Giving employees meaning in their work
January 3, 2012
I have long been a believer that people don’t work only for making a paycheck. Mind you, I don’t think most people would work if they didn’t get paid, but I think it’s something beyond getting paid that draws a person to a job or keeps them in it.
I recently changed companies and had written myself a task to blog about this very topic while I was at my old job. I read this wonderful blog posting by one of my favorite career bloggers, Patty Azzarello, and I thought she did a great job of summarizing an incredibly important topic that I think gets missed by a lot of managers.
The points that resonate best with me:
1) People may tell you they are leaving this job for more money, but there is definitely another reason. If they really liked what they did, felt appreciated, and felt their work really mattered, they wouldn’t leave the job to go to another where these things were not true but they just got more money. Or, if they did, they would likely soon regret it. 
2) The way to empower people isn’t to tell them *how* to do their job, it’s to tell them the results you want and let them decide how. I had a previous boss who was not good at this at all. He would dictate how he wanted the job done which meant that it left no room at all for creativity. His employees felt that they were just button pushers instead of creative brains who got to do fun things. This basically crushed the spirits of everyone who worked for him. What was even worse was then he would frequently change his mind which meant the work they had done (the way he had dictated it would be done) then no longer mattered…
3) … which brings me to the next key take-away which is if you’re going to change directions, at least recognize the work folks have done. Patty Azzarello uses a great example of folks who build a Lego robot (which makes me happy since I love Legos and worked one Summer for a professor to improve the experience of his Lego robotic class). In Patty’s example. this is like either throwing away this great robot once someone finishes it, or, worse yet, disassembling it in front of them. It’s better to recognize them for what they’ve done and give them closure. Yes, you created this great robot. Let’s recognize it for what it is, what we can learn from it, etc. And now let’s work to create this new robot and see if we can’t use some of the lessons we learned with the last one, but if not, you at least did a great job with creating the first one.
4) Both in this posting and a few others Patty has written, it is critically important to communicate (over and over and over) the company strategy because while it may make sense to upper management and you may all be aligned, if you can’t communicate to everyone else both what the strategy is and how it impacts them and what you want from them, it just ends up getting lost in translation.
I highly recommend reading Patty’s blog posting on this, since she has a great way of summarizing things incredibly effectively, but these were key lessons that seem to be important no matter what company I’m working for. They all seem to struggle with this in their own way.
