Today, with smaller budgets and bigger workloads handled by fewer people, companies in the United States expect their employees to do more with less. That may be why some 70% of American employees feel disengaged from their work. They show up for paychecks but feel scant personal incentive to excel. Whether their companies meet their goals matters little to them. So how do you engage workers under these troubling circumstances? Procter & Gamble senior executive Scott Mautz urges employers to make work meaningful, and he believes that engagement will follow. He details how to create a job environment filled with meaning and how it can inspire employees. Mautz offers many good ideas, though some inevitably verge on platitudes. Still, getAbstract recommends his useful book to CEOs, HR executives, entrepreneurs and managers.
Important Work
Before he became a Nobel Prize winner, physicist Richard Feynman headed a team of engineers working on a special project for the US government during World War II in America’s Southwest. The engineers’ task was to perform numerous boring calculations. Although the math wasn’t difficult, the work went poorly. The project fell notably behind schedule, and the engineers constantly made easy-to-avoid errors. Feynman understood that the relatively simple math wasn’t confounding the engineers; the problem was that they were disengaged from their work, which took place at the highly classified facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Feynman suggested that his government supervisors tell the engineers the purpose behind their tedious tasks, which heretofore had been kept from them for reasons of national security. Robert Oppenheimer, the project director, briefed the engineers on the ultimate goal of their work. As Oppenheimer explained it, the engineers were not – as it appeared – performing pointless calculations for some trivial physics experiment. The entire Los Alamos scientific and technical community was running the most momentous scientific race in world...
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