The Real Drivers of Employee Performance: Love & Trust

In our last article, we discussed the importance of building trust in business team settings. One of the core tenants of this is that the employees trust their direct leader to: 

1. care about them 
2. be competent and proactive in meeting their needs 

But there’s another piece to the equation when it comes to improving performance: Employees also need to love what they do at least some of the time. 

Not all of it – not everyone can love every aspect of what they do day-to-day. But it’s easier than many think to find avenues of joy in work. That’s because when it may not be a particularly enjoyable task, there are methods of creative management, communication, or collaboration that fuel employee joy and love for what they do. 

Here’s the proof that building roles with love in mind is important, according to recent research from ADPRI: 

Team members whose days have some element of love, strength, joy, or excitement are far more likely to be productive, to be more loyal to the company than others, and to be able to combat burnout both in work and in life. The studies point to the fact that love for the work “is a precursor and an amplifier of performance.” 

How do you build roles with love in mind?

Leaders need to get intentional about helping their teams find some love in their jobs. In research in doctors and nurses (even considering the pandemic), if less than 20% of your work consists of things you love to do, you’re far more likely to experience burnout (both mental and physical). Interestingly enough, loving more than 20% does not seem to continue improving resilience—a little goes a long way when it comes to business. 

Demonstrate to your teams that you truly care about helping them find love and joy in their jobs by: 

• Building trust 
• Showing commitment to giving them more discretionary time 
• Whether this means flexibility in how they get the job done, as long as it gets done, or getting them the tools they need to do their jobs better and faster, leaving them more time for anything else 
• Setting both career and personal life goals, and exploring how you or the company can help them achieve both 
• Lulu Lemon does this solely during onboarding in regards to an employee’s first year with the company, and their employee engagement levels are 2X industry average (study) 

Transformation in how we work and how we manage our people can feel daunting and nebulous, because there haven’t been standard ways of measuring how well a given team is doing any of these things until now. We built a system that actually does that: measures what feels ambiguous, gives hard data, and shows clear action steps to improve things like love and trust, and exactly how it will affect things like productivity, revenue, turnover, and more. 

The Great Resignation is no anomaly – it’s a reckoning of humans that are asking for more from their jobs, so that they can have more from their life. The successful businesses will be those that take things like love and trust seriously, as soon as possible.