Help employees understand the meaning of work to increase labor productivity (Part 1)

If you want your employees to work with all the passion, dedication to the work, inspire them, help them find the meaning of the work and the benefits it brings to other people. Once they are clearly aware of this, they will be more enthusiastic, be creative and work more effectively.

It is a secret in human resource management that any leader should know. This requires leaders to invest in time through conversations between the two sides about the motivation, the lofty significance of mission statements, the existence of the organization and the meaning that the work these employees are doing. If this communication is exaggerated, dishonest, and improper, it can cause doubt and backfire.

Helping employees realize the meaning of a job is to help people see what the job they are doing means to others and to help them identify why they are doing it. should love what they do. Here are some of the approaches that Dan Cable (Havard Business Review, 2019) has developed to help leaders can apply to help employees find the meaning of the job easier.

Concretize and personalize

First, evoking the meaning of the job needs to be personalized and concretized by real-world situations because the purpose of this is to elicit a positive emotional response, which help employees feel the meaning of what they are doing in reality.

Assume that you are the leader of a medical device department in a medical device business. Your team is sometimes disregarded by people in the organization because they think other unit jobs are more important than the jobs of your department. Many in the group agree with the same and the team morale is quite low. In this case, what would you do to help your team appreciate the meaning of the work your department is doing and regain the spirit of work?

Ideally, in this case the leader should arrange for a customer to tell his or her team their personal story. Talk about the difficulties they faced before using the group’s medical devices and the benefits they received after using the product.

These practical and personalized cases like this will have a strong impact and create trust for employees. If people see the cause and outcome of the work they do, understanding the impact of the work they are doing on how their customers feel happy will help them feel the importance of themselves and the importance of the work they are doing.

Productivity and Quality Office