,000 Glassdoor users who contributed both a salary report and a company review since 2014, Glassdoor’s economic research team separated them into four income groups to evaluate which of the following six workplace factors were the most “important” predictors of overall employee satisfaction:
- Career Opportunities
- Compensation & Benefits
- Culture & Values
- Senior Leadership
- Work-life Balance
- Business Outlook
The result?
As pay rises, compensation and benefits become less important when it comes to driving employee satisfaction. Instead, regardless of income level, the three factors that are the most important for job satisfaction: culture and values, senior leadership, and career opportunities.
However, three things become less important as pay rises: compensation and benefits, work-life balance, and business outlook for the company over the next six months. Our research shows, for workers earning less than $40,000 per year, work-life balance contributes 13.2 percent to overall satisfaction, declining to 9.5 percent for workers earning more than $120,000 per year. This suggests that the higher one’s income is, the more they are willing to spend time at work, sacrificing leisure time.
So what does this mean for Jasper and Jasmine Jobseeker? This research suggests that sure, pay is important but it does not buy professional happiness. Job seekers want to find a company that shares your cultural values, that offers a meaningful career arc, and that has senior leaders you support and believe in.
Listen up, employers! Culture and values matter most.
For more insight into the data behind this study, check out Glassdoor’s Economic Research page and “Does More Money Change What We Value at Work?”
Originally published at www.glassdoor.com on January 17, 2017.
Originally published at medium.com