Bringing meaning to work
This week’s episode of Engaging Internal Comms is a short interim episode between our normal interviews. In it we would like to share some ideas with you that we think are useful and valuable. The Big Picture People are already using these ideas with our clients so we know how helpful they can be.
In these short episodes we’re going to share resources with you that you can download from our website (thebigpicturepeople.co.uk/resources) These resources are a mixture of personal reflection exercises, which are things that you can do on your own, and team exercises.
The first resource we want to introduce you to stemmed from work we are doing with clients where they are starting to look at how people’s expectations of their work changed during the pandemic and how this affects what people want from their work.
This is a useful resource to use now as a personal refection exercise and we’ve called it ‘Bringing meaning to work’. We’ve all had a chance to re-evaluate our life priorities over the last few months and it’s a good opportunity for us as internal communicators and employee engagers to maybe think about this on an individual, team and organisational level. As people return to work, we need to be looking at the different expectations that they have for their work and for their lives.
The resource ‘Bringing meaning to work’ is just a short one-page exercise designed to help you explore what some of the things are that our people need from their work at the moment.
The question is why do people work for your organisation other than money? Essentially everyone expects some degree of remuneration, that is a hygiene factor, but we’re looking beyond that; what is it that people are looking for from their work?
There are five different levels to look at:
1. Individual level:
- What are some of the intrinsic motivators?
- What is it about the work itself that makes it attractive?
- What are the career prospects?
2. Team level:
- How important is social interaction? This has been a huge challenge over the last few months so this should be something that we need to be conscious of going forward when we’re communicating with and engaging our people.
3. Organisation level
- How has your organisation been perceived during these last few months?
- Have you stood up and been counted?
- Do you have strong values that people are proud to go out and talk about?
- How connected do your people now feel to the organisation and its external persona?
4. Professional level
- Sometimes people’s loyalty to their profession is much stronger than to the actual organisation itself and it’s important to recognise and respect that this duality that can exist.
5. Customer / Service user
- Is there a strong connection between your people and the people that your organisation serves or who it sells to?
- How does this affect people and the way that they work?
This is all on the downloadable resource and there are also instructions on how to use it.
The next short episode we will be recording links to this one and will explain how the resource in this show feeds into your organisational values. This isn’t necessarily about rewriting your organisational values, but about how we can dovetail some of the elements we’ve been looking at in what people want from their work into these values.
These short interim episodes are all about giving you, the listeners, some tools that we already use that we hope you might find useful.
We would love to hear your feedback about the podcast and especially the new format, you can contact us at thebigpicturepeople.co.uk/contact/