If you want to increase your team’s productivity, you’d be wise to consider this: employees who feel that their work has a purpose, and that what they do every day makes a difference, are more productive. Numerous studies have drawn direct links between purpose and performance. One major global study identified several other factors that employees around the world consider important: getting to use their strengths every day, working with teammates that have their back and share their values, feeling confident about their company’s future, getting recognized for excellent work, and being offered constant challenges to grow. But what motivated them the most was having a clearly defined sense of purpose. Again and again, the data shows that the most engaged and productive employees are the ones who clearly understand and are enthusiastic about their company’s mission.
If you think about it, those findings just make common sense. Unless you’re the rare exception, it seems reasonable to assume that knowing the work you do every day has meaning, and will make a difference in some way, will spur you on to do a better job. Sometimes all you need to tackle a leadership challenge is common sense.
Still, it’s always good to have the data — especially when it is as compelling as a study conducted by American psychologist and author Adam Grant. According to McKinsey Quarterly, Grant and his team spent a couple of years studying employees who worked in call centres. Call centre employees rarely get to learn if what they do every day has an impact. So the researchers asked a customer, client or end-user who’d benefited from using their product or service to speak to the employees directly for five minutes about those benefits. The results were staggering. Just knowing that their work had made a difference resulted in a greater than 400 per cent caller-by-caller spike in weekly productivity.
Even though the data shows most employees want to find meaning in their work —and the belief they’re making a difference is the single most important factor that makes them feel significant day-to-day —Grant believes many leaders are unaware of that fact. Most of the leaders he asked about how they’d motivate employees with stressful jobs suggested doing the opposite of what his data showed actually worked.
Another interesting offshoot of this discussion concerns millennials and how best to manage them. Millennials are a cohort for whom purpose and motivation are deeply intertwined. Making a difference matters more to that demographic than the profit motive. Consequently, they’re much more inclined to join a company that also has a social mission, and much more engaged as employees when they understand their role in helping the company achieve that mission.
Clearly, employees need a sense of purpose to become engaged. But how do you make sure that they have one? I’ve found that what works best is having a well-articulated mission and communicating it clearly, finding regular and convincing ways to connect the dots for your team between the work they’re doing and the impact it is having, soliciting their input often, actually taking it into account when you make decisions, and celebrating the achievements of those who’ve made a big difference.
You know how motivating it is for you when you feel that your leadership is making a difference. Why would it be any different for your employees?