Bring love to work: The ultimate way to engage employees
Bring love to work: The ultimate way to engage employees
Bring love to work: The ultimate way to engage employees
Stephen Stills had once written – “If you can’t be in the job you love…love the job you’re in.”
Love is a very strong human feeling – a sentiment that connects two or more people, a person with activities, inanimate objects, etc. The feeling is blended with emotions, gratitude, purpose, and more. However, love takes effort.
Our topic today is about being in love with work. We mostly limit love between two or more individuals or between individuals and hobbies like cooking, music, dance, etc., but here we are extending the concept to how viewing work from the lens of love can help improve organizational work culture. Loving work is being emotionally connected with the tasks at hand, is about looking forward to being occupied and doing something meaningful.
What is love? The essence of being in love with your work
Leaving aside the fairytale stories, love is when two people bond with one another, have affectionate feelings that they mutually share, and are drawn into a relationship of commitment. The bond is marked with feelings of care and mutual respect. The relationship is about filling their lives with positivity, warmth, and a general sense of being appreciated and seen. Can this analogy be extended to the workplace?
“The bond is marked with feelings of care and mutual respect.”
Ideally, yes. It would be great if employees love their work with as many emotions as they love their family and friends because love brings out the best in an individual. Love filles people with positive energy. They become enthusiastic and motivated. Thus, they would give their best in every aspect of their job, be it the tasks at hand or maintaining a strong emotional connection with employers, managers, peers, and subordinates. But, that’s too utopian because, in reality, most employees are not as motivated as you want them to be. Considering that only 15% of the total workforce is engaged with their work, most employees come to work every day not with a lot of love.
There are enough and more statistics about employee engagement at the workplace that indicate that love is missing in the workplace or, in other words, employees work, but they do so because of various reasons and compulsions and not per se because they love to work. That special feeling or attachment seems absent in about 85% of the workforce. Consequently, it is leaving an ever-lasting impact on their productivity, which in turn influences your organizational goals and business performances. Thus, understanding the essence of ‘being in love with work’ and doing your bit as an employer, manager, or HR is important.
You would want to have employees fall in love with work for obvious reasons. When they love what they do, they enjoy it and go the extra mile. For example, we love being with our close-knit group, which accentuates our best form, our true self. We are comfortable in our skin, have no pretension, and have the best time ever. That is how it should be at work too. When employees are in love with work, they are bound to enjoy coming to work, day after day. Not just that, they will happily go the extra mile to collaborate and work as a team with their subordinates, colleagues, and superiors and contribute willingly towards a better organizational culture.
Is it practically possible to always love what one does for a livelihood? Maybe not because every job has certain aspects that are not too pleasant. Being in love with work does not mean that one has to love everything about their task. We don’t love everything about our partners, kids and parents, do we? We love them despite it. We love them because the moments of joy and contentment experienced with them are more than the moments of discord or unhappiness.
“The essence of loving work is that it inspires the person to do his job well.”
Bringing love to work – strengthens trust, builds a collaborative workforce
Being in love with work can be very rewarding because it helps employees search and look for positive things, bringing optimism and trust to the workplace. Loving work generates the passion for outdoing the previous performance. It is a big turn-on, not just for an individual employee but people around him because pragmatism attracts like-minded attributes. Work is no longer a monotony that one has to get through daily since the individual enjoys the job at hand. It is a great way to bring in a constructive mindset and approach that can become the foundation for creating a collaborative workspace.
This Valentine’s Season – set a goal for enhancing the emotional connection with work
Being in love with work is more about the intrinsic nature of the employee. Employers might wonder what they can do to make their employees love work. There are two things that employers can do as facilitators of loving work:
Create a culture where employees love their work and are emotionally connected
Employers need to create a culture where employees are motivated enough to give their best and work dedicatedly. While most of the emotional connection with work is in the hands of individual employees, HR and employers can do everything possible to make the workplace fun, motivating, and inspiring. For example,
- Continuous and consistent performance analysis and management.
- Create a high-trust work environment.
- Ensure inclusiveness in team meetings, work distribution, etc.
- Ensure pay parity and fair treatment.
- Frequent, open, and honest communication
- Fair and justified rewards & recognition system in place.
- Offer career growth and learning opportunities.
Fortify love for work with reinforcements in daily life
If your employees love work, you can keep them motivated by offering reinforcements. Such motivations assure employees that they are on the right track. One of the best reinforcement is peer-to-peer appreciation.Verbal acknowledgment or an electronic message in cognizance on a public platform from a peer reinforces his philosophies about work. Similarly, another aspect is about being appreciated by seniors and team leaders. A pat on the back, a listening ear, and an empathetic outlook can work wonders for employees trying to work self-assuredly and give their best.
Conclusion
How do you show appreciation when you love someone? The easiest and the quickest way is to compliment them. Buzzz by GRG India is a Reward & Recognition platform that can be used to appreciate team members with peer-to-peer recognition features. Such platforms encourage open feedback and communication that can be used as an effective medium to help enhance confidence in employees to keep loving their work.
