After a 20-year career with Marriott, in 2006 I ventured into a second act speaking, writing, and consulting, primarily on the topic of customer service. Over the years, I’ve read dozens of business books to glean insights and keep abreast of trends. Two books have shaped my post-Marriott service philosophy more than any others: Drive (Riverhead, 2009) by Dan Pink and Start with Why (Portfolio, 2009) by Simon Sinek.
While the service culture at Marriott gave me a foundation and lens through which to evaluate and improve service quality, it was Pink’s book that revealed the distinction between executing algorithmic duties and tasks (what I refer to as job functions) and displaying heuristic behaviors (what I refer to as job essence). And it was Sinek’s book that helped me to see that a job role was comprised of not only job knowledge and job skills (the WHAT and HOW), but also job purpose (the WHY).
Fast forward 15 years to today. In that time, I’ve honed my own customer service message over hundreds of presentations, articles, and blog posts. I’ve also published two books, Delight Your Customers (HarperCollins, 2013) and The Revelation Conversation (Berrett-Koehler, 2022). Delight introduces The Anatomy of a Job Role, which includes both job functions and job essence. It also details seven exceptional customer service behaviors that service providers can practice to improve the quality of customer service they provide. And Revelation digs deeper into the WHY behind the WHAT and HOW of a job role. Readers are shown how to uncover the higher purpose of a job role, connect employees’ daily activities to this purpose, and inspire the team’s collective pursuit of a common aspirational goal.
As I continue to study workplace challenges such as low engagement scores and high employee turnover, I see a common assumption among organizations that struggle: the belief that the quality of employees’ (employment) experience correlates with the company’s investment in employee engagement initiatives. I compare this assumption to the notion that the quality of a customer’s experience is determined by the customer service culture of the organization when, in truth, it hinges on the one-on-one interaction the customer has with a frontline service provider who represents that service culture, whether online, over the phone, or face-to-face.
American companies typically allocate between 1-2% of their payroll budget towards employee engagement initiatives, which translates to more than a billion dollars in cumulative spending according to Deloitte. To add perspective, Gartner estimates per person annual spending on employee experience to be more than $2,500. Given this commitment, one would expect for engagement levels in the U.S. to be on the rise, but the opposite is true. Employee engagement figures have been steadily declining from a high of 36% in 2020 to a 10-year low of 31% in 2024, despite investment in corporate-wide employee engagement initiatives.
The linchpin for authentic employee engagement, it turns out, is the one-on-one interaction between frontline employees and their immediate supervisor that occurs less formally and more frequently. Workers come to work seeking role clarity, opportunities for development, and purposeful work (the WHY that Simon Sinek wrote about), but supervisors, managers, and leaders increasingly fail to meet these basic needs. Because of an absence of regular, informal conversations pertaining to corporate ideals such as mission, vision, purpose, and core values, at most companies, there is a profound disconnect between employees’ daily job responsibilities and the higher purpose of the organization and job role.
Instead, managers are consumed with job functions (the algorithmic duties and tasks that Dan Pink wrote about) and related metrics linked to financial, productivity, and quality benchmarks. It’s common for their meetings, feedback, coaching, and performance appraisals to be dominated by job functions. Why? Because that’s how their own performance is managed by their bosses. It’s also what they know. It’s how they were acculturated to the company themselves.
While fluent in job functions, managers are largely unfamiliar with job essence (the heuristic behaviors that Pink wrote about), the reflection, through actions, behaviors, and decisions, of the higher purpose of the organization and job role. (And if they are attuned to this dimension of a job role, they often don’t know it well enough to leverage in their daily interactions with employees.) Job essence is often amorphous and relegated to Customer Service Week in October or the annual all-employee meeting where the corporate mission statement and core values are celebrated amidst balloons, confetti, and fanfare.
This detachment from job essence is perhaps the single greatest oversight that supervisors, managers, and leaders (unwittingly) commit in their quest to be purpose-driven leaders.
Purpose-driven leaders recognize that they cannot rely on formal employee engagement initiatives and end-of-year rallies to affect the engagement levels of their staff. They know that authentic employee engagement is the result of informal, daily conversations that reinforce both job functions and job essence. These are intentional leaders who reflect corporate ideals, acknowledge the totality of every job role, and connect employees’ daily work activities to the higher purpose of the organization and job role.
