When work means something, it becomes a labor of love. When work has meaning, there is a chance that it will also be fun.
POS Point: When work has meaning, more work gets done.
Riding with my then 10-year-old son, I asked how he had performed on a test at school.
"I did okay. I missed seven questions and got an 86."
"I'm surprised. When you and I went over the material, you answered every question perfectly. You knew them all."
To prove my point, I began asking him questions that I remembered. I was blown away to discover that now, two days later, he could barely answer half of them correctly.
"Son! You could answer all of these just two days ago. What has happened!"
"Dad, I don't need to know this stuff anymore. The test was yesterday!"
Duh! And here I thought that the purpose of school was to learn things that might be useful in your life. Now a ten-year-old was pistol-whipping me with the reality that the purpose of school is to memorize data long enough to spit it out on a test!
Is it possible that your employees are suffering from the same malady? Lack of purpose?
I love the story about the three stone carvers. One was drearily chipping away at a huge block of stone when a passing traveler asked what he was doing.
"Shaping this stone," came the somber reply. "It's killing me one whack at a time."
A little further down the road was another mason. The traveler asked again upon noting that this carver was working a little faster than the other and seemed noticeably happier.
"I'm shaping this stone for a building!"
Still further along the road was a third craftsman who was both swinging his hammer and singing as he carved.
"You seem awfully happy for a man working so hard in this heat," said the traveler. "What are you doing?"
"I'm building a cathedral!"
What are your employees building? Better yet, why are they building?
In a classic study, supervisors were asked to list what motivated workers. Then workers in all lines of endeavor were asked to respond to the same question. Surprisingly, the two lists were nowhere near identical. I would publish the survey results except for two reasons. First, a survey of workers in general would most likely not reflect the feelings of the workers in your industry: and, second, because even an accurate survey of your industry would not represent your employees individually.
We found out, simply by asking, that even in our own small company, no two team players come anywhere close to being similarly motivated.
You might think that what turns on workers is the money and benefits. If you thought so, you would be right but only partly so. In a survey of lottery players, it was discovered that eight of ten said that if they won the lottery, they would continue to work although most would change jobs. Wanna know why? People like to work. The news gets even better when you learn what it is about work that they like, and money doesn't even make the top 10!
Asked what turns them on about work, people cited things like being in the know, the opportunity to learn new skills and a chance to work with others as top motivators.
What is the biggest motivator of today's worker? Control over their own time. Today, the biggest motivator is freedom. Not the freedom to retire but the freedom to put work in perspective. Workers want to give more meaning to that part of life that exists outside of work.
By putting more value on their lives as individuals, workers are demanding more meaning from the time they spend while at work. People are beginning to seek a work life that is in harmony with the rest of the day.