Stephen Stills had once written – “If you can’t be in the job you love…love the job you’re in.”
Love is a very strong human feeling – a sentiment that connects two or more people, a person with activities, inanimate objects, etc. The feeling is blended with emotions, gratitude, purpose, and more. However, love takes effort.
Our topic today is about being in love with work. We mostly limit love between two or more individuals or between individuals and hobbies like cooking, music, dance, etc., but here we are extending the concept to how viewing work from the lens of love can help improve organizational work culture. Loving work is being emotionally connected with the tasks at hand, is about looking forward to being occupied and doing something meaningful.
What is love? The essence of being in love with your work
Leaving aside the fairytale stories, love is when two people bond with one another, have affectionate feelings that they mutually share, and are drawn into a relationship of commitment. The bond is marked with feelings of care and mutual respect. The relationship is about filling their lives with positivity, warmth, and a general sense of being appreciated and seen. Can this analogy be extended to the workplace?
“The bond is marked with feelings of care and mutual respect.”
Ideally, yes. It would be great if employees love their work with as many emotions as they love their family and friends because love brings out the best in an individual. Love filles people with positive energy. They become enthusiastic and motivated. Thus, they would give their best in every aspect of their job, be it the tasks at hand or maintaining a strong emotional connection with employers, managers, peers, and subordinates. But, that’s too utopian because, in reality, most employees are not as motivated as you want them to be. Considering that only 15% of the total workforce is engaged with their work, most employees come to work every day not with a lot of love.
There are enough and more statistics about employee engagement at the workplace that indicate that love is missing in the workplace or, in other words, employees work, but they do so because of various reasons and compulsions and not per se because they love to work. That special feeling or attachment seems absent in about 85% of the workforce. Consequently, it is leaving an ever-lasting impact on their productivity, which in turn influences your organizational goals and business performances. Thus, understanding the essence of ‘being in love with work’ and doing your bit as an employer, manager, or HR is important.
You would want to have employees fall in love with work for obvious reasons. When they love what they do, they enjoy it and go the extra mile. For example, we love being with our close-knit group, which accentuates our best form, our true self. We are comfortable in our skin, have no pretension, and have the best time ever. That is how it should be at work too. When employees are in love with work, they are bound to enjoy coming to work, day after day. Not just that, they will happily go the extra mile to collaborate and work as a team with their subordinates, colleagues, and superiors and contribute willingly towards a better organizational culture.
Is it practically possible to always love what one does for a livelihood? Maybe not because every job has certain aspects that are not too pleasant. Being in love with work does not mean that one has to love everything about their task. We don’t love everything about our partners, kids and parents, do we? We love them despite it. We love them because the moments of joy and contentment experienced with them are more than the moments of discord or unhappiness.
“The essence of loving work is that it inspires the person to do his job well.”
Bringing love to work – strengthens trust, builds a collaborative workforce
Being in love with work can be very rewarding because it helps employees search and look for positive things, bringing optimism and trust to the workplace. Loving work generates the passion for outdoing the previous performance. It is a big turn-on, not just for an individual employee but people around him because pragmatism attracts like-minded attributes. Work is no longer a monotony that one has to get through daily since the individual enjoys the job at hand. It is a great way to bring in a constructive mindset and approach that can become the foundation for creating a collaborative workspace.
This Valentine’s Season – set a goal for enhancing the emotional connection with work
Being in love with work is more about the intrinsic nature of the employee. Employers might wonder what they can do to make their employees love work. There are two things that employers can do as facilitators of loving work:
Create a culture where employees love their work and are emotionally connected
Employers need to create a culture where employees are motivated enough to give their best and work dedicatedly. While most of the emotional connection with work is in the hands of individual employees, HR and employers can do everything possible to make the workplace fun, motivating, and inspiring. For example,
- Continuous and consistent performance analysis and management.
- Create a high-trust work environment.
- Ensure inclusiveness in team meetings, work distribution, etc.
- Ensure pay parity and fair treatment.
- Frequent, open, and honest communication
- Fair and justified rewards & recognition system in place.
- Offer career growth and learning opportunities.
Fortify love for work with reinforcements in daily life
If your employees love work, you can keep them motivated by offering reinforcements. Such motivations assure employees that they are on the right track. One of the best reinforcement is peer-to-peer appreciation.Verbal acknowledgment or an electronic message in cognizance on a public platform from a peer reinforces his philosophies about work. Similarly, another aspect is about being appreciated by seniors and team leaders. A pat on the back, a listening ear, and an empathetic outlook can work wonders for employees trying to work self-assuredly and give their best.
Conclusion
How do you show appreciation when you love someone? The easiest and the quickest way is to compliment them. Buzzz by GRG India is a Reward & Recognition platform that can be used to appreciate team members with peer-to-peer recognition features. Such platforms encourage open feedback and communication that can be used as an effective medium to help enhance confidence in employees to keep loving their work.