Everyone knows the economic woes of the last couple years have had a huge impact on organizations, individuals, and sometimes entire industries. Over and over in this blog you’ve seen recommendations, discussions, and articles about one the biggest HR challenges of our time – keeping employees engaged, motivated and interested in staying with your company. There is much debate about how much time, money and effort should be extended to employees to accomplish these goals.

Recently, I was re-reading one of my favorite books of all time called The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People by PH.D David Niven. I came across the chapter called “If you can’t reach your goals, your goals will hurt you.” This made me think of how helpful this basic idea could be if used by HR to evaluate your workforce.

Considering the recent down-sizings and re-organizations that have taken place, how many of your employees have been asked to take on extra functions at work? There are many articles written on this topic, most of them focusing on ways to let your employees know that you value their contributions. But what about backing it up a bit and evaluating whether or not what you’ve asked them to accomplish is attainable and matches the skill set they possess?

There is a study by Pavot, Fujita, and Deiner from way back in 1997 that I think still holds true today. It is entitled, “The Relation Between Self-Aspect Congruence, Personality and Subjective Well-Being.” One of the findings concludes that if a person’s goals are in-congruent with their abilities, the likelihood of dissatisfaction quadruples. That’s right – quadruples!  The goals themselves ultimately contribute to disappointment and disagreeableness.

Maybe before tons of effort is expended on thanking your employees, a good first step would be to evaluate whether the business goals are congruent with the individual. Do the new demands match the employees’ abilities? Now that the employee has been doing his/her best to manage the new responsibilities for a while, can you see where he/she struggles or excels? Could you shuffle some of the new functions between employees who have different strengths?

Any goal in life both, personally or professionally, should be assessed and updated periodically to ensure it is realistic. A new year is on its way and with it may come a good time to take a hard look at the specific duties you’ve asked your employees to take on. If you can make sure that what your company needs matches what your individual employees are capable of as closely as possible, you are one step closer to a satisfied and engaged workforce. THEN you can figure out how to show they are valued.