What Your Employees Wish You Knew

One of my early Performance Pulse™ testers said something that stayed with me.

After completing the tool, she said she wished her employer would take this program. Not because she wanted another survey, another initiative, or another leadership slogan. Because the questions helped name what many employees experience every day and don’t always know how to explain.

That response matters because employees usually know when work is harder than it needs to be. They know when expectations keep shifting, when tools slow them down, when one team is overloaded while another has margin, and when the real rules are different from the stated rules. What they often don’t have is a safe, structured way to say it.

That’s where the JL³ Performance Levers are useful. They give leaders and teams a shared language for looking at the conditions around the work without turning the conversation into blame.

Caring About Employees Has to Show Up in the Work

There are a lot of leadership books that make the case for caring about people. Steve Farber makes the point directly in Love Is Just Damn Good Business: care is not separate from business performance. It affects loyalty, effort, service, trust, and the way people show up when the work gets hard.

W. Edwards Deming approached this from a systems perspective. He challenged leaders to look beyond individual effort and pay attention to the system people are working inside. If the system makes good work difficult, speeches about excellence won’t fix the problem.

That’s the part leaders sometimes miss. Employees don’t only want appreciation. They want leaders to notice what the work is actually requiring from them.

Caring about employees is not just being kind to them. It is designing conditions where they can do good work without having to fight confusion, overload, broken tools, mixed messages, or invisible friction every day.

What Employees Wish Leaders Could See

Most employees are not sitting around hoping leadership will lower the bar. In healthy organizations, people usually want to do good work. They want to be useful, competent, trusted, and proud of what they produce.

The problem is that many workplaces accidentally make good work harder than it needs to be. People are asked to move faster without enough capacity, hit targets without clear priorities, use tools that create extra work, and adapt to changes they were never fully prepared to carry.

Over time, employees learn to cope. They create shortcuts. They rely on the one person who knows how things really work. They stay quiet because they don’t want to sound negative, difficult, or ungrateful.

Then leaders are surprised when performance stalls. The warning signs were usually there. They just didn’t have a clear structure for finding them.

The Six Performance Levers Give the Conversation a Place to Go

The JL³ Performance Levers are built around a simple idea: performance problems are often caused by workplace conditions, not a lack of effort.

When leaders only look at outcomes, they tend to ask, “Why aren’t people doing what we need them to do?” When leaders look at conditions, they ask better questions. “What is making the right work harder, slower, less clear, or less consistent than it should be?”

That shift matters because employees don’t need leaders to guess harder. They need leaders to look closer. If your best people are constantly compensating for broken conditions, you don’t have a people problem. You have a design problem.

Shared Capacity

Employees wish leaders knew when the workload has outgrown the team’s actual capacity.

Not the capacity that exists on paper. The real capacity. The one affected by vacancies, interruptions, meetings, rework, competing demands, and the invisible support work people do to keep things moving.

When Shared Capacity is weak, employees may look disengaged, slow, or resistant. In reality, they may be overloaded, stretched too thin, or constantly forced to choose which important thing will be neglected today.

Leaders who care about employees pay attention to capacity before exhaustion becomes the proof. They don’t wait until people are burned out to ask whether the work was ever realistically staffed, timed, or prioritized in the first place.

Skill Readiness

Employees wish leaders knew when they are being asked to perform without enough preparation.

This is especially true when processes change, tools change, expectations change, or people are moved into new responsibilities quickly. Employees may not always admit they feel underprepared, especially in cultures where asking for help gets interpreted as weakness.

When Skill Readiness is weak, performance becomes uneven. Some people figure it out. Some quietly struggle. Some depend on informal coaching from whoever happens to be nearby.

Leaders who care don’t assume confidence equals competence. They check whether people have the knowledge, practice, examples, feedback, and support needed to do the work well.

Peer Norms

Every team has informal rules, and employees usually know what those rules are long before leaders do.

Maybe the stated expectation is collaboration, yet everyone knows certain teams don’t respond. Maybe quality matters, yet rushed work gets praised if it hits the deadline. Maybe accountability is discussed, yet underperformance is quietly worked around by the most reliable people.

