Unleashing employee purpose in service of social purpose
“WHY is a tool that can bring clarity to that which is fuzzy and make tangible that which is abstract. Used properly, it can be used to hire, to develop strategies and to communicate more clearly (internally and externally). The WHY can help set a vision to inspire people.” ¹
~ Simon Sinek
Behind every social purpose initiative are individual employees each with their own set of reasons to work, their own WHY. They also have a WHY for choosing where they work. Organizations pursuing social purpose need to understand those WHYs if they want to attract and retain the right employees.
Understanding those WHYs is related to the so-called ‘Great Resignation,’ which is seeing large numbers of workers quitting their jobs in search of better work/life balance. The cultural landscape is changing and purpose is becoming an integral component of what it means to live a full and happy life.
While compensation remains the number one issue overall for employees, followed by flexibility and benefits, purpose-seeking desires, such as personal interest, positive impact, and a sense of ‘calling’ now rank highly too.² According to Populace, today’s workforce “values work as a way to not only materially provide, but also to nourish a sense of self. Employees are looking for job opportunities that make a living, but also a life.” ³ Organizations able to address employee purpose-seeking desires have a competitive advantage, particularly when attracting younger talent as that cohort is clearly concerned about societal issues such as social justice and climate change.
Reevaluating what really matters
In the wake of Covid, companies, both not-for-profit and profit-driven, must pay more attention to the expanded concerns of their workers in this era of significant social and economic change. Beyond compensation, job flexibility and benefits, they need to understand their employee’s experience at work and help make that experience more meaningful and fulfilling across a range of factors.
In a similar vein, employees are reevaluating their relationship to work and with whom they work. This includes understanding their bigger ‘why’. Why am I here? What do I stand for? What difference do I want to make? Increasingly, today’s employees want their work to be meaningful and have a greater purpose beyond a paycheck and benefits.⁴
As a result, and quite unexpectedly for both employers and employees, the pandemic has forced a re-think about what really matters, about life satisfaction, and about meaning and purpose at work.
For social purpose organizations, getting those two WHYs aligned is critically important because an embedded “purpose-driven culture” enables everyone to enjoy more meaning at work, creating higher levels of commitment, authenticity and resiliency.
Essentials of purpose alignment
To help a social purpose organization better understand their employees’ needs at work and to develop an effective purpose-driven culture throughout, the following three components are essential elements of an employee-centric purpose strategy:
A multi-purpose WHY framework that allows employees to self-identify their own WHY@work and better understand and optimize their role in relation to the organization’s WHY.
A developmental roadmap that allows employees to recognize their own core motivations and understand the opportunities for personal growth in pursuing higher-levels of purpose for themselves and the organization.
A functional methodology for empowering employees to bring their “whole self” to work in order to realize their fullest potential while supporting the organization in pursuit of their social purpose.
Implementing those three elements across the entire organization – from entry-level personnel to senior management – empowers everyone to more fully bring their whole self to work, embracing their own WHY@work while simultaneously supporting the important organizational WHY, which is social purpose.
Facing the uncertainty of purpose in the workplace
In response to sustainability and other societal concerns, companies have been grappling with these bigger WHY questions for quite some time. For many employees the attempt to figure out their WHY beyond pay and benefits has not been so obvious or straightforward.
How do employees go about finding purpose in life? And how do they find work that’s meaningful to them? Is that something they are even looking for?
For many organizations this notion of aligning employee purpose in the workplace is challenging. What if certain employees are not really committed to the organization’s social purpose? What if they just want a paycheck and don’t much care about anything else?
Or maybe some employees simply enjoy the work environment and their teammates, and social purpose is just a nice-to-have?
And what about employees whose personal purpose closely aligns with higher organizational purpose, such as social purpose? In an era of social change, that is certainly a useful thing to know. How do organization’s find and retain employees whose personal purpose is more fully aligned with the organization’s social purpose?
At Greater Meaning, we have developed a simple, yet powerful model to reveal how purpose shows up in the workplace, and a methodology to embed employee purpose more deeply. The result is two important outcomes for social purpose organizations:
Employees can easily identify their own WHY of working and better articulate what really matters to them
Employees have a motivational framework for how to better pursue their personal purpose at work and aspire to higher-levels of achievement, thereby becoming ever more valued employees within the organization
We have named this model and methodology the Six Dimensions of Purpose,⁵ which provides an approachable and straightforward roadmap for effectively engaging employees in the hefty topic of purpose at work.
