The message to leaders, managers and other stakeholders could not be clearer. If you want to improve organisational performance, then raise your people’s level of engagement. Several reports present compelling evidence that employee engagement is the key to better productivity. Despite this sound advice, many organisations are experiencing a drop in their engagement scores. This can be tracked to the change in the social contact since lockdown and hybrid working.
Traditionally, accepted research shows that the three pillars of ‘employee engagement’ are ensuring that your people feel valued, involved and developed. Whilst these make sense, our work in helping companies affect people behaviour suggests there is an equally important fourth pillar.
This fourth pillar is the need people have to feel inspired which, in turn, requires that employees find meaning in their work.
To understand the process of employee engagement beyond mere research figures we must start by reminding ourselves about basic human nature. This is where Abraham Maslow started over eighty years ago. It is no coincidence that there is a correlation between the three pillars of feeling valued, involved and developed and Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’.
The feeling of being valued, both economically and socially, links directly to Maslow’s need for security and esteem. One of the deepest hungers of the human heart is to be valued for who we are. The desire to be involved and have one’s talents utilised and recognised, links to the need to belong. In an era when many people feel alienated and disassociated from the world around them there is the need to feel a part of the company rather than apart from the company.
Finally, the need to be developed, to unlock one’s potential, relates to the drive of self-actualisation. As children, we can’t help but develop, and there is no reason why this should stop the moment we hit adulthood. To learn and extend oneself is evolutionary.
Self-actualisation is not in fact the highest need, but something Maslow called ‘self-transcendence’ where people feel that they make a difference and serve some purpose. It is when people feel this connection to a bigger idea, to something significant that they feel inspired. Inspiration in turn gives rise to new levels of enthusiasm and engagement.
Leaders therefore need to know how to create meaning if they want true engagement. For example, employees respond to organisations that have a reputation for social responsibility or for being a leader in the community.
Rousing people to outstanding performance firmly rests on the fourth pillar of inspiring meaning at work.
Ask not ‘how much do you want?’, but ‘what matters to you?’.
