How To Win The War For Talent: Inspire Your Employees to Find Their Purpose - And Link It To Your Company Purpose
Conspiracy of Love Personal Purpose Workshop
In the wake of the pandemic, purpose-driven companies are attracting and retaining top talent by providing a sense of purpose and meaning in the workplace. By creating a culture that helps employees discover and nurture their own personal purpose, provide opportunities for employees to make a social impact, and find ways to link impact to business growth, forward-thinking companies have found a new and powerful way to drive employee engagement, retention, and innovation.
"Quiet quitting," "doing the bare minimum," "work is just a paycheck." We have reached a stage where the expectations amongst global employees of what work can give them is in danger of reaching rock bottom. According to Gallups’s 2022 State of the Workplace report, only 21% of employees engaged at work and 33% of employees thriving in their overall wellbeing. It’s safe to say that workers would say that they don't find their work meaningful.
Coupled with the rising demand for autonomy in the form of remote work, this poses an existential risk for companies who have survived for hundreds of years on an organizational model handed down from the Industrial Age: workers on a factory floor, all sitting together, overseen by a manager, following rote processes and practices designed to create a consistent manageable outcome.
As HR leaders grapple with this new normal, there is one solution lying in plain sight that a few brave companies have had the courage to embrace: Purpose.
Deloitte reports 62% employees considered their organization’s purpose when they joined, and 47% reported that they had left an organization for purpose-related reasons. This suggests that companies that prioritize purpose are not only more likely to retain their current employees, but also to attract top talent.
Furthermore, a survey conducted by LinkedIn found that 71% of professionals would be willing to take a pay cut to work for a company whose mission and values align with their own. This demonstrates that for many job seekers, purpose is just as important as salary.
But how do companies unlock this enormous potential?
It starts with having a clear organizational Purpose, a North Star, a rallying cry that helps everyone at every level understand the reason the company exists and benefits the world.
But then the real work begins. At Conspiracy of Love, we believe that enormous benefits are unlocked when every single employee in the organization has clarity not only on their own Purpose - but also finds great overlap between what brings them meaning and their daily work.
1. Help Employees Discover and Nurture Their Own Purpose
Let’s take the example of one employee - Mary, an IT professional at a technology company. She participates in a GPS to Purpose Workshop done by Conspiracy of Love which helps her realize that she has a huge Purpose for mental health, having been through issues with family members. She is passionate about helping those around deal with the issue as a concerned citizen, and volunteers on the weekends for mental health charities in her community. Yet in her workplace, she notices that there aren’t any mental health resources to support her colleagues.
2. Provide Opportunities for Employees to Make a Social Impact
A wise employer would recognize that Purpose and help Mary find ways to channel her energy. For instance, it may support Mary in helping create an Employee Resource Group around mental health. Or a Slack channel dedicated to sharing resources internally that help with practices like meditation and mindfulness.
The employer may go a step further and offer Mary the chance to use her paid volunteer days to go and work and her chosen charity - as well as a chance to match funds through the company philanthropic foundation.
Research has shown that employers who help their teams with opportunities for volunteering and fundraising reduce turnover by a staggering 57%.
3. Find ways to link impact to business growth
Now let’s take it a step further: even though Mary’s day job has nothing to do with innovation, she sees that there is an internal hackathon, dedicated to fostering innovation amongst all employees. Even though she has no technical background she decides to gather a small team of fellow employees who are passionate about the same topic and they come up with the idea for a mindfulness app.
To their surprise, not only does the app win the hackathon - the company sees the potential of developing it as a new product innovation. And asks Mary whether she would be prepared to evolve her role into leading the team to take it to market.
By recognizing and nurturing Mary’s passion and purpose, the company has given her meaning and satisfaction in her job, in addition to her good compensation package and benefits. It has made her happier and more engaged and more likely to stay longer and move up the company ladder. The company benefits from her skills in multiple ways, from helping create a better internal culture to new product innovation that can help them grow their business.
All of this is happening every day in companies around the world. Microsoft regularly hosts internal hackathons for their employees who come up with game-changing new product ideas. Zappos has nurtured employees who have come up with entirely new business divisions around adaptive clothing. In fact, Purpose-driven companies have a 42% higher rate of innovation, according to research by the Harvard Business Review.
A Purpose Driven Employee Experience: GPS to Purpose
At our Purpose consultancy, we help companies go on a journey of Purpose Transformation - and design internal programs that help companies embed and infuse purpose into every stage of the employee experience- from recruitment to onboarding to engagement to new product innovation.
It starts with a transformational methodology called GPS to Purpose that quickly and deeply unlocks Personal Purpose in leaders and employees - and help them get ‘in alignment with their assignment’, by helping the company create pathways to channel their desire for meaning in authentic and valuable ways.
“We loved Conspiracy of Love’s GPS to Personal Workshop. It was like water in the desert to our Leadership Team. It helped our Leaders come to the table.”
If you’d like to learn more about what we can do for you, please contact us at purpose@conspiracyoflove.co.
