Hey, everyone, this is Chris with Hacking your Leadership. On today's discussion
on employee engagement, we're going to be talking about another reason that employees decide
that it's time to move on from an organization. The last couple of weeks,
we've talked about some of these reasons, starting with it they don't feel
like their company invests in them, and then followed up with that they don't
feel happy and what that means to feel happy at your job. The next
reason I want to talk about about why employees tend to leave their organization is
that they don't feel important. And when I talk about feeling important, you
know, everybody wants to feel like the work that they're doing matters in the
context of whatever the mission of the organization is, So, you know,
they want to feel like they're making a difference, not just that their organization
makes a difference, but that they make a difference in service of that broader
mission or purpose. And if a person doesn't feel that way, I think
they're a lot more likely to leave the organization. And data from employee engagement
surveys and Gallop polls and Deloitte polls, they all say this same thing.
It's one of the primary reasons people leave organizations as they don't feel important.
Yeah, I hear that, and I immediately think of like feeling valued seeing
heard, you know, like the things that matter on like kind of the
local personal level. But to your point, I like the fact that you're
kind of calling out like the idea of, you know, the importance of
the job and of the role and of the impact that it has on the
greater organization. And again I think that there's like there's personal value that you
have around like how do you feel that you're being treated? And then there's
also like professional value that you have around like is my job really important?
Is the thing that I do making a difference? Is it something that's being
recognized? And I think that that's such an important piece of the work if
you're really talking about why people stay, or on the flip side, why
people leave if they feel that their job is not important and that it can
just be replaced by anybody else for any other reason, it can it's hard
to have an intrinsic motivation to want to continue to invest your time and effort
and passion into the role that you have, right, So I think if
you're listening right now. And you ever watched the TV show Lost, and
I did. It was like appointment viewing for my wife and I. We
loved Lost. Don't get me started on how it ended, but you know,
during during the watching of the show, it was very good and we
were enthralled with it. We just loved it. And one of the plot
lines is the guy sitting at the computer who has to type in the code
and hit enter and push the button, you know, once every hour in
order for the island to not blow up, or once every twelve or I
have forgot how how long it was, once every eight hours in order for
the island to not blow up. And that person made sure that no matter
what they did to go find water or food, they were right back where
they needed to be in order to type that code in to make sure that
the island didn't blow up. And if you had to do something every day
in order to make sure that you know, people didn't die, or or
even more that you didn't die, that would be a very you would feel
like what you were doing was pretty significant. I would think that'd be really
easy to make that tie in. But the moment if you if you take
that same person and you tell them no, no, nothing, nothing would
happen if you didn't do it. We just we just need you to do
it. You know, how how long would that person do that same thing?
How long would that person type in that code and hit enter if they
didn't feel like the outcome of it mattered at all, like that the action
was significant. And you know, that's a very extreme example of it from
a TV show, but this happens all the time in organizations, where a
person doesn't feel that the work they're being asked to do every day actually matters,
that if they stopped doing it, it wouldn't matter. And this is
this is really difficult to do in a lot of organizations because not everybody in
every organization does work that impacts the world every single day. You have to
be able to tie that in and make sure that if you're a leader of
people, that you know that you can make sure your people feel like the
work that they're doing is significant and that it matters, even when it may
be a lot harder to do so, or even when the work they're being
asked to do maybe doesn't matter, you know, in terms of the grand
scheme of things, maybe it is easily replaceable. But it doesn't mean it's
not important. It doesn't mean they can't feel significant. Yeah. No,
it's a great call out. It's funny because I was thinking about the same
thing as like, what if that guy was told like, hey, all
right, you need to enter this code in by five o'clock every day.
Well, why doesn't matter why you need to do it. Don't ask questions,
right, don't ask questions? Yeah? Yeah, And she's like,
well, I guess, okay, fine, all right, Well you know
I'm not feeling well today. You know, maybe I won't make it a
little bit delayed. You know, like if you don't know, if you
don't have a direct you know, correlation to the outcome like that, then
it can it can. It feels a lot less motivating, And I think
to your point when it comes to things like leadership and the impact that can
have. You know, you talked about feel and how do people feel about
it and how do we recognize it? Sometimes like yeah, some of these
things are you know, not not the most exciting, or you don't have
the pressure of the world on your shoulders. You're not worried about the island
blowing up, but for a leadership standpoint, there's a way to make sure
that people do feel important and they feel valued, and they feel appreciated for
the things that they do. As maybe as repetitive or basic as they might
be, there is something that's happening as a result of their work. And
you know when we talk about vision and helping people to tie what they do
to the greater vision, that's a big part of leadership, right right.