When Peer Norms are weak, your best employees often carry the cost. They compensate for gaps, absorb frustration, and eventually wonder why they are the only ones still trying to hold the standard.

This is where caring has to become specific. Leaders who care don’t leave culture to chance. They notice what behavior is being reinforced, ignored, rewarded, and protected.

System Cues

Employees wish leaders knew when the organization is sending mixed messages.

This is one of the fastest ways to create confusion. Leaders may say one thing while metrics, incentives, deadlines, or approval processes push people in another direction. Employees are smart. They learn what the system actually rewards.

If leaders say quality matters, yet only speed gets attention, people will prioritize speed. If leaders say teamwork matters, yet individual numbers drive recognition, people will protect their own lane. If leaders say innovation matters, yet mistakes are punished, people will play it safe.

Leaders who care make sure the system is not asking employees to choose between what leadership says and what the organization actually rewards. Mixed messages create performance problems that look like employee choices, even when the real issue is the design of the system.

Tool Support

Employees know how much time gets lost to broken, clunky, duplicative, or incomplete tools.

This can be hard for leaders to see because employees often normalize the workaround. They copy information from one system to another. They track things manually. They build shadow spreadsheets. They rely on memory because the official tool cannot be trusted.

That hidden labor is expensive. It drains capacity, increases error risk, slows down response time, and makes employees feel like leadership is not paying attention to the reality of the work.

When Tool Support is weak, employees are not just doing the work. They are doing the work around the work. Leaders who care ask whether the tools actually help people perform or whether they quietly add friction, delay, and risk.

Mindset Alignment

Employees wish leaders knew when priorities are not as clear as leaders think they are.

Most confusion does not come from having no priorities. It comes from having too many priorities that all sound urgent. One leader says customer response time is the priority. Another says documentation must be perfect. Another says the new initiative needs attention now.

Employees are often left to interpret what matters most when demands compete. They may stay busy all day and still wonder whether they focused on the right things.

Leaders who care clarify what comes first, especially when everything cannot matter equally at the same time. They don’t just announce priorities. They help people make better tradeoffs when the work exceeds the time, tools, or capacity available.

This Is Helpful for Employees Because It Moves the Conversation Away From Blame

The levers are not about giving employees a place to complain. That would be too shallow.

They are about giving teams and leaders a better way to diagnose what is happening. A good diagnostic process helps employees describe the work without making it personal, and it helps leaders see patterns instead of reacting to isolated comments.

That is where trust starts to build. Employees don’t need leaders to solve everything overnight. They need to see that leaders are willing to look honestly at the conditions affecting performance.

They also need to know their experience is not being dismissed as attitude, resistance, or lack of commitment. When employees feel seen at the level of the work, leaders get better information. Better information leads to better decisions, and better decisions improve performance.

Caring Is Operational

It is easy to say people matter. It is harder to prove it in the way work is designed, prioritized, supported, measured, and improved.

That’s why care has to become operational. It has to show up in the systems, tools, expectations, training, workload decisions, and team norms that shape the employee experience every day.

Your employees may not use that language. They may simply say, “I wish my employer would do this.” What they may really mean is, “I wish they understood what is making the work harder than it needs to be.”

They may be wishing leaders would ask better questions. They may be wishing leaders would stop assuming the problem is effort. They may be wishing someone would finally look at the conditions around the work.

That is the purpose of the JL³ Performance Levers. They help leaders see what employees have often been carrying, adjusting to, and working around for far too long.

Once you can see it, you can do something about it.

Ready to See What Your Employees May Already Know?

If you’re a leader, the question is not whether your employees care. Many of them do. The better question is whether the conditions around the work are helping that care turn into consistent performance.

Start with the Performance Pulse™ to identify which workplace conditions may be helping or hindering performance on your team. It gives you a clearer picture of where friction may be showing up and which levers may need attention first.

Then join the JL³ Masterclass to learn how to read the results, understand the six Performance Levers, and turn those insights into practical next steps. Your employees may already know where the work is getting harder than it needs to be.

The opportunity is to become the kind of leader who is willing to look.