Meeting objectives of profitability and customer satisfaction rank high on a leader’s list of priorities, and yet, especially after the pandemic, a meaningful, purposeful life is increasingly a top concern to employees. The title of a post-pandemic article by McKinsey & Company says it all: “Help Your Employees Find Purpose or Watch Them Leave.” Simply put, a life of purpose is a life of meaning. Yet when applied to business, the integration of purpose into a company is often misunderstood. Without a company culture that cultivates meaningfulness, employees will move on. If as leaders we learn how to work towards a purposeful culture, employee engagement and company vision both can both move forward.
Purpose V Purposeful
The word, “purpose,” has its roots in the Greek telos, which means to take aim. The word “purposeful,” has different connotations, however, and points toward a sense of significance and meaning. If we aim narrowly and strive to meet the next objective, leaving out a sense of purposefulness, this approach can be debilitating to a company. When the wider perspective of meaning is left out, the company does not optimise employee engagement, and risks repeated turnover or a low level of participation together with employee dissatisfaction and under-performance.
Let’s look at the data coupling company performance with employee sense of purpose.
- Forbes cites a PwC study, which finds that, “millennials who have a strong connection to the purpose of their organization are 5.3 times more likely to stay. But the vast majority of employees remain disengaged from work, and only 33% draw real meaning from their employer’s purpose.”
- Proaction International writes, “Purpose-driven companies have become more important. The numbers speak for themselves: 4 times more consumers are likely to buy from purpose-driven companies. Lack of trust, social values, and sustainability are the topics that are the most important to the public today. In addition to stimulating demand, purpose-driven businesses can foster employee engagement, improve customer loyalty and enhance innovation and creativity.”
- Springer also emphasizes the importance of purpose in the company culture by citing the study “Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance:” “Gartenberg, Prat and Serafeim demonstrate, with a large data sample from more than 900 companies and half a million employees, that companies can achieve better results if they incorporate practices that foster people’s sense of purpose. This result seems to be valid for very different types of industries and for a wide variety of companies—from manufacturing companies to service organisations—and for various business strategies within the cost-differentiation spectrum.”
We can see that when the employer’s purpose aligns with the employee’s sense of purposefulness, then productivity increases.
Where To Begin
Now we can take proper aim. It’s important to understand not only what we are aiming for, but also who is doing the aiming, what that calls us to do, and who that calls us to be. These questions allow us to inquire into ourselves, our employees and our world to find the interrelated expression of a company’s purpose. There’s a benefit if everybody in the company reflects first on their deepest intention, their sense of meaningfulness, about why they are on this planet. Notice the non-hierarchical nature of this inquiry. These reflections could lead to training in different aspects of awareness, such as cultivating autonomy in business, to identify and let go of unacknowledged biases, as well as re-animating suppressed leadership qualities. Training in dynamic inquiry could be helpful, in which an open-ended question is posed, and if seemingly unrelated answers occur, these answers are also inquired into—all creating a thread to follow in developing a person’s understanding of their place in their life, in the company, and their commitment to an integrated life. Those who lead the company might ask similar questions about the deepest intention of the company. Why has it been created now? What response to the world’s situation does it bring forward? The integrity of the company’s culture can gain momentum in this way.
Deepening Employee Engagement
A purposeful culture depends upon employee engagement. If, as part of the hiring intake, HR addressed a potential employee’s deepest intention, it would be easier to see if there’s a fit for the company. The investigation of purpose across the board, not as aim but as intention, clarifies the congruency between the prospective employee and the company.
Once it is clear in the hiring process that there is a fit, the potential employee could see the company’s own commitment to the employee, and the purposeful structures in the company that take a person’s deepest calling into account and make it real. Some ways of looking at those structures include asking the following questions:
- Does the company offer to support the employee’s on-going investigation of their deepest intention through coaching, directed seminars, or other means?
- Does the company provide performance reviews that actually re-evaluate what performance is, asking questions such as, How well did you do with your stated intention? and, How do you build mastery, take action, and mobilise possibilities?
- Do the executives develop an authentic presence to inspire and engage the employees in a meaningful way? Many companies announce this as their intention, and yet any pretense of encouraging an employee’s development without follow-through, will actually create disengagement on the part of the employee, due to a lack of confidence and trust in the company’s real commitment.
Synergy
When the deepest intentions of both employee and company are developed together, the company prospers in unexpected ways. The employee has a deeper commitment to the company and therefore remains loyal. The Great Resignation, subsequent to the pandemic, suggests that yes, flexibility at work is important, and yet that is not enough. As we have seen, employees are also seeking a greater sense of meaningfulness. When the structures within a company, for example, include a percentage of time where the employee can simply explore, the employee values that freedom and autonomy, further increasing their engagement. That exploration can become beneficial in terms of the company’s innovation and eventual profit.
Conclusion
I often refer to the Irish poet David Whyte, who says this in his book called The Preservation of Soul in Corporate America: “All of your ability to hold the conversations you were made for relies entirely on your ability to hold radical attention to your intention. And without that radical attention, nothing much will happen at the frontier of your being.” I like to suggest rephrasing that ending to read, “And without that radical attention, nothing much will happen at the frontier of business.” Now, place your radical attention toward developing a purposeful company culture.
Co-Founder, The HuPerson Project
https://thehupersonproject.com/
Dedicated to science, art and spirit, Daniel inspires individuals, teams and enterprises to live their unique vision in the way the world most needs it. Co-founder of The Way of the Heart with Kimberly Herkert, Daniel designs processes for people to live more fulfilled, purposeful, and intentional lives. He recently published The Caravan of Remembering, a powerful self-directed inquiry for discovering our deepest calling. Together with Jill Taylor and Shelly Cooper, in 2023, Daniel co-founded the HuPerson Project to help leaders develop a deep awareness and presence, opening new structures of thinking so that corporate and entrepreneurial enterprises are able to embody their vision and become a remedy for the needs of the world today.
