Scott Constantine of Performance Link NZ shares a series of plain truth articles about creating a highly engaged workforce.

Meaningfulness comes from feeling worthwhile, valued, and valuable, as well as feeling able to give to one’s work and receive from one’s work.  It is an important consideration if you want to build a highly engaged workforce.  

But how can a great sense of meaningfulness possibly be achieved in basic or lower level jobs? 

Once upon a time back in Organisational Behaviour 101 we would have leapt onto job enlargement, job rotation, or job enrichment as the solution to making employees' jobs better.  In reality, this is not always possible and when it is, the question begs to be asked, does a broader range, greater mix, or continual swapping of meaningless tasks make them any more meaningful.  Well it might, but not necessarily!  If we want to have people doing meaningful work then we need to do two things: We need to put the right people into the roles, people who can relate to the work.  Then we need to make sure the work that needs to be done is made to be meaningful.  Then actually we need to remember this is about people rather than tasks and therefore do a third thing as well. We need to help these workers to feel valued, valuable, and that their effort is worthwhile.  

Job design and tasks

The sense of meaningfulness derived from tasks themselves is affected by employees’ perceptions around the importance of the tasks and the degree in which they feel they are able to give their true-selves to these tasks.  This is about how employees see and feel about their jobs, as well as how they see themselves.  

This sounds awfully basic, but these things all help convey a message "that these tasks are important."  

The employee is a person

Apart from the job tasks themselves, there are other things you can do to help employees to feel valued and valuable and subsequently increase the level of meaningfulness, and ultimately engagement.  Recognise team members as unique individuals, ensure that interactions at work promote dignity, self-appreciation and a sense of value. Recognising components of employees’ lives that are not work related but which help each individual to be recognised as a unique person all help employees to feel valued and valuable.

The po!nt:  "You can create meaningfulness by making tasks important without changing the nature of the task themselves.  Also, rather than just connecting employees’ job tasks back to the bigger picture, connect each employee’s particular attributes back to the bigger picture.  Even if the tasks and procedures allow little flexibility or room for change, you can also create meaningfulness by valuing each employee’s uniqueness, and creating space for them to be their true-selves.  Finally, recognise the great attributes that employees utilise in their outside of work lives and draw these into their work role within the team.  There's plenty of opportunity to raise engagement at all levels."

  www.performancelink.co.nz