So I'm looking at things like, you know, companies that have high ESG
scores, you know, environmental, social and governance scores, and so these
are this score obviously is very important if you are looking at how you are
you know, a sustainable organization, a company that has governed well and ethical
organization. If a company ends up on this list of the of the top
ESG scoring companies, it's not by accident. It means that they're actually taking
steps that it's it's important to them to do these kinds of things now.
Whether or not they're doing it because they know people are more likely to buy
from them because they're doing it, or the companies or employees are more likely
to stay with them, that's a less relevant. The fact that they're taking
these steps is a good thing. If I look at the companies that are
at the top of this list, you know, some of them are applied
Materials, Wouldward, Varisk Analytics. You know, these are companies. I
don't think I've ever heard of them before I saw them on this list,
and yet they're high on this list. Now, are there people who work
for these organizations who aren't doing things every single day? Are that would impact
the company's ESG score every single day? Of course, of course there are.
But the leaders there are at some point have to tie in what they're
doing to the importance of this in a way that leads them to believe that
their work does matter in the context of this. Whatever they're doing to give
back, whatever the organization is doing to leave the world a better place,
or to become sustainable, the sacrifices that the employees are asked to make in
order to make sure that they are, you know, working sustainably, whatever
that looks like. For an employee to buy into that, they have to
feel like the work they're being asked to do is significant enough to be worth
whatever that effort or that sacrifice is. I want to go into some advice
for leaders on what they can do to make sure this is happening in your
own organizations. But first I want to give up toward to one of our
sponsors. All Right, if you're a leader of people and you're trying to
make sure that your employees feel important and significant and like the work that they're
doing makes a difference, you need to make sure that the tasks that they're
being asked to do that might feel mundane or tedious or repetitive, and that
it is harder to tie in to the broader mission or goal or purpose of
the organization, that you do a good job of articulating that to those employees.
If you're having a hard time doing that on your own, partner with
your leaders and partner with your peers to figure out how they're doing it.
But it's important that employees don't feel like a lot of the work they're being
asked to do, or a significant part of the work they're being asked to
do, doesn't tie in to the broader purpose or mission of the organization.
It doesn't have to be one hundred percent, but it needs to be enough
of it to where they feel like they are engaged in the work every single
day. If you look at these companies on the ESG lists, somebody still
has to make sure that the plants get watered in the in the lobby,
Like there's there are things that have to get done that individually may not seem
like they matter or that they are significant in a moment, but together they
do support the broader mission of the organization. And as a leader at your
job, to make sure that your employees understand how that happens in a way
that resonates with them and so they can come to work every day feeling significant.
Otherwise they're not going to have the level of engagement that you need out
of them to do good work. Yeah, I think it's so important to
connect those dots a lot of times for teams around you know, here's the
work that you're doing, and then kind of here's where that works, here's
where that work goes, and then here's what that kind of work you know,
allows to happen or or or is a part of a larger piece of
the puzzle that's needed to get us the results that we have. Because like
again it's one thing to say, like you know, hey, we did
this everybody here. I don't want to thank every single person as result like
that's one way to do it right. And again it might feel good when
it's addressed. That kind of like that largely, but really from a leadership
standpoint, like having individuals know and feel appreciated for that work and for those
things and feel important and feel seen and feel valued, that leadership capability is
so important because again, many times the work itself can feel like I just
don't know what happens after this, or I have an idea of what this
does. But if I'm not getting you recognized for the milestones that are happening,
for the things that I am directly impacting, for the timeliness of the
work that I do, for the quality of the work that I do,
like, those things matter so much in making people feel good and feel important
in the job that they do right right. The last thing I'll say about
this is that sometimes it's enough to just say it. Sometimes it's enough to
say thank you for this work that you did. You don't know how much
this helps and is in service and of the purpose of the organization, but
it does. These are the people that were impacted by it. These are
the numbers that remove because of it, And this is what we're able to
do. These are the doors that are able to open because of the work
that you're doing. A thank you can go a long way. And if
you assume that it's not needed, or that your employees are being able to
tie these things together on their own without you, you're wrong. They are
not able to, at least on a long term basis. So you need
to get out there and do that. It's part of your role as a
leader. Make your employees feel significant and they will come to work engaged.
And with that it brings us into this discussion of employee engagement. Please join
us next week for another one. You have a great day.