Large organisations are failing in their attempts to improve employee satisfaction levels, new research suggests.

A survey, by Global Integration, found that of 730 people working in large organisations, 40% said their organisations have become less satisfying places to work during the last five years.

According to the research, while staff members are frequently given company questionnaires and polls, these attempts to gauge and ultimately improve job satisfaction appear to be counterproductive.

“Measuring levels of satisfaction is a good start, but the most important part of the process is the action you take to improve the problems you find. Unfortunately many companies take actions that are based on outdated ideas about management and these make job satisfaction worse,” said Kevan Hall CEO of Global Integration.

He added that responses may also be shaped by what respondents think the “right answer” should be. “Nearly every survey, for example, finds that communication could be improved,” Hall said. “Managers and internal communications specialists then work hard to provide more information. But the reality is that many teams suffer from too much communication, so measures to increase communication are likely to make job satisfaction even worse.”

He believes that managers should make sure that communication is relevant to staff.

While satisfaction improvement programmes can create more teamwork and more meetings the research found that people spend a significant amount of wasted time in unnecessary meetings. More meetings just lead to further dissatisfaction.

“What people really miss is one-to-one time with their managers regular, brief chats and not weekly conference calls where all staff members share irrelevant updates on what they did last week. The conference call is often one of the biggest wastes of time for people and, like all unnecessary work; it is a major source of dissatisfaction,” said Hall.