A meaningful purpose gets you better colleagues
Very content people make the best employees because if you really care about the work you do, the company you work for, and the people you work with, you’ll work harder and more intelligently.
It has also been shown that employees who work for companies having a meaningful purpose at the very core of everything they do are more engaged and happier. And happy people make the people around them more content because humour and happiness are contagious.
Consequently, if you work in a place with a motivational purpose you’ll have better colleagues — and you’ll be a better colleague to those around you.
Employees who work with you and those who work against you
Unfortunately, it’s a fact that many people are dissatisfied with their workplace. The findings of Gallup’s comprehensive report of 2013, State of the Global Workplace, which includes 142 countries, show that only 13% of employees are emotionally engaged with their jobs and concerned with creating value for their company.
For example, the survey shows that only 30% of employees in the USA are engaged with their work: the remainder are neither emotionally nor intellectually involved with the companies they work for. In other words, 7 out of 10 feel neutral towards, or are dissatisfied with, their work situation. Incredibly enough, these are not the worst figures to come out of the survey. The figures speak plainly: as many as 1 in 5 employees deliberately work against their company! They sabotage projects, stab their colleagues in the back, and generally make life miserable for the rest of the workplace. It is calculated that these actively disengaged people cost the USA around 500 billion dollars, Germany around 170 billion dollars, and England roughly 100 billion dollars every year.
Across the 142 countries surveyed, it appears that there are actually twice as many employees actively undermining their workplace as employees who are properly engaged. It’s true that the worse figures in this regard can be found in China and a number of other Asiatic countries, but in no way are we immune to the problem in this part of the world.
Here’s an actual example: in the wake of the case against the Norwegian policeman Eirik Jensen, information came to light indicating that Norway in fact has a lot of disloyal employees or criminals who take pains to place themselves where they can to do damage to companies from the inside. These are individuals who try to get themselves into positions in which they are able to steal from their employers. As if that wasn’t bad enough, some of them long for power in arenas we like to regard as safe: law enforcement, the justice system, and the civil service. It’s essential that we filter these disloyal employees out at the recruitment stage.
Culture and negative culture
We believe that negative cultures and extremely undermining behaviour are much less likely to arise in companies that have engaging, meaningful, and relevant purposes that influence and inspire, and which encourage everyone to pull in the same direction. It is often much easier to spot wayward individuals when everybody else is pulling in the same positive direction, as counterproductive behaviour will probably grate on other employees at a much earlier stage. So, having engaged and contented employees is not just the first step towards future growth, but also a possible protection against those aiming to throw a spanner in the works.
The loyal and the disloyal
The survey entitled The Human Age 2.0: Future Forces at Work, undertaken by ManpowerGroup in 2011, claims that we have entered the “Human Age”: an era in which talent overtakes capital as the most significant economic differentiator. It is also a fact that today’s optimists do not stay long in places that feel wrong for them.
According to ManpowerGroup’s global survey Millennial Careers: 2020 Vision, carried out in 2016, the Millennial Generation (born ca. 1980–2000) will make up 35% of the workforce in 2020 and Generation X (born ca. 1965–1979) a further 35%. It’s worth noting that 2 in 3 of the millions of Millennials out there are very optimistic about the prospect of finding jobs. As many as 62% of them (Norway is aligned with the global average here) say they would be able to find a new job that was just as good, if not better, within three months.
This type of optimism, when handled in the correct manner, can be used to create an effective working environment, even as it presents a significant challenge. In today’s job market, it’s important to be a company with an activity or purpose that harmonises with the people you hope to employ. If it’s obvious on the outside what you stand for, you may be able to avoid wasting valuable time and effort at the recruitment stage.
Wave peaks and troughs
Millennials often see their careers as going in waves; very few of them reckon on staying in the same job until they die. The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey shows that those who are aligned with an organisation’s values or a company’s purpose are most likely to stay in their jobs the longest. As many as 88% of those in the same job after five years are satisfied with the company’s values and purpose while only 63% of those who leave within two years are satisfied on the same grounds.
Harvard Business Review conducted a study of 474 top executives and concluded in The Business Case for Purpose, that 89% of these executives agreed with the theory that organisations having a common purpose will have satisfied employees. As many as 85% say they are more likely to recommend a company that has a strong purpose to others.
Purpose addresses a universal need
There is something fundamentally appealing about having a purpose to one’s activities. We often talk about the meaning of life. Well, purpose concerns itself with that, only on several levels: the meaning of work life; the meaning of business life; but most of all, the meaning of life as human beings. And in more and more working contexts, the distance between ourselves as private individuals and as employees becomes ever smaller.
Whether we are doing something for charity or for the sake of others, or whether we have a personal need to belong somewhere, most of us have a desire to make a positive contribution. And we often expect a similar attitude from the companies we work for. The traditional way of creating a business culture of solidarity has been to find an enemy or competitor to come together in defeating, but having a purpose completely changes the perspective. We register the differences, but prefer to gather people around a common desire to be part of something bigger, instead of flexing our muscles towards a competitor or boasting excessively about our own business.
Building bridges
A well-chosen purpose can perform small miracles on a company’s internal relations and make it easier for both individual persons and teams to work together towards a common goal. A grand, sweeping, but nevertheless sound purpose offers something to reach out for, and could be sufficiently ambitious that the only way to come close to achieving its ideal is by working together in a rational manner.
A company that has a crystal clear purpose will find it just as easy to work with its employees located under distant skies (in the case of a globally-positioned company) as with those who are close at hand. Such a purpose will facilitate the co-ordination of internal communication between desks, departments, or even silos (!).
A course of action
Unilever, the world’s third most popular employer on LinkedIn, says that half of the job applications it receives are due to the company’s focus on, and initiatives in connection with, ethical and sustainable product development. Moreover, 76% of employees at Unilever say that their work is contributing to this agenda. Brands that are able to offer work that has consequences beyond their own domains are very popular amongst job seekers.
Gallup’s almost 120-page State of the Global Workplace report finds (on page 22) that increased engagement amongst employees not only increases earnings per share, but also enhances a company’s ability to rebound more quickly after recessions.
Based on its research material, Gallup recommends three ways to accelerate employee engagement:
- Select the right people
- Develop employees’ strengths
- Enhance employees’ well-being
Some people might say these things are easier said than done. Others would say they are so obvious it wasn’t necessary to conduct research in order to confirm them. Indeed, if one is already aware of the extent to which employee engagement can benefit a business, there should be no reason for delay in setting the wheels in motion.
The alternative to more engaged individuals is not particularly appealing. The largest industrialised countries taken together are losing an amount equivalent to an oil fund every year as a result of so-called actively disengaged employees. These are individuals who, rather than wondering how they can help to oil the wheels of their company’s business, are simply looking for the next stick to poke into them.
Furthermore, bear in mind that modern employees — even those who are doing their very best for the business — are not particularly known for their loyalty in, or having a long term approach to, their working lives. If they want a gold clock, they’ll buy their own. But if you manage to convince the right people that, as a company, you’re aligned with who they are as individuals and what they stand for, it can lead to working relationships that are worth their weight in gold and don’t expire before you know it.
Good hunting!
Sources
Gallup, Global Workplace 2013
Manpower 2011, The Human Age 2.0. — Future Forces at Work
Manpower Groups 2016 Millennial Carreers: 2020 Vision
Harvard Business Reviews The Business case for Purpose
The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey
