How to Keep Employees Happy in the IT Industry
Insights of Exploratory Data Analysis from 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
Introduction
Employee satisfaction or job satisfaction is one of the main points that influence companies’ overall success in today’s world. Keeping workers happy helps strengthen a company in many ways, including lower turnover, higher productivity, increased profits, and loyalty. Identifying significant factors that influence employee satisfaction will help to build a stronger, more stable, and profitable future in an organization.
Motivation: Factors that influence employee satisfaction addressed in this analysis might include education level, background compensation, etc. The main objective of this analysis is that giving meaningful insights to IT industry to keep their employees happy.
The following questions are analyzed to achieve the main objective mentioned above.
- What is the overall job satisfaction in the IT industry?
- What are gender and age differences in job satisfaction?
- How does education relate to job satisfaction?
- How does income level affect job satisfaction?
Most of the employees in the IT field are satisfied, and happy with their job and work environment
A total of 24207 of the employees were slightly satisfied, and another 22452 were very satisfied. Added together, these two groups formed 46659 of the samples. Slightly dissatisfied and very dissatisfied employees were only 10752 and 4857 respectively. It can conclude that most of the employees are satisfied with their job among all respondents.
Overall, 74.93 percent of employees are satisfied, whereas 25.07 percent are dissatisfied
Gender of Employees by Job Satisfaction
Concerning gender, about 88.88 percent were males whereas 6.99. percent were females. The level of job satisfaction by gender did not show much difference with more than 74 percent of both males and females were satisfied with their job.
Age Group of Employees by Job Satisfaction
The largest age group of the employees amounting to 52.91 percent was in the age group of between 25 and 34 years. The smallest age group was 55 years or above, with about 1.90 percent of the total. The finding reflects that the employees in the IT industry were relatively young. The young group was less satisfied, as opposed to the older satisfied group. There was no much job level satisfaction difference among employees who were in age groups 25–34, 35–44, and 45–54.
Employees who had a higher level of education are more satisfied
Concerning job satisfaction level, 80.12 percent of the employees who had a doctoral degree were satisfied with their job. This value is relatively high compared to 65.44 percent of satisfied employees who had no formal education. The finding to some extent indicates that those who obtained a higher level of education experience a high level of satisfaction.
Employees who had studied in different fields are more satisfied
74.79 percent of the employees who had studied in computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering fields were satisfied with their job. This percentage is lower, as opposed to those who had studied in social science, health science or natural science.
Employees who earned more income are more satisfied
Interestingly, the finding reveals that a total of 73.57 percent of those with an annual income between $25K and $50K is satisfied with their job, lower as compared to 80.17 percent and 79.66 percent respectively for those with income from $125K to $150K and $150K to $175K.
Conclusion
About their job satisfaction, the findings indicate that the higher the educational level, and the higher the income group, the high level of job satisfaction that prevails.
The results suggest that companies should find new methods to increase the education level of their staff and develop work context parallel to education level.
Note: All source codes are available on GitHub
Acknowledgement
Abdullah, Moha Asri, et al. “Job satisfaction amongst employees in Small and Medium Industries (SMIs) in the manufacturing sector: A Malaysian case.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Business 8.4 (2007): 39–66.
