WOMEN want to work, it seems, for employers that ask them what they want. Being asked for your opinion makes you feel valued, so you invest emotionally in the relationship with your employer and are less likely to leave. Everybody wins. So how do organisations that score highly with their women workers measure job satisfaction? And do men and women really want different things from work? The usual tool is the annual employee survey. In some cases this has shown markedly higher rates of job satisfaction among women than among men. Catherine Hamilton, the inclusion and diversity manager at National Grid UK, says: “Our most recent findings indicate that women are much more positive about their employment than men in every aspect.” The same trend has appeared at Capgemini, according to Amanda Shrimpton, head of employee relations: “Our female employees are more satisfied than the men. When asked if they are able to balance the needs of their work and personal lives, 71 per cent of women agreed, but only 64 per cent of men.”

Hamilton believes that women are innately more contented — “I think it must be more to do with women’s general make-up than their jobs” — while Shrimpton puts it down to women taking advantage of flexible working opportunities: “Women have to make decisions about whether to follow a career, become a full-time mum, or juggle both. With support you can juggle, but we haven’t yet got to the stage where men feel comfortable asking to work flexibly.”

Some companies also conduct women-only surveys. “It gives us a good pulse on how women are feeling and it can challenge preconceptions about what women want,” says Ingrid Devin, the diversity programme manager for Dell. Goldman Sachs uses suggestion boxes “to keep a check on employees’ opinions”, according to its global leadership and diversity director, Stephen Golden. “We also measure employee satisfaction through personal development plans and annual self-evaluation.”

Sometimes old-fashioned talking is best. Goldman Sachs employs an outside company to run focus groups, “including some specifically for women”, Golden says. Cassie Heiss, the head of European HR at Lehman Brothers, says that its chief executive “hosts breakfasts for senior women so he can learn from them their experiences of the firm”. She also says that its women’s networking group “has taken a number of initiatives to connect with female employees, including looking at the support that’s given to pregnant employees, to improve the number of women who return to work after maternity leave”.

Firms differ on whether male and female employees want different things. Heiss, among others, is clear that “women have different needs in the workplace to men”, though this may be because men have been slower than women to adopt flexible working. Most agree that this is changing. “Eighteen per cent of Capgemini employees who work a non-standard pattern are men,” Shrimpton says. “It’s encouraging to see that.” Goldman Sachs prefers to emphasise that “there are no things that specifically ‘matter’ only to women or men. Successfully managing a career and family life is critical to our employees, regardless of gender.”

But everyone agrees on one thing — finding out what people want, and acting on it, does matter. In the case of women, as Heiss says, “by looking at your take-up of flexible working, childcare vouchers, return-to-work, etc, you can measure how accommodating you are as a firm for your female population”.

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