Derek Irvine

Recognize This! – Proactive, explicit sharing of what you need from employees and how they are delivering are the keys to realizing meaning and purpose at work.

Over the last year, TLNT has become a favoured go-to source for me for news and insight across the HR space (and if you haven’t signed up for the inaugural Transform conference, I encourage you to do so).

In just the last week, two articles elaborated on key steps to how you help employees find the meaning and purpose in their work.

Be Proactive (from Eric Chester)

Quotation

“Many organizations put tons of effort into promoting the good news about their company to the outside world in an effort to attract and keep investors. But they neglect their internal customers — their workers. …

“Take it upon yourself to make your frontline staff feel like an important cog in the wheel of your operation by keeping them informed. … Make it your mission to help your young employees see that they are on a train that’s going somewhere important, and that they are part of something positive and good. Don’t stretch small victories into giant ones, but when good things happen, spend as much time telling your frontline workers as you do telling your potential investors.”

Front-line employees don’t have the line of sight you as management has into greater organizational direction and success. It’s up to you to proactively share with employees – individually and as a group – when their efforts contribute to the success of your team and the company as a whole.

Be Explicit (from David Lee)

Quotation

* If you want employees to act like what they do matters, you need to remind them that what they do really does matter. You do this through sharing stories of how doing their job with excellence made a difference in the life of a customer (whether the customer is a person or a business). …
* Learn how to “reverse engineer” your business goals into the behaviors that will make them possible. To increase your ability to connect the dots between employee behaviors that make your brand promise and strategy possible, learn how to reverse engineer your brand promise and strategic goals into a Behavioral Vision—i.e. the specific behaviors that will make your brand promise and strategic goals possible.

Your employees likely know what it is you need them to do. But do they know how you want them to do it? Don’t fall into the results-only trap by ignoring the importance of how.

As David points out, employees likely know your company values. But do they understand what those values look like in their daily work? It’s fine to have “innovation” or “integrity” as your values, but unless an employee understands what the innovative behaviors look like or how to display integrity as they work to achieve needed results, the values will never be real to them.

How have you been proactive or explicit in helping your employees find the meaning and purpose in their work?