A five-year profile of employee satisfaction for UK local government buildings

A substantial five-year database, totalling over 20,000 responses across more than four hundred UK local government office buildings, is used to analyse employee satisfaction towards their work environment. Within this database, twenty-seven employee satisfaction attributes have been collected, for different sets of individuals and buildings, by an annual online survey for five years. The collective views of these responses in each of those years have been compared. The results have been strikingly consistent. The problematic areas are persistently the same. They appear to be the control of heating and ventilation and the need for, and ability to use, quiet areas for concentration, followed by document storage facilities, provision of meeting rooms, car parking facilities, and other personal needs related facilities, such as toilets and kitchen facilities. These areas are important concerns which need to be brought to the attention of local authorities and should not be neglected by decision makers. The findings by the comparison should also stimulate the proposals of improvement initiatives. This five-year profile provides a baseline against which the future investigations can be compared in the same sector. This study also provides an analytic method for performing other satisfaction related investigations. Keywords: employee satisfaction, work environment, local government