“Rewarding work”, we hear it here and there.  When the more employees at a company find their jobs rewarding, the more profits the company surely will gain. Therefore, companies are desperate to make their employees enjoy their jobs and feel rewarded by giving them new tasks at work, adopting a suggestion system, establishing fabulous company cafeterias, or practicing personnel change and pay raise and so on.

 

However, are these challenges really in the right direction? According to a survey held by the Cabinet, less than 20% of employees find their jobs rewarding. To make it worse, the number keeps decreasing over time. Sadly, although employees spend most of their time at work, it is very difficult for them to feel rewarded with their jobs. So far, no companies have found a useful measure.

 

There might be employers who say, “I don’t care how my employees feel at work”, but taken the situation where companies competing each other for better human resources into consideration, they should correct their philosophy. It is OK if he or she is the only employee at a company, though.

 

Here is a question. When employees find their job rewarding? Let me introduce an interesting experiment conducted in the 1920s at Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works in Illinois.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect#Relay_assembly_experiments

 

 

Surprisingly, the result of this experiment established a theory that what makes employees feel rewarded is not what they do, but the realization of significance of what they do.

 

In short, the sense of playing an important role brings an employee a rewarded feeling no matter how monotonous or boring the job is.

 

 

When a person in sales cannot find the job rewarding, it is not because of his/her marketing skill, but he/she is not really proud of the product or service he/she is dealing with.

 

As for an engineer, it is not because of his/her performance, but he/she has no idea how the technology contributes to the world.

 

As for an administrative worker, it is because he/she feels what he/she does is trivial in a company.

 

 

The Cabinet’s survey shows the ratio of employees who feel rewarded at work has nothing to do with the size of the company. In fact, less employees feel rewarded at major companies. We cannot stand being “just one of them” or engaging in “something useless”.

 

The blog title is a quote of Peter Drucker and he says, “Those who live only to eat are not citizens. Furthermore, they are far from being a citizen”.

 

Do you think your job is “important”? If not, you might want to reconsider your career.