How Passion For Work Can Transform The Performance Of Your Company
As an emotion, passion brings out the best in people. When accompanied by this feeling, any action you take becomes memorable. Moreover, it is a contagious emotion that can do wonders in a team as well. An employee with a passion for work can spread this positive boost to the rest of the team as well make a tremendous impact on overall performance.
Here at eLI, we have witnessed this positive impact of passion over the last 10 years of our operation. Hence, we encourage and inspire passion in what we do to do it better. Since we’re celebrating our 10-year anniversary, we would love to help other companies to do the same. In this article, we present the “why” and the “how” of passion as a core value in the workplace.
Are you already passionate about it? Then let’s dive right in!
Why Is Passion For Work Important?
Throughout the years, the word “workplace” has acquired a rather negative connotation. Often, when people talk about workplaces, they express a negative sentiment about hours that lack freedom. However, in the current era of the Great Recession, companies have realized the importance of passion in their workforce and its solid connection with the goal completion of the company.
Nowadays, passion has become a necessity in a working environment. In general, passion is a feeling which operates like a booster for multiple positive outcomes that derive from within a person. In this article, we focus on 5 of the most important effects of passion in the workplace.
1. Passion For Work Brings Innovation
There is no innovation without passion. By definition, innovation requires a step out of the ordinary, thinking outside the box, and going the extra mile. Passion for work in this case is the fuel which keeps the innovation engine running. If this fuel runs out, you will witness your workforce going back to routine working—aiming for maintenance and not improvement. After all, only a passionate employee would ever notice that a current process could be improved within the company. They are the people who will work harder to address a problem rather than avoid it.
Here at eLI, we address innovation on a daily basis. We do not view the eLearning environment as stable and complete, but we aim to improve it little by little. This is what has helped us and our partners over these remarkable 10 years. That said, if your company considers innovation as part of its main goals, then you should aim to create a passionate workforce that will be at the forefront of your company.
2. Boosts Motivation
Even though passion and motivation are strongly related, they are two different things, and both are needed in the journey of standing out. On one hand, passion refers to the excitement of the moment, whereas motivation can be defined as the desire for a future benefit. There are cases in which motivation exists even when the person does not like their job but they have goals to achieve. Now imagine how these two work in collaboration: passion will make your employees enjoy what they are doing, and motivation will help them grow.
Inspiring motivation can be proven fruitful for your company in the macro game. It is the key to driving productivity and commitment to the overall goals. Moreover, motivation can also reduce the employee turnover of your company and help you build a solid team to work collaboratively with.
3. Paves The Path For Goal Completion
Completing goals is among the most important factors of every company and any industry. When considering enterprises, goals can be individual, team, or company. To achieve any of these objectives, a person is required to have not only the right skills but also the right mentality: the mentality of setting goals and achieving them. As a leader, you ought to inspire this type of mentality in your employees by making them feel involved in the core of the company.
That is also where passion comes into play. Passion as a core value can set the foundation for goal completion. A passionate workforce can work together more effectively since their goals align with company objectives. At the end of the day, some goals require 150% of the effort, which only a passionate employee can give.
4. Enhances The “Extra Step”
If we could name a feeling that boosts the extra mile, that would be passion. As we mentioned earlier, there is a correlation between passion and motivation when it comes to the workplace. A highly motivated employee is more likely to take the extra step in order to improve their performance and, hence, the overall performance of the company.
There are still companies that believe they can force employees to perform better. This is a recipe for failure though. The will to give more has to come from within. It has to be inspired by the team and the leader. In general, taking the extra step is the natural outcome of a positive environment.
5. Builds A Healthy Work Environment
There is a solid relationship between passion and a healthy work environment. To define, the word “healthy” refers to the mental status that it inspires in your employees. A healthy work environment is a place where goals are achieved, development is made, and successful collaboration happens. It is a win-win situation for everyone involved in the company’s objectives.
Passion can help you build such a healthy workplace. All the above-mentioned benefits of this core value can collaboratively create a unique and fruitful environment. A place filled with positive energy and happy employees. If you manage to build and maintain such a workplace, then you will witness an increase in both employee retention rate and income.
