How Purpose Drives Engagement

What Drives Employees? A look at how Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery at work leads to increased motivation and employee engagement - Part 2 of 4

By Chris Atkinson, HR Consultant, Organizational Strategy, CPS HR Consulting  

In the first post in this series, we introduced three factors at work that can lead to increased engagement and motivation: purpose, autonomy and mastery. These factors, identified by Daniel Pink in his book Drive, also align with questions on our employee engagement survey. You can view that post here. In this post, we will examine Pink’s first factor, purpose, which aligns with our survey question “The work I do is meaningful to me.” 

Purpose

In Drive, Pink talks about how people who find meaning and purpose in their work are tapping into one of the greatest motivating factors. He argues that people want to have a sense of “doing something beyond themselves." Having a sense that there is a good reason behind your work is what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning and into work with a genuinely positive attitude. Think about jobs that you have had. When you had a job where you could see the purpose and meaning behind what you did every day, weren’t you more engaged than when you worked in jobs where you could not see the reason behind what you were doing?

So, what steps could your organization take to increase the sense of meaning and purpose employees feel in their work, or for that matter, any other area of employee engagement?

Action Planning for Purpose

Before we talk about what you can do to create a greater sense of meaning and purpose in employees’ work, let’s first talk about how to approach increasing employee engagement in general. Without getting into too much detail, there are a few key steps you would need to take at a minimum:

1. Conduct an employee engagement survey so that you can accurately capture the level of employee engagement in your workforce.
2. Identify the questions that focus on factors that influence employee engagement the most in your organization through some type of statistical analysis, such as the key driver analysis mentioned in the first article in this series.
3. Have conversations with employees to uncover root causes behind the responses to survey questions identified in step two. 
4. Create a plan of action to address and improve scores on the targeted questions.

While it is important to speak with employees to gain insight into the underlying factors and perceptions behind question responses before deciding on an action plan, we also like to give our clients some general action planning tips to increase scores on specific survey items. So, what do you think might be appropriate steps if your organization had identified that "The work I do is meaningful to me" as a question to focus improving responses to? You could consider the following:

• Help employees identify the types of work that will bring them a sense of engagement and meaning. 
• Identify the key strengths of each employee and help ensure that their job allows them to use their strengths. When employees feel they are doing what they are good at, they will be more likely to find meaning in their work. 
• Encourage managers/supervisors to work with their employees to put them in the right situations for them to excel (even if this means that an employee will need to move to another unit ).
• As part of one-on-one meetings with employees, discuss whether they find meaningful purpose in their work. If not, discuss how to connect their work with important outcomes.

Stay tuned for the next segment in our series in which we examine how the survey question “I have a choice in deciding how I do my work” relates to Pink’s concept of autonomy, drives engagement, and the things you can do to increase employees’ sense of autonomy.