Make My Job Mean Something
Money, benefits, work-life balance are all important factors to employees in determining their engagement and overall happiness at work. However, companies can't usually do more than they already are to improve any of these things. Besides, more and more employee engagement is being driven by something else: Purpose. This has been identified as one of the core needs of employees and is one that organizations should already be fulfilling as part of running an effective business.
Companies should already be in the practice of mapping what value their employees contribute to the organization's customers and measuring that regularly. This practice helps eliminate wasted effort on the part of workers and gives management insight into what is helping and what is just adding noise to the Customer Experience. There is also the added benefit of being able to show each and every employee how their job actually matters. Employees that believe their work matters to the overall goal of the organization and the people they serve are 3x as likely to stay with the company, have 70% higher job satisfaction and were on average, 40% more engaged.
The hard factors of employee satisfaction such as compensation, benefits and work environment are typically the focus of employee satisfaction because they are tangible things that can be measured. The soft factors like job meaning, co-worker/boss interaction and praise/appreciation are often neglected because they are so difficult to measure effectively. Each person has their own values, experiences and mental filters that make reasonable comparisons on a macro scale challenging. However, companies can measure an individuals contribution of value to what the organization does and share that with their employees. Regularly sharing these measures with employees not only gives them a sense of their overall purpose for the organization and its customers, but the act of this sharing helps bolster another core need of receiving feedback and being appreciated for the work they do.
So how to make this happen? Companies need to institute a metrics framework that takes employee job descriptions/roles and begin building a value stream map of how their work directly or indirectly contributes to the Customer Experience. Show exactly where their work output goes, have them understand and appreciate where their job inputs come from and then build measures into those processes. Create a standing meeting for managers to go over the results with their employees and reinforce why their job matters. Introduce employees from upstream and downstream on the workflow to put faces to inputs/outputs so workers can appreciate that their work is helping others and that when they fall short of their goals it does truly have an impact.
