Your Employees Stopped Caring About Their Work

HR leaders think they know what drives retention – compensation, benefits, job security. Meanwhile, employees are quietly screaming about something entirely different: they don’t understand why their work matters. This 8-percentage-point perception gap (McKinsey) isn’t just a communication problem. It’s a structural failure baked into how we design roles. When 94% of organizational problems stem from systems rather than people (Deming), the culprit isn’t employee apathy – it’s role designs that describe tasks instead of missions. Here’s why outcome-focused role design isn’t just better HR practice…It’s THE system fix that makes everything else possible.

The Perception Gap Nobody’s Talking About

When McKinsey surveyed HR professionals and employees about retention factors, they uncovered something startling. Both groups identified similar factors – compensation, work-life balance, relationships with colleagues, meaningfulness of work. But here’s where it gets interesting: HR professionals ranked “meaningfulness of the work” eight percentage points lower in importance than employees did.

Think about what that gap reveals. While HR focuses on compensation packages and benefits administration, employees are asking a fundamentally different question: “Why does my work matter?”

This isn’t a communication problem. It’s a structural one.

The late quality management pioneer W. Edwards Deming insisted that 94% of organizational problems are system-driven, not people-driven. When employees don’t find their work meaningful, the instinct is to blame the employees – they’re disengaged, they lack motivation, they’re resistant to the company’s mission, they don’t “fit” the culture. But as management consultant John Kotter observed, what looks like individual resistance is usually intelligent response to inconsistencies between the organizational model and the desired state.

In other words: your employees aren’t the problem. Your role design system is.

Tasks Feel Like Work. Outcomes Feel Like Missions.

Consider how most job descriptions are written. They’re task inventories: “Prepares reports. Attends meetings. Coordinates with stakeholders. Manages schedules.” They read like obituaries.

Now ask yourself: if you were hired to “prepare reports,” would you wake up inspired? Would you understand how your work contributes to anything beyond getting reports prepared?

This is the structural obstacle. Task-focused role design systematically prevents employees from understanding the “why” behind their work. And when people can’t connect their daily activities to meaningful outcomes, disengagement isn’t a personal failing – it’s the only rational response to a badly designed system.

Barry Flack, an HR practitioner focused on organizational systems, draws a crucial distinction between two types of HR work: those who work IN the system (executing tasks, deploying programs, managing compliance) versus those who work ON the system (diagnosing structural obstacles, redesigning for value creation). The perception gap about meaningfulness exists precisely because most organizations have built task-execution systems rather than outcome-focused systems.

An example

A job description for an accountant might say “follow up on delinquent accounts.” But why do we care about that? Do we need to see people sitting at their desk making phone calls no one wants to receive or writing emails no one will read? Do we need to measure the activity? Following up on delinquent accounts is a means to an end. The end is reducing days sales outstanding (DSO).

In a company with $10 million in annual recurring revenue, reducing DSO from 90 days to 60 days creates $833,000 worth of value. That’s meaning. That’s the outcome the role exists to generate.

Shifting from task-focused to outcome-focused role design also makes it easier to measure performance objectively. It opens the door for the employee to say, “If that’s my job, shouldn’t I also be doing these things?” That’s initiative. That’s ownership.

When people understand the outcome they’re accountable for generating, they can think strategically about how to achieve it rather than mechanically executing prescribed tasks.

The difference isn’t semantic – it’s structural. And it’s the foundation that makes everything else in talent management possible.

The Cascade of Consequences

When roles lack clarity about outcomes, the dysfunction cascades through every aspect of talent management. Gartner research emphasizes that HR must shift focus from managing the workforce to redesigning the work itself – understanding what work creates value and how roles should be structured to deliver it.

The ripple effects are measurable:

• Only 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% in March 2020 (Gallup)
• Employees with high role clarity are 53% more efficient and 27% more effective than those with role ambiguity (Effectory)
• Global employee disengagement costs the world economy $8.8 trillion annually, representing approximately 9% of global GDP (Gallup)

These aren’t people problems. They’re system problems.

When your performance review system punishes the behaviors your change initiative requires, is that employee resistance? Or is that your incentive structure working exactly as designed – just badly? When your role design focuses on tasks rather than outcomes, and employees can’t articulate how their role contributes to organizational success, is that lack of engagement? Or is that your role design system functioning precisely as you built it?

Industry analyst Josh Bersin argues that design thinking “transforms HR from a ‘process developer’ into an ‘experience architect.'” But you can’t architect meaningful experiences on top of structurally meaningless role definitions. The foundation matters.

AI Will Make This Problem Brutally Obvious

Here’s where the urgency intensifies. As Flack notes, AI will automate HR work that executes tasks – survey deployment, workshop facilitation, administrative compliance. What AI cannot do is the structural diagnosis, the system redesign, the curious investigation into what creates value in your specific organizational context.

The organizations that will benefit from AI aren’t the ones rushing to deploy tools. They’re the ones doing the hard work of structural preparation – removing obstacles, clarifying decision rights, aligning incentives, and most fundamentally, redesigning roles around outcomes rather than tasks.

Bersin’s 2024 predictions emphasize this shift: from “hire to grow” to “hire for productivity and redesign.” His 4-R model – Recruit, Retain, Reskill, Redesign – positions redesign as the strategic constraint. You can’t hire your way around badly designed roles. You can’t engagement-survey your way out of structural ambiguity. You can’t workshop your way through role definitions that prevent people from understanding why their work matters.

How PropulsionAI Can Help

The 8-percentage-point gap between what HR thinks employees want and what employees actually want isn’t a perception problem to fix with better communication. It’s a systems problem that requires structural redesign.

Your employees don’t lack motivation. They lack meaningful connection between their daily work and organizational value creation. And that’s not their fault – it’s how you designed their roles.

The solution isn’t another engagement survey or culture workshop or leadership training program. Those are interventions that work IN a dysfunctional system. The solution is working ON the system itself: redesigning roles around outcomes that feel like missions rather than tasks that feel like work.

In an era where AI will automate task-execution and 94% of organizational problems stem from systems rather than people, the strategic advantage belongs to organizations that fix the foundation. Role design isn’t an HR administrative burden to minimize. It’s the structural constraint that determines whether everything else you do in talent management succeeds or fails.

Ready to transform how your managers think about roles? Try PropulsionAI 100% free

Want More?

1. “Can a machine do this? HR’s focus must shift from the workforce to the work” – HR Executive/Gartner (link)
2. “How Design Thinking Is Disrupting HR” – AIHR (link)

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