We recently worked with a Fortune 100 company that was hell-bent on making the “Best Places to Work” list. After four years of improving employee benefits, instituting flexible dress policies, giving people Friday afternoons off in the summer, and hosting multiple family events throughout the year, their employee engagement scores were actually lower. Their attempts spawned entitlement among their employees, whose appetite to be taken care of had become insatiable.
All organizations want their employees to thrive. Research shows that a thriving employee means a growing company. Recently, however, countless studies have shown how deeply organizations are failing at providing thriving conditions for their employees.
Everything from excessively low employee engagement scores to rising turnover costs and the increase of sole proprietorships tells us that people have lost faith in the promise of the corporation as a place where they believe they can thrive. So what, then, is an organization to do?
Searching for an answer, every possible methodology for improving employee engagement has been looked at. