It is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. -Jim Collins
“I hope you go home today feeling like a useless, faceless cog in a giant wheel, questioning whether or not anything you did made a hill of beans difference to anyone…whatever your name is.”
That’s not one way to make employees feel valued.
No manager in their right mind would ever endorse making such a statement to those they lead…at least not with their words. And most of us wince reading it. But day in and day out, managers all over the world, and their organizations, broadcast this message to employees with their actions. And then scratch their heads in mystery when the quarterly earnings statements, sales forecasts, production reports, and customer satisfaction surveys all return declining trends.
How to Make Employees Feel Valued at Work
Here are the 4 tenets for people to thrive in organizations
Nope, turns out none of it’s really a mystery. The correlation between whether or not people feel like they, and their work both matter, and the performance of the organization, is a pretty straight line. If people in your organization feel like crap, there’s a good chance your results will too. This is a timeless truth we’ve known for decades. Nothing rocket science-y about it.
When Employees Don’t Feel Valued This Happens
And yet, we began this quarter’s theme of THRIVE recalling the now well-known statistics of 70% of the workforce being passively (40%) or actively (30%) disengaged in the workplace. We’re talking somewhere in the vicinity of 300 MILLION people in the U.S. going to work every day and, at best marking time, or worse, looking to sabotage their employer. So it’s clear all of that timeless truth hasn’t sunk in to many organizations.
But let’s take a closer look at some of the experiences that distinguish these groups from one another and see if that doesn’t reveal (again) why it matters that people know they matter.[i]
| Proportion of highly engaged employees that experience this | Organizational Experience | Proportion of highly disengaged employees that experience this |
92% | Someone has talked about their progress | 13% |
98% | They have opportunities to learn and grow | 13% |
99% | They are able to do their best everyday | 53% |
91% | Their opinions count at work | 19% |
98% | They view their job as important to the company | 22% |
You Don’t Need a Degree in “How to Make Your Employees Feel Valued” to Actually Do It
The differences are hardly subtle. And I can almost hear hardcore, hard driving leaders rolling their eyes, thinking “I’m not running a therapy practice here. I’m not going to spend my days kissing boo boos because someone’s self-esteem is a little rocky. I’ve got a company to run!” And to be fair, there are people who show up to the office with bottomless needs for approval and affirmation, and will do anything to get it. Those pathologies were there long before they were employed, so no amount of managerial love will suffice.
But we’re not talking about “those” people. We’re talking about the vast majority of people who come to work every day wanting to do a good job, make a difference, enjoy making a contribution, get paid fairly, and advance their career. All reasonable expectations. And if you provide them with experiences like those noted in the table above, chances are good they will advance your cause toward ever greater results.
Weirdly, There’s Nothing You Can Do to Make Employees Feel Valued at Work
But here’s the catch. There is actually nothing you can do as a leader to convince people they matter. Regardless of where their sense of self-worth was when they started working for you, you can’t directly determine if they believe they matter or not.
What you can do is to create the conditions under which people conclude for themselves that they matter. Knowing that I, and my work, are significant is something I must discover for myself. It’s a conclusion I draw. True, how I am treated by others, how my contributions are valued – or not – may strongly influence the conclusion I draw. But ultimately, my significance is mine to discover.
4 Ways to Make Employees Feel Appreciated
So, what are some of the conditions you can create that raise the odds those you lead will conclude that they, and their contributions, matter to you and the organization? From among the endless options, here are four major opportunities to help employees conclude, “I, and my work, matter here.”
1. Measure performance, honor contribution: No organizational process is more insufferable, more demeaning, and more anxiety-provoking than performance management systems. Aubrey Daniels, author of Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money, argues that performance appraisals are actually counter-productive. Daniels cites a study by the Society for Human Resource Management that found 90% of performance appraisals are painful and don’t work; and they produce an extremely low percentage of top performers. So let’s skip the excuses about alleged fairness, avoiding lawsuits, being consistent, and documenting shortfalls. They don’t work.
The good news is some organizations are waking up to the stupidity of this. A growing number of major U.S. companies, including Accenture, Adobe, and Gap, have been saying goodbye to an annual rite of corporate life that both employees and managers love to hate: the traditional performance review. Now General Electric, long seen as Corporate America’s bellwether for management practices, is joining their ranks by piloting a big shift in the way it handles reviews. To date nearly 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies have done away with annual ratings.[ii]
Yes, we do need to measure progress in some meaningful way. And we should be freely having meaningful conversations about performance, commitments, and holding one another to account for those commitments. Those should be ongoing conversations, not annual events. And to truly honor contribution, (see #2 and #3 below, as well), be sure that you fully grasp what the contribution actually was and are acknowledging it broadly. Treat the contribution as an extension of the contributor and know that it is a personal expression of who they are. Too many leaders unintentionally separate the two, and in so doing, invalidate the sense of feeling proud of their accomplishments and confident in repeating them that comes from being honored for what you have done.
Making Employees Feel Appreciated Doesn’t Need Voodoo
2. Ask for the story: Nothing expresses genuine gratitude to someone, and helps raise their sense of importance, than asking them, “Tell me how you did that?” Sadly, too many leaders confuse compliments for gratitude. So here is the difference between a compliment and gratitude. A compliment is a generic acknowledgement of something tangible – a completed task, a nice tie, a persuasive presentation, or a kind gesture. Gratitude goes beyond the compliment to the intangible why you are thankful for the completed task or the persuasive presentation, the personal effect the tangible act had on you, and your genuine curiosity about what it took for the tangible act to be accomplished. People are always glad to have their work acknowledged, to know that it matters in the abstract. But to know that it matters to you is something more. To know that you are interested in how they made their contribution – regardless of how large or small – by inquiring of them how they did it, signals a level of honor and gratitude that transcends a compliment. Ask them to tell you the story, and then luxuriate in the time it takes to truly L.I.S.T.E.N. to it in a fascinated and captivated way.
3. Build meritocracy and transparency into rewards As companies move away from the outmoded appraisal process, so too are they moving toward delinking scores and rankings from compensation. Instead, they are looking to broaden reward pools and what considerations are used in determining compensation. Deloitte experts suggest leaders “Consider revising compensation structures to include broader considerations, such as how the outside talent market would compensate an employee or how difficult the employee would be to replace. Analyze the extent to which the organization can take a broader approach to total rewards by offering growth opportunities to employees who have outperformed their peers.” Further, if rewards appear to be distributed capriciously, or the standards for earning more aren’t transparent, or worse, the “published” standards are consistently contradicted in practice, expect people to become entitled, self-interested, and disengaged.
4. Create strategic line of sight I saw a recent blog post that declared “All work is created equal.” Too many organizations try and neutralize differences by perpetuating the illusion that “all work is equal.” Nothing could be further from the truth or more insulting to people in organizations. All workers are, and should be treated, equally. As human beings, everyone’s dignity should be protected and respected. But it is vital that we acknowledge that all work is not equal.
We usually help organizations categorize work into three buckets – competitive work – work that directly drives the organization’s differentiated work against competitors, competitive enabling – meaning work that is directly supportive of competitive work, and necessary – tasks that must be done to keep the organization running, but can be done in parity with anyone else. While all three of these types of work contribute to the organization’s success, holding them up as equal is silly. Everyone knows they’re not. Leaders should work to create clear line of sight between every type of work and its contribution to the organization’s overall success (and if you can’t do that, you should question why you’re wasting money having that work done).
Knowing They’re Contributing Makes Employees Feel Valued
People’s work lives are enriched greatly when they feel they are making progress on work that is meaningful — in other words, when they feel they are making a difference in the world. While no organization can, or should try to, contrive a sense of meaning for their employees, they can and should work hard to create the conditions in which people choose to conclude that they, and the work they do, matter significantly.
[i] Adapted from #URLinkedUp Infographics!!! http://bit.ly/1Fp9g1F
[ii] This according to Cliff Stevenson, a senior research analyst for the Institute for Corporate Productivity, a research network that studies management practices.