Money is not everything

A few days ago IFMA Polska and PropertyTalents announced the preliminary results of a survey of employees within the facility management sector in Poland. Most of those surveyed would like to change their employers with 100 pct of the respondents in certain positions stating that they are prepared to change their jobs.

Tomasz Kwiatkowski, the president of the board of IFMA Polska comments on the results for ‘Eurobuild CEE’

Looking directly at the conclusions of the report – the respondents firstly considered changing their jobs because they expect an increase in their wages. However, it would be difficult to expect in a market of ‘decreasing budgets’ a sudden rise in salaries. Still, money is not the only motivation for changing jobs. More and more people are considering changing their employers, not only due to the opportunity of improving their financial conditions, but also as a result of their willingness to develop in another, more mature organisational culture. Aspects that are still appreciated include: the stability of employment, keeping to the promises made, and clearly set out development possibilities for the employee. And when the employee does not identify themselves with the HR policy or does not accept it, that’s when they start thinking about changing their employers. Such people can be re-motivated with pay rises and bonuses, but these only make a short-term impact and the efficiency of such people will decrease.

When the economic climate was good, employees were being promoted by one or even two career brackets. However, after some time they tended to be returned to their previous positions. Companies looking for cheaper management staff offered ‘quick promotions’. The above-mentioned phenomenon often has positive effects when we are dealing with internal recruitment. Then the candidate knows the organisation and its business environment very well. However, a badly implemented process can have adverse effects. I know of some cases where people had not been included in the internal promotion process but had career development ambitions, and so very quickly they found a suitable place for themselves in a different organisation.

I encourage you to participate in our future survey of all the participants of the real estate market more actively, particularly if you are from outside the Masovian province. We want to carry out separate surveys for the public, commercial and industrial markets. It is possible that we will prepare and publish rotation indexes for individual professional groups, which will provide more answers regarding salary satisfaction levels. However, in order to do this we need respondents to be more open – and this also applies to the heads of HR departments who gather and analyse personal data regularly.