You hire each employee to fulfill a specific role within your organization. And, with rare exceptions, most of your team members want to meet or exceed your expectations. But they also want more. Your employees yearn to feel a deep passion for their work and to be inspired by your company’s mission. They long to make a positive impact on the world around them.
As their leader, you should desire these things for your team. By unleashing their passion, you’ll help your staff feel empowered, fulfilled, and happy. Passion starts with employee engagement.
According to Gallup, “…engaged employees produce better business outcomes than other employees — across industry, company size, and nationality, and in good economic times and bad.” The numbers bear this out; the behaviors of highly engaged business units result in a 23% difference in profitability. If that’s not incentive enough to focus on engagement, Gallup also reported, “Not engaged or actively disengaged employees account for approximately $1.9 trillion in lost productivity nationally.”
When your employees have this deep connection to their jobs, your company will reap numerous benefits. Engagement will go up. Turnover will go down. And your team will become an innovative, problem-solving force that fosters productive relationships and pursues continuous learning — all in the name of moving your enterprise forward.
So how do you encourage, tap into, and nurture your employees’ passions? You:
- Create a culture where forward-thinking risk-taking is celebrated and rewarded.
- Demonstrate how each employee contributes to the organization’s success.
- Provide continuous, varied, and tailored professional development opportunities.
Set the Culture
Your organization has to facilitate passion through engagement. And your company culture must reflect that desire to support the differing needs of each team member.
Shaping a culture that fosters passion begins with leadership — old-school, rigid micromanaging and narrow-focused supervision is out. Collaborative, flexible, trusting, and visionary leadership is in.
Your employees need to know that it’s okay to fail if a calculated risk doesn’t pay off. They also need to know that you’re not after perfection — you’re after results. And, while today’s performance is important, tomorrow’s growth and evolution are even more so.
This organizational stance has to be championed from the top down. As a leader, you need to model the behavior you want to see in your employees. Let your own passion show before you can expect your team to reveal theirs.
Show the Impact
To be genuinely invested in and truly passionate about their work, your employees need to see that what they do matters. To help them recognize this, show them how their effort impacts their department, organization, and community. When each employee can trace their output to a larger outcome, they’ll take ownership of it and strive to improve.
Here are a few ways you can show your employees their real impact:
- Have regular department meetings where each employee shares what they are working on and can provide feedback.
- Go over an organizational chart with staff and explain how their effort is essential for the company’s overall workflow and achievement.
- Arrange interdepartmental meetings to see and discuss where their work fits into the larger process.
- Encourage volunteerism in the community so team members develop a connection to the company’s future potential customers — and employees.
Provide the Opportunity
According to Omnia’s 2024 Talent Trends report, “The value of a company aligning with the ambitions of employees is clear. 77% of job applicants research company culture before applying for a job. 92% say that the company culture impacts their decision to stay longer.”
When you invest in an employee’s development, you tell them that you care about them and their career. With an enhanced skill set, they’ll feel more confident navigating uncertain times. They’ll also feel more loyal to your organization.
This development can also uncover and nurture your employees’ passions. As they learn by creating and doing, they’ll realize their potential and find new ways to help your organization achieve its goals. It’s a real win-win.
For best results, provide each employee with various developmental experiences tailored to their emerging skills and interests. Let them interact with other passionate team members across the organization to spread enthusiasm and innovation. And most importantly, give them ample space to experiment and implement what they learn.
How Omnia Can Help
It’s exciting to watch your team’s passion develop and deepen, benefiting each member and the business as a whole. What if you could get a sneak peek into your employees’ strengths, tendencies, and work preferences? That insight would help you position them for success both now and in the future and determine optimal developmental opportunities.
Good news! You absolutely can get that insight anytime you want it. A behavioral assessment provides all of those details and more, helping you lead, motivate, and communicate effectively with your team. You can learn more about Omnia’s behavioral assessments here.
Remember, effective communication leads to more productive employees and a more profitable workplace.
According to Dan Schawbel, managing partner at Workplace Intelligence (as reported by The Workforce Institute at UKG), “Feeling heard drives a sense of purpose and belonging. By implementing employee feedback, people leaders can create an organizational culture of psychological safety and trust that thrives when its people thrive.”
Behavioral insights can provide leadership with ideas on how to communicate with each team member efficiently and thoughtfully, to ensure that they each feel heard.
Omnia offers a variety of reports using behavioral assessment data. For example, the Team Dynamics Report provides an in-depth custom analysis of an existing or potential team. On the other hand, our Professional Development Report is an automated self-awareness report written directly to existing employees.
Final Thoughts
Passionate employees can achieve great feats for your organization. But, they must be empowered to create, innovate, and take risks. When they are, you’ll retain valuable human capital, and your company will take giant leaps forward — both necessities in today’s ever-competitive business world.
This article is a repost from August 2020 with updated information and statistics.
