This is not an article about employee satisfaction, it is about employee passion. I think being satisfied is too low a bar to establish in your career. If you asked someone, “Did you like your meal?” and they replied, “I am satisfied”, would think that they had a great meal? No, satisfied is about the lowest bar we can establish, yet we use that as the yardstick for the place where we spend the majority of our waking hours, work. If you read the 2014 Society of Human Resource Management Report about employee satisfaction and engagement you will find employees are satisfied but not engaged. The report highlights many factors that lead to employee engagement, but most of those factors are actually only aspects of one single factor, a mission to accomplish.
Here are the top ten factors that lead to employee engagement and at least four of them are directly tied to organizational mission and I believe every single one of them is improved by a commitment to mission.
1. Relationship with co-workers
2. Opportunities to use skills/abilities
3. Relationship with immediate supervisor
4. The work itself
5. Contribution of work to organization’s business goals
6. Variety of work
7. Organization’s financial stability
8. Meaningfulness of the job
9. Autonomy and independence
10. Overall corporate culture

The key point is that employee engagement isn’t simply some bland metric, here is how the report describes what engagement is,

Composed of the eight statements in Table 5, engagement
opinions are expressed through feelings of deep
concentration, eagerness and passion. These statements
capture personal reflection of the employees’ relationship
with their own work rather than the collective
employees. Personal engagement invigorates employees
to feel enthusiastic and energized by their work.

Employee engagement isn’t some trivial thing, who wouldn’t be overjoyed if their employees had feelings of deep concentration, eagerness, and passion?

So engagement and passion is a gift you can give to your employees, but many of us fail to do so. You can give your employees joy and eagerness, but only if you give them a sense of mission. If they feel like their jobs are just pushing a piece of paper around a desk or typing meaningless words and numbers into the computer then you’ll have unengaged employees, but if you give them give them something more to strive for, a mission something to accomplish, that is when they will find their joy in their work.
Think about the times your life where the work was most meaningful and most fun and what was the common denominator? I guarantee you it was some sense of mission. So why aren’t you giving that to your employees? Do you feel like your organization doesn’t have a mission? Do you feel like what you’re working on isn’t important enough? Then that’s a problem. Your organization regardless of what you’re doing has a mission. It has something that should be driving it, something that is going to make people’s lives better. You need to figure out what that is. Missions are not just for political parties or churches or the military or charities, missions are for you and your organization. If you don’t have that mission, you must define it, your employees happiness depends on it.