Motivating Your Team By Finding Meaningfulness

​As a manager, it can often feel impossible to do your own job to its best, fight all the fires which need fighting AND stay on top of the team and how they’re feeling. Fostering motivation across a team, large or small, can be one of the trickiest parts of being a leader.

Be honest: doing the same job day in, day out, can become monotonous. From time to time, a member of your workforce is going to become bored or unchallenged, thus becoming demotivated. And a lack of enthusiasm for the job almost always has a directly negative effect on business performance.

So, motivate them by helping your employees find meaningfulness in the everyday activities of their job.

The word meaningfulness is quite a mouthful, and its definition follows. Meaningfulness doesn’t mean to find enjoyment or happiness in what you do, but to delve into why you’re doing it; what’s the purpose, what is it going to help with, what are you contributing to.

Having your employees find meaningfulness in their work can improve:

• Job satisfaction – and as a result, increase staff retention

• Employee engagement – by helping align your employees’ goals with those of the company

• Mental health – by reducing the stresses attributed to completing their job

Finding the meaningfulness in their job will help employees remember why they’re doing it during the tough times, whilst they’re facing challenges.

So, some examples of what ‘finding meaningfulness’ might look like:

• Why should I devote some time to clearing my inbox this afternoon? Because it will help me prioritise the tasks I have left to complete, and reduce the chance of me becoming or feeling overwhelmed by my workload.

• Why am I attending this meeting? Because it will help myself, and my employer, on the path to achieving our goals. It will bring me recognition at work, and a feeling of accomplishment.

• Why is it important for me to spend time properly analysing this spreadsheet? Because it may contain important data and metrics which could really help boost team direction and performance moving forwards.

When an employee finds meaning in even the simplest of tasks, they’ll also find satisfaction. A person who finds satisfaction in the role is more likely to stick around, seeking challenge and/or progression on the day to day.

By leading your employees to understand the role they play, you create a connection between the person as an individual, their place in the team and how they contribute to the business. Finding meaningfulness is akin to understanding the value you add, and where.

And doing so can play a huge part in positively impacting employee engagement levels.

Finding meaningfulness in what some might consider “menial” tasks has been proven to reduce stress, thus motivating staff to get on with the bits of the job they may not find as satisfying as others. Mental health should be at the forefront of every manager’s mind – so stay abreast of who’s avoiding doing what, get to the bottom of why, and us meaningfulness to help them find a way to enjoy even the small, seemingly insignificant tasks.

As a manager, motivation is paramount to a high-performing team – and reminding your employees of the point behind the work they do could be just the ticket to keeping them on track.

When you partner with us, you don’t just benefit from years of recruiting expertise, a world-class network and a team of dedicated consultants – but all of that on top of years spent understanding how to retain and motivate individuals once they’ve been hired. We’re not a one-and-done recruitment agency – we’re a recruitment partner, and we want to grow your business with you, for the long-term.

Our team is slowly but surely returning from furlough and we couldn’t be more proud – don’t hesitate to get in touch.