Every employee shows up to work with two kinds of effort. The first is the effort they owe you. It’s in the job description, it’s what the paycheck buys, and it’s what a performance review measures. The second kind is different. It’s the effort they choose to give, the part of themselves they bring only when they want to. Nobody can require it, and no policy can extract it. That second kind is what we call discretionary effort, and it may be the most valuable and least understood resource in any business.
The effort that gets held back
Think about what it feels like to be a number. You clock in, you do what’s asked, you clock out. Nobody has asked about your family in months. Nobody knows what you’re good at outside your narrow role, and nobody seems to care whether you’re growing or shrinking as a person. In that environment, an employee does something very rational: they hold back. They give the company exactly what it pays for and not one ounce more. The ideas they have on the drive home stay in the car. The problem they noticed in another department goes unmentioned, because it isn’t their problem. The extra hour they might have spent perfecting a customer’s experience is spent watching the clock instead.
None of this is laziness. It’s self-protection. When people don’t feel cared for, when they have no sense of belonging, when they sense that the organization sees them as a replaceable input, they instinctively keep the best of themselves in reserve. Why would you pour your creativity and your heart into a place that would not notice if you left?
The effort that comes forward
Now picture the opposite. An employee who knows, without question, that the people they work for see them as a whole person. Their manager knows their kids’ names. When they went through a hard season, the company showed up, not with a form letter but with real presence. Their ideas get heard, even the ones that don’t pan out. They belong.
Something changes in that person. They stop holding back. They bring their innovation, their entrepreneurial instincts, their creativity, their excitement into the building with them every morning. They notice the problem in the other department and they speak up, because now it is their problem, because this is their company too. They stay the extra hour, not because anyone asked, but because they care about the outcome as if it were their own.
That is discretionary effort. It’s the difference between a person who works for you and a person who works with you. And when a whole workforce starts bringing more of itself to work, the effect goes far beyond any one person’s output. The culture itself becomes richer. Personalities enrich the environment. People start caring for one another, not just for the boss. The place becomes somewhere human beings actually want to be.
Yes, it shows up on the balance sheet
Business leaders are right to ask whether this is soft talk or hard reality. The answer is that it’s both, and the hard reality is not hard to see. If each employee is producing more, whether you measure that in time, in output, in revenue per head, or in ideas that turn into new lines of business, then the company as a whole is producing more. Productivity is simply the sum of what individuals bring, and discretionary effort is the portion of that sum that most companies never collect.
Gallup’s decades of engagement research point in the same direction: workplaces where people feel genuinely cared for consistently outperform on productivity, retention, customer outcomes and profitability. Turnover drops, because people don’t leave places where they belong. Recruiting gets easier, because people talk. Innovation rises, because ideas only surface in environments where it’s safe to offer them. Every one of those has a dollar figure attached to it.
So the return on investment is real. But here is where leaders have to be careful.
You cannot fake this
The moment a leader reads about discretionary effort and thinks, “Great, I’ll start caring about my people so I can get more out of them,” the whole thing collapses. That isn’t care. That’s a transaction dressed up as care, and employees can smell it from across the building.
People know the difference between being valued and being managed. They can tell when a “how’s your family?” is a technique and when it’s a question. They can tell when a company’s stated values live in the hallway posters and when they live in how people are actually treated on a bad day. Manufactured warmth produces, at best, polite compliance. More often it produces cynicism, which is worse than indifference, because now the employee has learned that the company’s kindness is a tool.
Being nice is not the same thing as caring. Telling people what they want to hear is not the same thing as caring. Sometimes authentic care means a hard conversation, an honest correction, or a decision that costs the company something in the short term because it’s right for the person. Care is proven when it’s inconvenient.
Discretionary effort is not a lever you pull. It’s a fruit that grows, and it only grows in soil that’s real. The leader who cares for their people because those people have inherent dignity, because they are worth caring for whether or not it ever shows up in a quarterly report, is the leader whose people will give them everything they’ve got. The return follows the care. It never works the other way around.
Caring by Design: making authentic care the way the company works
If care can’t be faked, the natural objection is that it also can’t be built. Either a leader has a warm heart or they don’t, and the culture follows. But that isn’t quite true. What can’t be manufactured is the motive. What absolutely can be built is the structure that lets a good motive reach every person in the company, consistently, and not just the handful who happen to sit near the owner.
This is the gap His Way At Work exists to close. Plenty of business owners care deeply about their people. The problem is that in most companies, that care is accidental. It depends on who your manager is, which shift you work, or whether the owner happened to walk past your desk on a hard day. Care that depends on chance is care that most employees never experience. And the owner, who would be heartbroken to learn that, usually has no idea.
His Way At Work’s methodology, which we call Caring by Design, starts from a simple conviction: if you truly care about your people, that care deserves the same intentionality you give to everything else that matters in your business. You don’t leave your finances to chance. You don’t leave your quality control to whoever feels like paying attention. Why would you leave the well-being of the human beings who make the whole thing run to chance?
Caring by Design helps a company move care from the accidental to the intentional. It gives leaders a way to look honestly at how their people are actually experiencing the company, in every part of their lives that work touches, and to build practices, roles, and rhythms that ensure care reaches everyone, not just a favored few. It equips managers, who are the point where most employees meet the company, to care well and not just to supervise. And it does all of this in a way that flows from the dignity of the person, because that is the only foundation on which authentic care can stand.
The result is not a company that performs caring. It’s a company where caring is simply how things are done, so consistently that employees stop bracing for the day it disappears. That is the environment in which people finally let their guard down and bring their whole selves through the door. Discretionary effort doesn’t have to be asked for in a company like that. It’s just what happens when people know they’re loved.
Companies that have walked this path with His Way At Work will tell you the same thing: the business results came, and they were real. But they came as a consequence, never as the goal. The goal was always the person.
The invitation
If you lead a business, the question isn’t “How do I get more discretionary effort from my team?” The question is “Do I actually love the people who work here?” Not sentimentally, but in the concrete, daily, costly way that love always requires. Do I know them? Do I show up for them? Do I treat them as people who happen to be employees rather than employees who happen to be people?
Answer that honestly, and act on it, and you may find that you don’t have to chase productivity, innovation, or loyalty anymore. Your people will bring all of those things through the door on their own, because they want to, because this is where they belong.
That is what Caring by Design has always been about. It was never a strategy for getting more out of people. It was, and is, the point.