Is My Work Relevant?

Continuing on the theme shared in the last two posts, the second factor that can inhibit an employee’s happiness and sense of engagement is irrelevance. Lenicioni, in his book The Truth About Employee Engagement, explains that employees feel most relevant when they are needed and feel as though their work has an impact on others. This certainly includes their boss. Managers can help their staff by simply sharing what impact the employee’s work has on the manager and how it benefitted the team. This enriches an employee’s sense of purpose.

As a manager, this might make you cringe. It could feel self-serving to express how your own life has been improved by the work of your staff, but that is exactly how you can improve engagement in your team. It can be as simple as expressing how and why employees’ contributions have impacted your work as their supervisor. It provides a concrete sense of purpose.

We each can take steps to improve our own sense of engagement by sharing with our teams and our leaders that we need to know that what we do adds value to our team. Knowing our contribution is relevant to the success as a team will have a powerful impact. We can do this for ourselves, to assure we are doing something relevant.