The Power of Meeting Your Employees’ Needs

What we discovered is that people feel better and perform better and more sustainably when four basic needs are met: renewal (physical); value (emotional), focus (mental) and purpose (spiritual).

Is there any doubt that when we feel more energized, appreciated, focused and purposeful, we perform better? Think about it: The opportunity and encouragement to intermittently rest and renew our energy during the work day serves as an antidote to the increasing overload so many of us feel in a world of relentlessly rising demand. Feeling valued creates a deeper level of trust and security at work, which frees us to spend less energy seeking and defending our value, and more energy creating it. In a world in which our attention is increasingly under siege, better focus makes it possible get more work done, in less time, at a higher level of quality. And finally, a higher purpose – the sense that what we do matters and serves something larger than our immediate self-interest – is a uniquely powerful source of motivation.

What it does require is a willingness among leaders to test their longstanding assumption that that performance is best measured by the number of hours employees puts in – and the more continuous the better — rather than by the value they generate, however they choose to do their work.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/the-power-of-meeting-your-employees-needs/