A functional framework for purpose in the workplace
The simple truth about purpose at work is that everyone works for a variety of reasons. There is no single ‘why’ when it comes to purpose at work in the same way that there is no single WHY for how any of us live our lives. The Six Dimensions of Purpose helps make sense of those WHYs by providing a “transcend and include” roadmap that is both practical and aspirational.
Here’s a brief description of the Six Dimensions of Purpose for employees:
Organizations also have purpose at all the Six Dimensions, summarized briefly as:
Through a process of engaging employees with the Six Dimensions of Purpose, organizations can unravel the messy world of purpose in the workplace and create a better functioning workforce pursuing personal and organizational purpose simultaneously.
The Six Dimensions in practice — From ‘having’ to ‘being’
At a minimum, social purpose organizations need senior leadership that is fully attuned and supportive of social purpose. It can be ‘good enough’ for other employees, even most, to be working in pursuit of other dimensions of purpose, because they are still solid, contributing members of the team.
However, by identifying higher-levels of purpose, work can actually become an aspirational journey for employees, not a joyless drudgery of working to the clock in order to get a paycheque. The Six Dimensions of Purpose offers a motivational roadmap to help all employees articulate their own ‘why’ and achieve deeper levels of engagement and personal satisfaction in the workplace.
“Creating strong links to an individual purpose benefits individuals and companies alike—and could be vital in managing the post-pandemic uncertainties that lie ahead.” ⁶
~ McKinsey & Company
This motivational roadmap can guide an employee from merely ‘having’ – having a job, having nice colleagues, having challenging work – to a way of ‘being’ by being-in-service, being authentic, and being committed to social purpose. The advantages of this higher level attunement of purpose can propel organizations to achieve organizational aims in multiple ways:
Heightened commitment and initiative by the workforce because employees understand their job is important and meaningful
Engagement with the social purpose brand at every level, every interaction, both internally and externally
Internal synergies through motivated and engaged workers for improved team integration and performance
An inspired workforce realizing that social purpose is a journey, not a destination, and that everyone, collectively, is pursuing something more meaningful and fulfilling for the greater good
Getting clear on the varying motivations of employees helps bring clarity to the organization’s social purpose and shows how each employee makes a valuable contribution to the overall organizational aims. Understanding how the Six Dimensions of Purpose are playing out is a powerful way for leaders and managers to catalyze employee purpose and crystalize their own contribution to social purpose.
The need for dialogue on worthwhile work
Matching this ‘double why’ of the employer and employee means the two have to face each other authentically in the complex arena of meaning and purpose in the workplace. The Six Dimensions of Purpose provides a relatable and grounded context to enable those conversations to occur.
For social purpose to take hold meaningfully within the organization and become part of the cultural fabric, a real dialogue, not monologue, needs to happen where employers articulate their greater social purpose clearly and concisely, and employees are able to articulate their own connection and role in support of it, while fulfilling their own heartfelt need for meaning and purpose at work.
A transformation to better work
According to McKinsey & Co. research, recognizing the need to get the employer-employee purpose more closely aligned, so the two can mutually understand and support each other, is the next big step for successful organizations.
Not only do those companies become a better place to work, but they can also tap the enormous potential of a purposeful workforce aligned with a purpose-driven organization.
Empowering this transformation of the workplace—getting both employer and employee to pursue a fuller sense of meaning and purpose at work—is a sure fire way to help stem the tide of the Great Resignation, and support the fulfillment of an organization’s social purpose.
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To find out more about how you can apply the Six Dimensions of Purpose to purpose alignment in your organization, contact Charlie James at charlie@greatermeaning.com or call 604-813-2557.
Sinek. “The Why in Action.” Simonsinek.com. Accessed November 8, 2021.
Populace Inc., “Populace Insights: The American Workforce,” 2021. Populace.org. Accessed Nov. 16, 2021.
Populace, P.9.
McKinsey & Co. “Help your employees find purpose—or watch them leave.” 2021. Mckinsey.com.
The Six Dimensions of Purpose is a developmental hierarchy for purpose in life that is revealing of past and current modes of purpose, as well as providing a trajectory for achieving higher-levels of purpose. It was developed by Greater Meaning based on research into developmental psychology, particularly Abraham Maslow (hierarchy of needs) and Edward Beck and Christopher Cohen (Spiral Dynamics), and levels of consciousness, particularly Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory.
McKinsey & Co. “Igniting individual purpose in times of crisis.” Mckinsey.com. Accessed Nov 16, 2021.
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