What helps people feel connected to the work they do each day? In this episode of Hey Jack..., Jack Nehlig and Trevor Robinson explore employee engagement through three areas leaders can influence: meaningful work, psychological safety, and support and recognition. Drawing on Jack's experience at Phoenix Contact USA and Trevor's conversations with people considering a career move, they look at how everyday leadership decisions shape whether employees feel valued. The discussion offers managers, team leads, and individual contributors practical ways to make work more meaningful and appreciation more visible.
Engagement Deserves a Leader's Attention
The conversation begins with a LinkedIn post that caught Jack's attention. It shared Gallup findings showing that only 31% of U.S. employees were engaged at work, a figure Jack expected to be considerably higher. He also discusses a global engagement figure of 21%; both numbers appear in Gallup's reporting on 2024. Those findings prompt him to revisit the leadership practices he and Trevor have discussed throughout the podcast and consider how they apply to the experience employees have at work.
Jack describes his reaction plainly: "We have a leadership crisis here on employee engagement." For him, the numbers raise questions about how companies are structured and how people are led. A leader may see employees completing assignments and assume the team is doing well, while knowing relatively little about how connected those employees feel to their work. Jack's challenge is to become curious about that experience and accept responsibility for improving the parts a leader can influence.
The discussion also touches on burnout, which adds another question to that assessment. Someone can care deeply about a job and still find the demands difficult to sustain, and Jack acknowledges that pressures outside work can contribute to how a person feels. That makes listening especially valuable: a missed deadline or a quieter presence in a meeting does not explain the whole situation. Before deciding what someone needs, a leader can ask what is making the work harder and give the person room to answer.
Jack organizes his reflections around meaningfulness, psychological safety, and support and recognition. These become useful prompts for a conversation with a team: do people understand their contribution, do they feel cared for and secure enough to share concerns, and does leadership help them succeed? A manager can explore those questions within a department even when broader company decisions sit elsewhere. The value begins with understanding the local experience well enough to take a useful next step.
Help People See Why Their Work Matters
Jack recalls how much he appreciated his former employer's commitment to meaningful work. He saw two responsibilities within that phrase: help people understand the value they create and remove waste that keeps them from focusing on it. As he puts it, "Let's remove the waste from people's jobs that makes their job less meaningful." The idea gives leaders a reason to examine routines that absorb time while contributing little to the purpose of a role.
One of Jack's clearest examples involves a customer who requested catalogs from three suppliers. Phoenix Contact's package arrived promptly, neatly packed in a branded box, with a sleeve that would hold the catalogs on a shelf. Another supplier's materials arrived weeks later in poorer condition, while the third had yet to send its catalogs when the customer wrote. The customer took the time to describe those differences in a satisfaction survey, giving Jack a specific example of how care in a routine task could influence someone's impression of the company.
Jack shared the story at an employee meeting and recognized Jim, whose responsibilities included packing and sending those catalogs. He explained how Jim's attention to the package helped put the company's information in front of an engineer who might later need its products. The story connected an everyday shipping task to a customer relationship and a future opportunity for the business. The customer's response gave Jack a clear way to show why the work mattered and why Jim deserved to hear that connection made publicly.
The same approach can help leaders recognize contributions that are easy to overlook. A carefully checked invoice, a reliable handoff, or a clear answer to a customer can each be connected to the person who benefits and the problem avoided. Leaders can bring those examples back to the people responsible, while also asking which repetitive steps keep them from doing that work well. Meaning becomes easier to understand when employees can point to a specific contribution and explain, in their own words, how it helps the company succeed.
Listen to What Makes Work Feel Safe or Uncertain
Psychological safety catches both hosts' attention because it is not the phrase they initially expected in a discussion of engagement. Jack connects it to caring, positive leadership, and the policies that shape daily life at a company. He says he would want his boss and employer to show that "they cared in certain ways about me as an individual." In the conversation, that concern extends from a manager's tone to employees' confidence in how the organization makes difficult decisions.
Trevor recognizes the concern in conversations with candidates and people considering new roles. They may talk about an intense culture, values that do not align, ethical concerns, or uncertainty about stability as AI changes their work. As he observes, "They'll say it in different terms." A leader listening only for a formal complaint about engagement could miss those more ordinary descriptions of what is making someone uncomfortable or encouraging them to look elsewhere.
Jack also directs a portion of the discussion toward senior leadership. He argues that treating layoffs as an early response to economic pressure can damage employees' sense of security and their connection to the company. That is a concern about decisions beyond the control of many middle managers, and the distinction matters when thinking about responsibility. A team leader can be honest about what is known, take concerns seriously, and raise them with the people who can act, while senior leaders consider how their choices affect the trust employees place in the organization.
