Do you know what meaningful work is for each of your employees?
- How can you make work meaningful for your employees? What can colleagues and the individual employee do?
- Can complaints and dissatisfaction be due to lack of meaningfulness?
- Do your employees lack motivation, show signs of boredom, aggression, apathy and helplessness? Could this be a sign that they lack meaningfulness at work?
- Are your employees clear about how the individual contributes to the overall results of the shop?
- Is there a good social community at the workplace, and what can you do to strengthen it?
Here is what you can do as a manager
- Use the annual appraisal interview to find out about what makes work meaningful for your employees and to discuss whether changes should be made to their tasks, responsibilities or skills development During these interviews, you should make sure you show employees how they contribute to achieving the goals and visions of the department and the company.
- Prioritise and enable development. Skills development helps balance employees’ resources and professional qualifications with demands at work. Employees will experience better cohesion in their work and thereby find work more meaningful.
You should examine whether what creates value for your employees could be of value to your company. For example, does an employee want a new area of responsibility because it will bring them more value and meaning in their work? - Clear goals for tasks and a clear division of roles help employees to be more aware of their role in achieving goals. This will make it easier for the individual employee to see what they bring to the table, and what others bring, and this will give them a better opportunity to assess whether they find their work meaningful.
Similarly, a clear mission and vision for the company will help ensure that both you and your employees know where the company is heading. This will ensure an experience of alignment between actions, values and goals. - Create opportunities for influence. What makes work meaningful differs from person to person. Therefore, as a manager you should organise work according to the individual’s need for influence. Some people find it meaningful to follow a task through from start to finish, while others prefer to concentrate on a small part of the task.
- Make room for social interaction. Culture, community and social identity can also help make work more meaningful. As a manager, you can support and facilitate social activities in day-to-day work, for example at staff meetings and joint breakfast events, or at other events outside normal working hours.
- Instil trust and be fair. Trust and fairness are important when you want to make work meaningful for your employees. Read more under Social capital.
- General initiatives at company level. General initiatives, such as a clear vision, mission and a goal for the company, a staff policy and a training policy, as well as the introduction of appraisal interviews, contribute to making work more meaningful for individual employees. Such initiatives may require decision-making at a more general level of the company. You should use the channels available to launch such initiatives.