Employee Engagement Isn’t About Perks. It’s About Meaning.

As a transformational leader, it’s important that you focus on employee engagement; the people who work for you must feel like they are part of a team. What you don’t want is for them to feel like they’re just cogs in a machine, or like the human equivalent of drones.

That may sound like a fine distinction, but I believe it’s a critical one. While you want your employees to see themselves in the big picture, you also want them to see how their individual role impacts the people around them. You want them to feel invested in something meaningful, and to know that they’re not just carrying out orders and doing busywork each day, but actually making a difference.

I think this is arguably the key component in employee engagement. I talk to a lot of employees who tell me they left their last job because they just got bored of going through the motions each day, never really feeling like their work amounted to anything. What these employees want is meaning -and the employers who offer meaning are the ones who will see the highest levels of employee engagement.

What Does Meaning Look Like?

Now maybe we should back up and discuss what meaning really looks like; that is, what meaning means! A lot of people are going to hear that word and assume that I’m…