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Employees want to know that their work matters to the overall success of the company. It’s important that jobs are designed in a way that their value and impact is clear to the employee. Technology companies are a great example of this: engineers at Facebook take part in Hackathons where they can work on new projects that may end up being product features. At Google, 20% of an employee’s time is set aside to work on personal projects and new ideas. Job design and clarity of contribution can make a big difference on productivity.

• Make sure everyone in the company knows how they contribute to your overall success. This is true regardless of how you define success: goals, objectives, mission, etc. You can create a simple template to role objectives to all employees and link them appropriately. It does not need to be over engineered, just make it simple. You should review this at least quarterly with the team to make sure everyone is still on track.
• Understand your team’s competencies and interests. Think about this broadly, including what people are good at and like to do inside of work and outside of work. Try to make sure part of the role includes areas that are interesting to them, even if they may not be part of the day to day job. This can be achieved by letting employees work on cross functional project teams, shadow leaders, do lunch times talks, etc. There are many ways to make sure people are finding joy and passion in their work. As a leader, one of your primary roles (if not your primary role) is to facilitate this.
• Ask and listen. Ensure that you know your team well enough to know how much is too much and when they are not challenged enough. There is no special way to do this. You need to talk with your team, communicate openly about their work and ask appropriate questions. Being bored is about the worst thing for smart people. Being consistently overworked will ultimately have a diminished return.
• Rethink the traditional “job description”. I think people get too caught up in job descriptions. I like to think about “job accountabilities”. Nike uses a “Success Profile”. Whatever you use, make sure it does not limit people. Think about contribution and accountabilities instead of simply writing a description.