What’s your purpose at work?

“I know that there’s something… wrong! You know, that I ca… that I can’t keep living like this, that there’s gotta be something more to love than commitment… But then I think that… I might have given up… on the whole idea of romantic love.”

The above comes from Ethan Hawke’s character Jesse in Before Sunset, and it brings to mind my own feelings about finding purpose in our work.  It’s something that is unquestionably attractive and that we all aspire to, yet after a string of meaningless and uninspiring jobs, it’s perhaps something that we’ve all put to bed, just as Jesse suggests he has with the notion of romantic love.

The notion of purpose and identity at work is one that has gained a great deal of attention in recent years, fueled in no small part by things like the annual Gallup employee engagement research, which revealed that just 13% of employees around the world are engaged at work.

This has a number of negative connotations that were nicely encapsulated in a recent study exploring the impact of ‘values misalignment’ at work.  This typically involves a general disengagement in ones work, and a reluctance to do anything that falls beyond ones official job description.  In the end, it usually results in that individual leaving the organisation.

It’s into this context that Dan Pontefract has penned his 2nd book The Purpose Effect.  He proposes that purpose comes in three forms:

  1. Personal purpose
  2. Organizational purpose
  3. Role purpose

With a sweetspot occurring when all three of those are in alignment.   The book details each of these three types of purpose and explores why it’s so important that they be met, before then discussing how things can be changed, both on an individual and organizational level.

Securing the base

It’s an important discussion because it is easy for things to get misaligned, even when intentions are good.  For instance, I’ve covered many studies of fields such as open innovation and citizen science that have set out to explore the motivations of participants.  The vast majority of these highlight the ‘higher order’, intrinsic factors such as a greater purpose behind the project and autonomy over how one goes about achieving it.

And you know, those things are great, but the fact remains that the vast majority of participants in these projects don’t get paid at all for their efforts.  The winner takes all approach usually means that most miss out.

If we’re talking in Maslow like terms, it’s a case of focusing on the peak of the pyramid before nourishing the base of it.  As any cyclist will tell you, if you try and do high end work before you’ve done your base miles, you’re asking for trouble.

It’s here, Pontefract argues, that organizations need to step up and show a willingness to care for their stakeholders, just as those stakeholders care so much for the mission of the organization.

How onboarding can help

So how can this happen?  How can personal and organizational values align themselves?  A recent study undertaken at the BPO company Wipro explored the use of the onboarding process to examine both the organizational identity and the personal identity.

The Wipro onboarding process had much in common with the way most organizations welcome new recruits.  They focused primarily on things like the products and services they’d be working with, the internal processes and so on.

The study saw this changed so that half of new recruits received a new induction that focused on either:

  • Wipro’s organizational identity, with the induction exploring the values of the company and why employees felt proud to be part of the family
  • The personal identity of each recruit, with employees reflecting on what their ‘best self’ looks like

The results revealed that when the induction focused on the personal identity of the employee, retention rates were 57% better than the normal, control group, with a significant improvement in performance too.

It suggests that simply taking an interest in the interests and values of our employees can be a cheap and easy way to bolster performance.

The key to happiness

It’s easy to regard the hunt for purpose in our work as somehow fluffy or unrealistic, just as Jesse did in his hunt for real love in Before Sunset.  With so many poor workplaces, the aspiration for something meaningful might only create the kind of cognitive dissonance that makes us miserable.

Alas, as Sigmund Freud famously said, the path to true happiness lies purely in work and love, so just as Jesse eventually found love with Celine, the hunt for purpose in work is crucial to a happy life.

If you’d like to learn more about how Pontefract thinks you can do that, he’s hosting a webinar at the Institute for Corporate Productivity next month.  You can register for it here.

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