Passion: A Story From The eLI Team
To establish the importance of passion as a core value in the workplace, we have asked a member of our team to share a story about how it has affected their performance:
“Even before my first task in the marketing team of eLI, I was already impressed during the onboarding process. At that time, I realized that people here are willingly following several core values that the company addresses since day one. One of these values was passion. At first, I was shocked because I was used to companies that only value the power of revenue, but day by day I witnessed a change in my performance.
What has inspired passion for me? Well, as time passed, I started feeling important to the whole team. In fact, I began witnessing my contribution to the main goals of the company. This has helped me develop and maintain a constant passion for what I do. So, in short, I would say that feeling important and working with passionate members has helped me become passionate myself.“
How To Promote Passion As A Core Value In Your Company
There is no fixed manual for inspiring passion in your employees. However, there are multiple ways to address this which have been proven successful. In this section, we present the ones that helped us develop passion as a core value at eLearning Industry. Throughout the last 10 years, passion has been our valuable companion to make the “balcony dream” become a reality.
Challenge The Status Quo
“Challenge,” “innovate,” and “evolve” have been the three pillars of success here at eLI. We strongly believe that stability is bound to eventually lead to failure. That is why we challenge ourselves through daily, weekly, and monthly tasks to constantly improve. Passion always accompanies these efforts and keeps us focused on the main goal.
Inspiring passion can be achieved through challenging the status quo. Even though it is not an easy task, it needs to be part of your overall strategy. You can start promoting this mentality to your workforce by making them challenge themselves first. Start assigning them tasks from which they can improve. Then, show them the progress and reward accordingly. This process will generate a feeling of accomplishment and passion for the work they have done.
Put Your Employees In The Game
Your employees are the gears of your company, the organs which keep this entity alive. That is why you should treat them as such. That said, you may want to include your employees in the company objectives. By doing so, your workforce will feel like they “own” part of the company and also like they are part of it.
There are multiple ways to apply this method in any organization. One great example is to hold your employees accountable for their actions. This does not mean to only punish them but reward them for all the extra effort they make. Additionally, show them how this extra effort contributes to the main goals of the company. In this way, the employees will understand how valuable they are and will be more tempted to go the extra mile for you.
Reward And Empathy
Two things stick as core memories in the mind from a job. The first one is the role itself, which includes the tasks and the work experience. The second one is the overall sentiment that this job has left you with. For the latter, the team leader should implement a just reward system for the employees. A reward system will boost the confidence of the workforce, provide them with extra motivation, and align them with the main goal.
All these benefits pave the way for passion to take place. A motivated and happy employee has more chances of becoming passionate about his/her work than an overloaded one. Passion itself needs to be supported by reward and recognition to be maintained or even enhanced.
On the other hand, there is empathy, which is recommended in cases of employees underperforming or having a negative mentality for any reason. Workplaces are not always perfect. Even when they seem like they are, there is a chance that one employee does not feel that way. In this scenario, practicing empathy can help you evaluate things from their perspective and possibly even identify areas for improvement within the organization. At the very least, you’re able to get a glimpse into their headspace and work with them to find a solution.
In short, all the above-mentioned methods achieve the following:
- Inspire passion
- Increase productivity
- Reduce employee turnover and overload
- Boost employee retention
- Enhance goal acquisition and completion rate
- Increase revenue
Conclusion
Passion as a core value is vital for the success of a healthy business. Here at eLI, passion has been one of our driving assets that enhance our initiatives. Throughout the last 10 years, we have harvested the fruits of our efforts, which are made with passion. In this article, we presented some methods which have worked for us so far and which might benefit your business as well. We strongly believe that they should be included in every organization with high expectations and important values.
Make passion a core value for your organization and witness the transformation of your workforce. Make them passionate and believe in the statement of Forster, who said, “One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.”
Want to know more about the potion for eLI’s success? Then feel free to check out our The Best Things Begin On Balconies: A Celebration Of Our 10th Year and find the core values that could work for your company as well!
You can also download our eLI Audience Survey 2022: Leveraging eLearning Buyer Insights To Fuel Marketing Strategies to dive into the survey data analysis and see the real effect of working from home and social distancing on eLearning professionals, HR pros, and corporations worldwide.
Last, but not least, we invite you to guest post on eLearning Industry to share your thought leadership with our community, as well as subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest and greatest eLearning articles, news, and free resources delivered right to your inbox.
