It’s difficult to create great Brand Ambassadors when 70 per cent of your employees hate their jobs.

A recent Gallup study finds that 70 per cent of American employees either hate or are totally uninterested in their jobs. Of that group, 18 per cent are actively disengaged. They’re looking for new jobs on the Internet or the telephone while they’re supposed to be working. And 50 per cent of all employees are completely disengaged from their work. All of this, says the study, adds up to between $450 and $550 billion per year in lost productivity.

But that need not prevent you from eliminating this “job hatred” phenomenon, creating better Brand Ambassadors and increasing your productivity and profitability. Here’s what to focus on.

Articulate and define your brand. Create a Values-driven culture. Make your Values integral to your daily activities. Use them as part of your performance review process, administering coaching and discipline, aligning your day-to-day decisions with your Values, and recruiting new employees. Make your Values one of the cornerstones of who you are and what your Brand is.

In weaving your Values into the conscious fiber of your organization, you must also know and apply this fundamental truth. The two most significant things that people must have in order to love their work and their company are:

• They need to feel that they are important;

….and

• That what they do makes a difference.

Easy to say. Not as easy to do. You can’t fake it. You can’t tell people they’re important and then prove, by your actions, that they’re not. Like not listening to employees concerns and observations about their work, their working conditions, their ideas about improving processes and products, or creating new ones, their reactions to the training they’re getting or not getting, their take on customer feedback. People whose input is ignored don’t feel important. No amount of compensation or perks will change that. Period.

To have people believe that what they do makes a difference requires that you frequently let them know how your products and services create value and meaning in the lives of your customers, and how their part in making those products creates real value and somehow, even perhaps in small ways, makes the world a little better. Don’t just tell them – show them. Demonstrate with stories of peoples’ experiences with your products. Create believers.

When Core Values and human validation are integral elements of your daily life, you can ignore the statistics of dissatisfaction. They won’t apply to you.