Trevor suggests reading employee reviews on Glassdoor to hear perspectives that may not reach a leader directly, including experiences in other departments. Such comments can provide questions to investigate through conversations and feedback, especially when similar concerns appear repeatedly. The useful response is to listen for what people are trying to describe and look for patterns in the experience they report. A leader who learns that employees hesitate to raise concerns has a concrete place to begin: invite those concerns respectfully and show what happens after they are heard.
Make Support Visible in the Daily Work
The third area, support and recognition, brings Jack back to servant leadership. He describes "the inverted pyramid that the boss is there to support his or her employees." That orientation gives a manager a practical responsibility every week: help the people doing the work get past the obstacles that make their jobs harder. Employees can see that support when a leader helps solve a recurring problem, improves a process, or makes it easier to complete a task well.
Jack describes the employee's need in direct terms: "Just show them, help me do my job better so I can feel like I'm contributing better." It is a useful question to carry into a regular conversation with a team member. A manager can ask what has been slowing the work down, which part has become unnecessarily difficult, and where a decision or some guidance would help. Listening matters, but the employee also needs to see what the leader does with the answer.
For example, a repeated approval delay gives a manager something specific to examine. The leader can clarify who needs to make the decision, help resolve the immediate delay, and check whether the process needs to change for the next person. That is a practical application of the support Jack describes, because it improves the conditions under which someone is expected to contribute. It also provides a reason to return to the conversation later and find out whether the change actually helped.
Recognition sits alongside that support. Jack connects it to the frequency with which leaders tell people they appreciate them and point out something they have done well. His story about Jim shows how the two ideas meet: a leader understands the work closely enough to describe its value, then makes sure the employee hears that appreciation. Over time, those conversations can help people understand that their contribution is noticed and that their leader is paying attention to the effort behind it.
Give Recognition Before the Exit Interview
Trevor extends the discussion beyond people with management titles. Returning to the earlier episode's "drops in a bucket" idea, he describes how recognition can come from anyone who notices a colleague doing something well. A teammate can acknowledge a helpful answer, thank someone for following through, or recognize care taken on a difficult assignment. Those moments give individual contributors a way to participate in the positive environment the hosts are encouraging.
Jack links that idea to being a positive opinion leader: "They can be the one that shares the great news." In practice, that might mean passing along a customer's thanks or making sure the person behind a useful improvement gets the credit. Trevor's point is that people often do not know what kind of day a colleague is having or how much a thoughtful compliment might mean. The opportunity to notice and appreciate someone is available well before a person earns a management title.
The final story shows what can happen when appreciation arrives late. Jack recalls an individual whose boss praised their years of service and accomplishments during a departure conversation. The person later told Jack, "If that boss would have done that on a weekly basis, I might not have ever left." That reflection does not explain every decision to change jobs, but it shows the difference between valuing someone's contribution privately and making sure they experience that appreciation while they are still part of the team.
Leaders can use that story as a prompt to consider what they would say if a valued employee left tomorrow. Which contributions would they thank the person for, and when did they last express those thoughts? Recognition can be specific, timely, and delivered in a way the person appreciates, without waiting for a review cycle or a farewell. The person doing meaningful work today deserves to know that somebody sees it today.
Key Quote From The Episode
"They need to understand it. They need to know it. And they need to be told they're doing meaningful work and they need to be thanked for the fact that they do meaningful work." - Jack Nehlig
Key Takeaways
- Connect everyday tasks to the customer, colleague, or company outcome they support, and tell people why their contribution matters.
- Ask which unnecessary steps make work harder, then help remove an obstacle that is within your influence.
- Listen for concerns about culture, values, and stability, and follow up on what employees share.
- Make appreciation specific and regular, while employees are still on the team.
- Recognize a colleague's contribution regardless of your title. Positive leadership is open to everyone.
Wrap Up
Jack and Trevor bring employee engagement back to experiences leaders help shape each day. People need to understand the value of their work, feel that their concerns receive a fair hearing, and see that someone is helping them contribute. Jim's catalogs and the departure conversation make those lessons tangible: a routine task can carry more meaning than the person doing it realizes, and appreciation can lose its opportunity when it stays unspoken for too long.
Start this week with one conversation about meaning, one question about an obstacle, and one specific expression of thanks. Tell a team member how their work helped someone, ask what would make that work easier, and follow through on the part you can address. Then return to the conversation to find out what changed. Those are manageable ways to begin putting the episode's reflections into practice and learn more about the experience of the people you lead.