People Want to Do Work That Matters

There is an old Walt Disney quotation the company still uses when talking about its people: “You can design and create and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it takes people to make the dream a reality.”

The quotation has survived because it remains inconveniently true. Disney can spend billions of dollars building extraordinary things. Imagineers can obsess over details most guests will never consciously notice. Technology can make environments more responsive, operations more efficient and entertainment more convincing, while a company this large can develop procedures for almost every predictable circumstance and measurements for almost every measurable outcome. Eventually, however, somebody wearing a nametag meets somebody who paid to be there, and what happens during that encounter becomes part of the product too.

It may last thirty seconds and involve nothing more consequential than answering a question, loading an attraction, cleaning a table, checking someone into a hotel or helping a family figure out where they are going. Most such interactions will never appear in a strategic plan, and almost none will become stories people tell years later. The interesting ones are the exceptions.

Disney Experiences describes its Cast Members as sharing a mission to “create happiness,” language that also appears in the company's current recruiting materials. Disney Traditions, the orientation program for newly hired Cast Members, introduces company history and heritage alongside guest service and ways Cast Members can help create that happiness. Disney's own descriptions of park operations routinely place Cast Members at the center of the guest experience.

That makes particular sense for a company whose physical experiences depend so heavily on people delivering the product while the customer is standing directly in front of them. A film can be finished before the audience sees it, and a book cannot have a bad afternoon. Hospitality has no such protection. The person delivering the experience remains part of the experience, which creates a management problem no amount of procedural excellence can completely solve.

Disney can establish standards for courtesy, teach people how to perform their roles, create operating procedures, define expectations and recognize excellent service. Much of that structure is essential, particularly in an operation where safety, consistency and reliability matter. What the company cannot do is write a procedure requiring someone to care.

It can certainly require some of the behaviors that caring might produce. An employee can be instructed to smile, greet a guest, use particular language or complete a prescribed service step, and those expectations may improve an interaction. But people are remarkably good at detecting the difference between someone performing friendliness and someone who has decided, for whatever reason, that the moment in front of them matters.

Disney's own public storytelling about its Cast Members provides useful examples. At Disneyland, attractions Cast Member Anthony Olivares describes finding ways to play with guests inside the environment of Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!, recruiting them into the fiction rather than merely operating the attraction around them. Custodial Cast Member Rachel McGivern creates Disney characters with water and a broom, practices new ones in her sketchbook and brings those ideas to her leaders. Disneyland Railroad Cast Member Jeremiah Counihan looks for opportunities to give postcards to young guests who share his enthusiasm for the trains. At Pixar Place Hotel, door attendant Daniel Lopez greets guests with bubbles, a Mickey glove and a personality that has become part of the arrival experience. Disney's own account gives some of the credit to leaders who noticed what he was doing and allowed him room to continue doing it.

None of these examples is especially important to the operation of The Walt Disney Company, which is precisely why Disney's decision to celebrate them is interesting. A broom drawing does not materially alter the capacity of a theme park. A postcard will not appear in an earnings presentation, and a hotel greeter blowing bubbles will not meaningfully change the economics of a resort. Yet Disney chooses to tell these stories about itself because they represent something the company believes has value: a Cast Member did more than complete the assigned function and contributed something of their own.

The Difference Between Compliance and Contribution

Management has always had a complicated relationship with autonomy because organizations need consistency, and Disney needs more of it than most. An attraction operator cannot improvise safety procedures because personal expression feels meaningful, any more than a food-service Cast Member can decide that temperature controls are unnecessarily restrictive. A company serving millions of people cannot reinvent its operation around the preferences of every employee working that afternoon. Standards protect guests, employees and the business itself.

The mistake comes when an organization assumes that because some parts of a job require strict compliance, every valuable part of the job can be produced through compliance.

Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci have spent decades studying human motivation through what became known as self-determination theory, which identifies competence, relatedness and autonomy as basic psychological needs associated with healthy motivation and functioning. Autonomy in this context does not mean doing whatever one pleases. It is closer to experiencing some authorship over one's actions rather than feeling that every action has been externally controlled.

Research on meaningful work points in a similar direction. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Management Studies, synthesizing 44 studies involving more than 23,000 participants, found particularly strong associations between meaningful work and engagement, organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Separate longitudinal research found that autonomy and beneficence—the sense that one's work positively affects others—predicted subsequent experiences of meaningful work.

None of that proves that giving a Cast Member more discretion will automatically create a better Disney experience. Human beings are considerably less cooperative with management theories than management theories would prefer. What it does suggest is that Disney's interest in meaningful work need not be merely sentimental. Someone who understands the purpose of the work, becomes skilled at doing it, feels connected to the people around them and retains some appropriate ability to exercise judgment occupies a different psychological position from someone whose principal responsibility is compliance. Both may complete the same task, but they may not feel equally responsible for the outcome—and guests can sometimes recognize the difference long before a dashboard can.

Standards Should Create a Floor

There is an appealing fantasy in customer service that exceptional employees simply possess exceptional attitudes: find cheerful people, hire them, train them in the Disney way, put them in costume and wait for the magic. It is a convenient explanation because it places nearly all responsibility on the employee and very little on the environment in which the employee works.

