Helping people find purpose at work

 Excerpts from McKinsey Quarterly 

1. Start with the organization’s purpose (hint: the only thing you control directly)

It may seem counterintuitive to look first to the organization’s purpose in hopes of supporting the life purpose of your employees, but remember: this part you control. Does your company meaningfully consider its role in society? Do senior executives use the company’s purpose as a North Star to make difficult decisions and trade-offs? If your company’s purpose is just a poster on the wall, you’re wasting everyone’s time. If you talk about purpose but don’t follow through, the results can be devastatingly bad.

If you aren’t sure your leaders are following through, start checking. Some companies use internal scorecards to track the commitment of leaders, employees, and other stakeholders to organizational purpose. Routine measurement helps leaders encourage buy-in, spot problems early, and take appropriate action. A few companies go further and embed purpose metrics into the performance assessments of people leaders.

One action you can take today is to start spending time with your team reflecting on the impact the company has on the world. Again: this must be earned. Cringeworthy emails to your team about corporate social responsibility efforts that seem disconnected from the team’s day-to-day experience will only inspire cynicism. You want dialogue, not monologue. Still, when authentic and handled well, reflections on the bigger picture can inspire a sense of purpose. Our survey found that employees are five times more likely to be excited to work at a company that spends time reflecting on the impact it makes in the world.

2. Reflect, connect, repeat

When employees have a chance to reflect on their own sense of purpose, and how it connects to the company’s purpose, good things happen. Survey respondents who have such opportunities are nearly three times more likely than others to feel their purpose is fulfilled at work. Make this a habit in your company.

While leadership workshops and storytelling sessions can be good forums for this, keep in mind that the underlying problem you’re trying to solve might be in your leadership environment. Managers must be prepared to share their own purpose with others, for example, and be vulnerable in ways they’re likely not used to in order to role model these skills and pass them along to colleagues. And pass them along you must: people in our survey whose managers didn’t provide them opportunities to reflect on purpose stood just a 7 percent chance of fulfilling their purpose at work.

Look closely at your managers and leaders. Do they cultivate compassionate leadership, or is the attitude more akin to “stop whining”? Ask yourself: Is my team comfortable sharing personal things with me? Few things are more personal than one’s purpose in life, and if psychological safety is low at your company you will never learn that firsthand. When employees in our survey said they experienced little psychological safety, they stood a 0.5 percent chance of saying their purpose was fulfilled at work.

3. Help people live their purpose at work

Sixty-three percent of people we surveyed said they want their employer to provide more opportunities for purpose in their day-to-day work. You need to find ways to deliver.

Many companies are tempted to scratch this itch by implementing programs that support employees’ purposeful impulses wherever they find them—in the community, for example, or even elsewhere in the world. Some companies offer paid time off for these pursuits.

While such efforts are laudable, and even beneficial, they are not a good solution to the problem our survey identified. Your starting point should be opportunities that help employees find more personal meaning in their day-to-day work. By doing your part to help employees live their purpose at work, you will enable them to feel more fulfilled. And when the work is aligned with the company’s own purpose, that sense of fulfillment will ultimately benefit the company, too.

Consider the example of North American insurer USAA under then-CEO Joe Robles. To establish commitment to its core customer base in the US military community, Robles (who retired from USAA in 2015) saw to it that every employee went through a four-day orientation. Town hall meetings and other forums reinforced the effort by encouraging employees to ask questions and share ideas about how to fulfill their purpose.3

Purposeful employees try harder and are more apt to innovate. As reported in 2018, USAA’s employees had collectively submitted more than 10,000 ideas to the company each year to improve the customer experience. About 900 had been awarded patents, including 25 authored by one of the company’s security guards.

Town hall meetings and immersive, small-group sessions may not sound as sexy as a paid leave of absence to do good in the world, but they are a lot more effective at helping employees start to see the good they can do in their day-to-day work. Many people spend the majority of their waking hours at work, so creating space for the little things to become purposeful can quickly snowball into better work experiences—and better work environments—for everyone.