Alchemy for Managers Weekly Tip
One of the things everyone looks for in their work is meaning. Sadly, many don’t find it, and this leads to disengagement, so how can you turn this around?
People find a sense of meaning when they feel that what they are doing is worthwhile. By this I mean that it has a benefit to themselves, the company, the community or even the planet.
How do you establish a ‘clear line of sight’ between a task, even a mundane one, and the larger company vision?
Consider a job of filing in an insurance company. There’s paper, and lots of it, and it all needs putting away where it can be found again if needed in the future. And who likes filing!
The company vision is to provide financial help when accidents or other costly and unwanted events happen to clients of the company.
How do you connect the filing with the vision?
If that insurance policy document for Mrs Smith is not filed in the right place, and Mrs Smith makes a claim, the whole process becomes much more difficult and fraught, especially for Mrs Smith. The filing is important, especially for Mrs Smith!
Read more about this topic here
Note: If you really can’t connect a task with the larger company vision, you should be asking if the task actually provides any value.
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Article by Paul Matthews
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Excellent post. Achieving engagement and meaning in work is critical to success and relies on all employee shaving a shared sense of purpose. This is critical because most employees aren’t engaged with creating more widgets. They are engaged with an idea – no, an IDEAL. And that ideal is characterized in the business world in a company’s values. Those values must be understood by all, clearly and consistently communicated, and reinforced through recognition.
For a company’s values to have any impact on employee behavior and performance outcome, they must be understood in the same way by all employees regardless of position, division or geographic location.
To achieve this level of common understanding, the values must be clearly and consistently communicated. In many global corporations, this includes ensuring the meaning doesn’t get lost in translation or the importance diluted due to varied cultural norms.
While the necessity of doing so is easily appreciated by company leaders, the task is complicated by the variability in communications skills from manager to manager, the infrequency of opportunities to demonstrate the values in a meaningful way, and the constant distraction of deadlines and other pressures.
Strategic recognition programs based on best practices incorporate a company’s values into the recognition process. When all employee activities or behaviors nominated for recognition are tied to a company value, then at least two people must think about the values during the process. And if all recognitions within a set time period are then announced in a monthly team meeting, then entire teams or divisions will be reminded of the values and how to demonstrate and achieve them in everyday tasks. In large, globally distributed companies this is virtually the only way to make the company values come alive for every employee and unite them all behind a common purpose and set of values to achieve your strategic objectives.