Increased Productivity

Employees who find fulfillment in their jobs are going to work with more enthusiasm, passion, and attention to quality than their counterparts who do not, mostly because they develop a sense of ownership and pride in what they are doing. That means they'll arrive earlier, stay later, pitch in outside their areas of responsibility, and look for ways to improve their performance, all without being asked.

Greater Retention and Lower Costs

Simply stated, employees hang onto fulfilling jobs as long as they can, mostly because they know that their chances of finding another are relatively slim. What is more, engaged employees tend to attract other good employees to an organization, either by actively recruiting them or merely by telling friends about their enthusiasm for their work. The result of all this for an organization is significantly lower costs related to recruiting, hiring, retraining, and termination.

Sustainable Cultural Differentiation

The opportunity for differentiation from competitors by building a culture of employee engagement cannot be overstated. In a world of ubiquitous technology and rapid dissemination of information, it is harder and harder to establish sustainable competitive advantage through strategic and tactical decision making. Cultural differentiation, however, is more valuable than it's ever been, because it requires courage and discipline more than creativity or intelligence.

Along these lines, managers who work to reduce the three signs in their organizations discover an unexpected side effect. Employees themselves begin to take a greater interest in their colleagues, help them find meaning and relevance in their work, and find better ways to gauge their own success, and they do all of this without specific direction from their bosses. In essence, they take some responsibility for keeping the three root causes of job misery at bay. Ironically, this gives them yet a greater sense of meaning while creating a sustainable cultural advantage that competitors will envy but find difficult to duplicate.

Employee Obstacles

Employees often fail to find fulfillment in their work because they place too much emphasis on maximizing compensation or choosing the right career. Are these irrelevant? Of course not. Even if you love what you do, if you can't feed your family or earn a livable wage, you have a problem on your hands. And if you're meant to be a carpenter and you find yourself sitting behind a desk doing accounting, then your ceiling on job fulfillment is going to be low.

However, even people who are relatively well paid for doing what they love (such as professional athletes, executives, and actors) are often miserable if they feel anonymous, their job is irrelevant, or their work is not objectively measurable. Consider that the world is full of advice on how to make more money and how to choose the right career, and yet people remain miserable. And even people who aren't doing their dream job and making a ton of money in the process will usually find engagement if their managers are reducing anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement in their jobs.

Organizational Obstacles

When it comes to managers and the companies where they work, the obstacles to eliminating misery are different. Too often, they are slow to recognize that they have an employee engagement issue, and then when they finally do, their attempts to address it focus on the wrong issues.

Many companies only come to terms with the fact that they have an engagement problem when employees start to leave. Unfortunately, during exit interviews, people tend to report that they are leaving because their next employer is going to pay them more money. This provokes human resources professionals—and the executives who listen to them—to raise salaries and other forms of compensation in spite of the fact that the last time they did so resulted in no lasting or sustainable improvements in employee retention, satisfaction, or productivity.

The problem, of course, is that departing employees rarely tell the whole story. By the time people decide to leave an organization, they have little incentive to tell their soon-to-be-former employer the truth—that they are leaving because their supervisor didn't really manage them, and without a good manager, their jobs eventually became miserable. What companies should be doing is asking a different question, and far sooner than an exit interview: What is making you even consider leaving in the first place?

Even in those instances when executives are able to discern that poor management is the real source of employee disengagement, their response, though well-intentioned, is rarely effective. That response usually takes the form of more management training, which often includes mandatory classes on setting goals, writing performance evaluations, and giving feedback. And while those are certainly topics worthy of attention, the impact of these kinds of classes is almost never immediate, and is all too often negligible.

That's partly because goals cannot be set, reviews cannot be written, and even feedback cannot easily be given immediately after a training class ends. Organizations have cycles and schedules and calendars that indicate when these things need to be done. And by the time those dates roll around, managers who attended the classes have either forgotten about the skills they learned or been distracted by some other overriding priority from the top. Or most likely, both.

What managers need is something that is both less mechanical and more emotionally, fundamentally, and immediately tied to the job satisfaction of employees. And that is where the elimination of anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement comes into play.

The Emotional Obstacle

Even when managers understand and appreciate the importance of addressing the three causes, they very often struggle to do so because of a natural behavioral shortcoming of their own. This is a critical point to understand.

In order to be the kind of leader who demonstrates genuine interest in employees and who can help people discover the relevance of their work, a person must have a level of personal confidence and emotional vulnerability. Without it, managers will often feel uncomfortable, even embarrassed, about having such simple, behavioral conversations with their employees. They'll mistakenly feel like kindergarten teachers or little league coaches delivering a simplistic pep talk, even though their employees—at all levels—are yearning for just such a conversation.