People do not perform their jobs in a vacuum. They learn which decisions require permission, which mistakes will be forgiven, what their leaders actually value and how much discretion they possess when reality fails to match the procedure. They learn whether an unusual idea will be welcomed, tolerated or quietly remembered during the next conversation about performance. Eventually they discover the boundaries of the job that actually exists, which may not be identical to the one described during orientation.

Standards can therefore become either a foundation or a ceiling. At their best, they remove ambiguity about what must always be true. Safety, courtesy, inclusion, show and operational requirements do not become less important because we would like people to exercise judgment. A Cast Member should not have to invent the basic expectations of working at Disney every morning.

Clear boundaries can actually make judgment easier because people know where judgment belongs. Disney's own Cast Member stories suggest what can happen inside that space: Rachel can experiment with a new water drawing, Anthony can decide how to bring a particular guest into an attraction's story, Jeremiah can notice a child who loves trains, and Daniel can become the guy with the bubbles. None of those actions requires abandoning standards. They require enough room within the standards for a person to appear.

The Work Has to Belong to Someone

Companies often speak about employees taking ownership, which becomes a peculiar thing to demand while retaining control over every meaningful decision. If an organization wants initiative, it has to tolerate some variation in how good judgment appears. Creativity occasionally produces an idea that does not work, and people trusted to solve problems will sometimes choose solutions their managers would not have chosen.

There are obvious limits. Judgment develops through training, experience and feedback, and authority should be appropriate to the consequences of the decision. Nobody needs entrepreneurial freedom while dispatching Space Mountain. But between rigid procedure and reckless improvisation lies an enormous amount of ordinary human judgment, and much of hospitality lives there.

A guest whose child has reached the end of a very long day does not present as a standardized case. Neither does a family celebrating something important, a visitor who is confused, someone embarrassed to ask for help or a child who has suddenly decided that the Cast Member standing in front of them is the most interesting person at Walt Disney World. The appropriate response is rarely extraordinary. More often it is simply attentive, and genuine attention requires noticing the particular person rather than merely identifying the category of interaction.

This is where meaningful work becomes more than an abstract employment benefit. If a job is understood only as the completion of assigned tasks, anything beyond the task can feel like additional work. If the job is connected to an outcome the employee considers worthwhile, the same action can become part of accomplishing the thing they believe they came to do.

Disney has an unusual advantage here because it does not need to invent an elaborate corporate purpose and hope employees can remember it. “We create happiness” is almost absurdly simple. The harder question is whether the daily experience of working for Disney allows people to believe they have some meaningful role in creating it.

You Cannot Mandate Magic

There is a danger in romanticizing frontline work at Disney, particularly when discussions of purpose begin drifting toward the suggestion that meaningful employment somehow compensates for everything else an employer controls. It doesn't. Purpose does not substitute for compensation, make difficult schedules easier to manage, eliminate exhausting interactions with the public or excuse poor leadership. A company cannot deposit “magic” into someone's bank account, and employees have good reason to be suspicious whenever emotional attachment to a mission is offered as a substitute for material conditions.

Meaningful work is not a loophole through which an organization escapes its ordinary obligations to the people performing it. If anything, the argument runs in the opposite direction. The more a company depends upon people contributing judgment, personality and discretionary effort, the more attention it should pay to the conditions under which people are being asked to contribute them.

Pride, genuine warmth and attentiveness cannot simply be added to a job description. An organization can, however, make them easier or harder to sustain through the way it responds when employees exercise judgment. Someone who notices an opportunity nobody anticipated is also discovering what happens to people who act without first requesting permission. The response becomes information, not only for that employee but for everyone watching.

This is why culture eventually matters more than slogans. Employees notice whether initiative is recognized or merely creates more work, whether leaders distinguish a reasonable mistake made in service of the mission from carelessness, and whether the people closest to a problem are invited into solving it before the answer has already been chosen. They also notice when efficiency repeatedly wins every argument against experience.

Over time, those observations become instructions more powerful than anything taught during orientation. A company can tell its employees that they create happiness; its daily decisions tell them whether the company actually expects them to have a hand in creating it.

The View From Main Street

There are many ways to describe the inheritance Disney received from the people who came before us. We tend to talk about films, characters, attractions, parks and technologies because those are the things that remain visible, but none of them appeared by themselves. They exist because people cared about drawings, stayed with problems after the first answers failed, noticed details that would have been easier to ignore and learned crafts well enough to make difficult work look effortless. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that the thing in front of them mattered enough to make it better.

The names of some of those people became famous. Most did not, but their work remains anyway.

Whatever Disney becomes next will depend on the same human decision. Technology will change the tools, the company will grow and reorganize, new measurements will appear, and some jobs will disappear while others are invented. Standards will evolve because the world around them will evolve. None of that eliminates the need for somebody, somewhere, to care about the thing they are making.

That care cannot be extracted indefinitely as a corporate resource. It has to be renewed through the experience of doing the work. People need opportunities to become good at something, understand why it matters, belong to the people doing it with them and, where the work allows, exercise enough judgment that their contribution can genuinely feel like theirs.

Disney does not need every employee to produce a grand gesture. It needs people to believe that the ordinary work in front of them is worth doing well, because the future of Disney—however sophisticated the technology, ambitious the creative idea or enormous the investment—will eventually arrive in the hands of individual people asked to make it real.

Give them standards worthy of Disney, and enough room to care.

— Walter B. Good