• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

  • About Mike
    • Contact
  • Services
    • Keynote Speaker and Presenter
    • Coaching
    • Workshops
    • Online Training Modules
    • Contact
  • Library / E-books
    • The Service Profit Chain
    • The Service Profit Chain – Answers to fundamental questions
    • The Service Profit Chain FAQ
    • GROW Model
    • A good coach might be what you need…
    • Understanding Engagement (ebook)
    • We are all born leaders (ebook)
    • Exploring Leadership (ebook)
    • Action Learning – what is it?
  • Online Training
    • Login
    • The Service Profit Chain
    • Working with others
    • The Team Leaders Toolbox
    • GROW Leadership DK
  • Blog
    • General

What makes a lousy job a great job

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

How to make a lousy job a great job

First, we need to understand that there are two parts to any job. There is the context and the content. Context is all about the environment in which I get to do my job. Content is all about the job that I get to do.

So context would be work conditions, schedule, uniform, tools, leave, canteen and all that god stuff.

Content, on the other hand, is all about autonomy, variation, recognition, feedback, sense of belonging, meaning making.

Context is what drives basic satisfaction – it is what people feel they need to have. Content, on the other hand is the big driver of employee  engagement, and it is more in the category nice to have. This is all well documented in research after research.

So the big challenge in the service industry is that many jobs don’t provide much content. Dishwashing, cleaning, housekeeping, laundry service and similar position all fall in this category.

The work is hard, the pay is low and there is not much recognition from the rest of the organisation for doing a good job.

So how do we provide job content for these positions?

Here is a clue:

“The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.” – Jim Collins

The secret here is to create and environment where we focus on enabling the social connections. If we can help these teams form good relationships with each other: camaraderie, having fun together, seeing themselves as comrades in adversity then that contributes enormously to job content.

Some of the best housekeeping managers I know invest considerable time in proving opportunities for their teams to spend social time together, and they have the great-place-to-work score to prove that it is well worth the time and resources.


This blog post is part of a series of answers to frequent questions that I get around the concept of the Service Profit Chain. In future posts, we will continue to explore other key points. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book “Best! No need to be cheap if…” HERE.

Filed Under: General

Primary Sidebar

Search here

© Copyright 2023 Thoughts4Action cc - Privacy Policy - Terms & Conditions