Singapore - Being passionate about work improves performance and increases productivity, but can we create passion in employees? Omar Khan, international consultant and author of Liberating Passion shares ways in which passion can be rekindled.

According to Khan, passionate employees will put in discretionary efforts to get the job done well and will find ways to overcome obstacles and rush to grab opportunities. Without passion, obstacles are excuses and tasks are done with a sense of apathy and anxiety.

The biggest passion killer in companies is often the lack of personal relationships, says Khan. Personal relationships are the crux of support and determine if the values of a company are aligned with its actions. Employees will then find it hard to be passionate when they no longer believe in the values of the company.

While it is impossible to create passion in people, Khan believes it is natural and can be released. Firstly, it is important to get to know them and understand their aspirations and challenges, as well as to assist them in understanding their roles in the company. "Leaders have to be able to customise their leadership styles to the people they are trying to lead" in order get the best out of the people they are trying to liberate passion in.

Secondly, companies need to give people something to feel passionate about. It means defining a bull's eye of what winning looks like for the company and what roles and challenges employees can take on to help the company succeed. Khan says having challenges is healthy and is in no way detrimental. "Nobody loses passion by being challenged. But they need to feel that the challenge is fair, meaningful and that somebody wants them to win."

Finally, it is crucial to find the reasons in which companies kill passion in employees. It can be the way the boss treats his employees, unfruitful meetings, or compensation and reward policies that do not make sense to employees. Picking out one or two passion killers and removing them will have a high impact on the level of passion in employees.

Khan also believes that the effort of rekindling passion should be done not for passion's sake, but for the need of a "crisis" to change. "A healthy crisis is always brought about by some type of change. It involves reasons why the past does not work, and why we have to do things in new ways," explains Khan.