A meaningful purpose gets you better colleagues
If you want better colleagues, the smartest thing you can do is to be a good colleague yourself. This is much easier if you yourself are happy with the status quo, for then there’s a good chance your happiness will rub off on your surroundings. And vice versa.
If employees are thriving in their lives because they are happy in their work, this is a good thing for a company. It’s not good, on the other hand, when employees think: “I love spending time with these people. What a fantastic place this would be if only we didn’t have to do this stupid work”.
"If you want better colleagues, the smartest thing you can do is to be a good colleague yourself."
When a company has a purpose that pervades the working environment to the extent that employees feel part of a common ambition, that company has achieved something worth its weight in gold. But of course, you can’t take it for granted that your employees will be happy with the workplace you offer them.
Lack of commitment and total futility
Figures from Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report from 2013, which draws its figures from as many as 142 countries, show an almost frightening absence of emotional engagement among workers around the globe. The numbers are so ugly that it really makes good sense to really work to not only have, but also make the company's purpose visible, get the right people in relation to who you are and through this try to create a constructive working environment.
In other words, it’s incredibly worthwhile to actively work on employer branding . Money can’t buy the genuine and honest respect an employee can feel towards their company. Nor can it be bullied out of people for that matter, regardless of what blackmailers and other hard-boiled criminals might think.
"You may be able to force people to do something, but you can’t make them enjoy it."
You may be able to force people to do something, but you can’t make them enjoy it. Sure, you could always use money to persuade someone to start or leave a job, but you’re only shifting the problem further down the line by doing so. If the only enticement you can offer someone is that of filling their wallet, you’re unlikely to have the future on your side.
If you’re alarmed to hear how difficult it can be to lay your hands on those individuals who have a genuine desire to work for you and your company in particular, you’ll be shocked to hear how many people regularly – and quite deliberately – work against their employers and sabotage their own workplaces.
Bearing in mind all the things you need to consider when hiring people, using your company’s purpose as a compass and a guide makes perfect sense.
Read on and find out more about:
Statistics that ought to scare everyone who is employing people
Numbers that show how incredibly important it is not to employ saboteurs
How a strong purpose can function as a filter in the employment process
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, many people are dissatisfied with their workplace. In Gallup's extensive report State of the Global Workplace from 2013, which covers a total of 142 countries, it appears that only 13% of employees are emotionally engaged in their jobs and concerned with creating value for the company they work for.
«The figures speak plainly: as many as 1 in 5 employees deliberately work against 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
In Manpower's 2011 survey, The Human Age 2.0. - Future Forces at Work, it is claimed that we have moved into The Human Age. This is a period where talent takes over for capital as the most important economic differentiator. It is also a fact that today's optimists do not stay too long in a place that feels wrong to them.
According to Manpower Group's 2016 global survey Millennial Careers: 2020 Vision, 35% of all employees in the year 2020 will belong to the millennial generation (born approx. 1980 - 2000) and 35% will be from Generation X (born approx. 1965 – 1979) . Here it is worth noting that 2 out of 3 of the millions of millennials out there are very optimistic when it comes to getting a job. A whopping 62% of them (here Norway is on the global average) say that they will be able to find a new and at least equally good job within 3 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.
In Harvard Business Review's report The Business case for Purpose, 474 senior executives were surveyed, and it turns out that 89% of them agreed with the following theory: A organisation with a common purpose will have happy employees. A full 85% say they are more likely to recommend a company with a strong purpose to others.
Purpose and meaning
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.
Connections and relations
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.
Find out more about how purpose connects people in this article.
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 (!).
Contribution and sustainability
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.
Gallup's 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 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.
Also remember that modern workers , even those who do their job in the very best way for the company, are not best known for being faithful and long-term in their approach to working life. They buy a gold watch themselves if they want one. But if you manage to convince the right people that you have a company that harmonizes with who they are and what they stand for, it can lead to a working relationship that can be worth its weight in gold. And that doesn't expire any time soon. Through a purpose process, EVRY has defined the company's purpose, which gave them a common ambition and clarified the company's strengths.
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
