SAS’s CORPORATE VALUES AND GOALS BRING JOB SATISFACTION AND MOTIVATION FOR SAS’s EMPLOYEES:
SAS is one of the world’s leading companies in the information technology industry that provides services of business analytical software development, management, and installation. This company was founded in 1976, and headquartered in Cary, NC (SAS, n.d.). The company has been rewarded, as the world’s second best company to work in the year 2014. SAS has continuously been generating healthy revenues for a number of years in Asia Pacific region and has maintained the smooth record of good profits which represent around 12% of its total revenues from around the world (Fortune, 2014). However, the company has successfully generated worldwide revenue of US$3.02 billion in the year 2013. Moreover, company has rendered the services of software installation in approximately 140 countries, to more than 70,000 organizations around the globe (SAS, n.d.). In Asia Pacific region, the company has set its offices at 14 different locations from India to Japan. According to Fortune 2014, the total numbers of employees in United States are accumulated as 6588 and the figure grows to 7296 of the employees outside the United States (Fortune, 2014). SAS believes in the power of employees and thus it has given core importance to employees’ needs, and has taken every single measure to satisfy them and meet their needs.
With a mission to provide solutions and drive innovation, company has created a healthy relationship with its employees and customers. The major values of the company revolve around the innovative, approachable, quick and responsive and customer-driven services to its world-wide customers. Undoubtedly, company’s employee engagement program and various corporate training programs help to build a strong commitment bond among employees and with the company’s roots. The strategies it employed in the company is effective communication, employee engagement, stern policies regarding diversity, harassment and other.
ETHICAL CONSIDERATION:
SAS believes in equal employment opportunity irrespective of religion, race, national origin, gender, marital status and physical disabilities. Company provides training to make correct decisions when some ethical challenges take place in order to compliance with laws and ethics. This training ensures the optimum level of employee commitment. Employees are provided with telephonic or web-based ethics hotline so that employees should report their complaints in secret. Employees are like their real asset to them and company values their perceptions and needs., company provides employees with constructive feedbacks, to keep the employee morale high; so as to execute recommended adjustments without let them feel offensive. Employees of SAS are largely motivated through effective human resources strategies of the company (SAS, n.d.).
TRAINING SESSIONS:
Nevertheless, company values the balance between work life and personal life, and therefore it facilitates its employees with job sharing and compressed work weeks. Company facilitates its employees with proper training sessions to their salaried employees as well as hourly employees in order to improve the productivity of employees.
WORKPLACE BENEFITS:
SAS provides supplementary services and advantages to its employees, who work at software development sector which includes workplace health center with accommodation and amenities to family members of relevant employees. This health care center takes account of 53 medical along with support workforce, counting in 11 nurse practitioners, three certified and registered dentists, three physicians who have experience based on family practice, a psychologist, three physiotherapists. All of these are accommodated with high tech labs, machineries, equipment, and building. For this reason, company deals with less complicated issues regarding employees’ turnover and employees’ growth. Employee’s job growth is continuously increasing over the time and has reached 3.60% in the recent year (Fortune, 2014). The employees’ voluntary turnover rate is reported as 2%, as according to Fortune 2014 (Fortune, 2014). SAS has won the trust of employees of all sectors by offering them plentiful benefits related to job, as well as off-job. The benefits include the childcare center at workplace, fitness center, provides memberships of offsite gyms. Workplace benefits seem to be the best source of boosting employees’ satisfaction and motivation which directly relates to improving the performance of employees over a period.
EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION:
SAS has strategized the proper communication system throughout the organization in order to embrace internal communication in an organization since it is mandatory to plan the communication process strategically in order to response in specific events and deal with organizational issues. Employees and management can perform in a collectively-efficient manner and collaborate more successfully by working in a positive culture (CIVICUS, n.d.). Company has enforced all sorts of communication including intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, mass and public communication, to ensure the positive performance of employees. Apparently, communication at workplace is an influential concern which includes selecting the proper channel, the right time, the right person, and the right message to communicate, or else it can create confusions and conflicts for anyone at the workplace (Sember and Sember, 2007). As employees are able to understand the tasks, missions and daily targets sufficiently, they are more committed to performing well; and, thus resulting in organization wide progress.
REWARD SYSTEM:
SAS has implemented a well-structured reward system throughout the organization. Company knows the importance of rewards and its impact on the performance of employees. Rewards, appraisals, constructive feedbacks, verbal appreciation, promotions, all these factors communicate psychologically and motivate the employees to work accountably and efficiently. These factors create the optimistic and peaceful work environment and reduce the sense of pain among employees. As it has been proved by several researches that intrinsic rewards a (challenging task, job satisfaction, recognition) are far dominating than extrinsic rewards (bonuses, promotions, paid leaves), so SAS has focused more on intrinsic aspects to increase employee motivation (Liao, Liu, & Pi, 2011). This results in high level of motivation and commitment of employees and thus achieving optimum level of employee satisfaction and improving the overall organization performance.
MODEL FOR EVERY BUSINESS:
Satisfying the needs of employees is the basic step to make out the key elements that are required to intensify the motivation in employees. Higher satisfaction and motivation rate lead the employees to form an emotional relationship with the company and work longer with the company and thus reducing the employees’ turnover rate.
The model that is being applied by SAS Company is the most effective one as it incorporates every element that an employee would like to have in his/her workplace. The company provides the amalgamation of reward system, communication, workplace benefits, ethical considerations, proper training programs for employees. These factors have created the optimum level of motivation among employees, and thus employees are willing to perform at their best for the betterment of the company. Employees have increased intensity of commitment to their work that brings greater performance and higher profits for the company. SAS is considered as the best workplace after Google Inc. for few consecutive years. It is beneficial to adopt this model by other businesses, and incorporate all these factors so as to improve the employees’ performance and subsequently improving the figures of their profits.
REFERENCES:
CIVICUS (n.d.). Internal Communication Toolkit. Retrieved June 24, 2014, from https://www.civicus.org/new/media/CIVICUSInternalCommunicationToolkit.pdf
Fortune. (2014). Best Companies to Work For 2014. Retrieved June 24, 2014, from http://fortune.com/best-companies/sas-2/?iid=BC14_fl_list
Liao, H. L., Liu, S. H., & Pi, S. M. (2011). Modeling motivations for blogging: An expectancy theory analysis. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 39(2), 251-264.
SAS. (n.d.). About SAS. Retrieved June 24, 2014, from http://www.sas.com/en_in/company-information.html#stats
Sember, B. and Sember, T. (2007). The Essential Supervisor’s Handbook. Career Press
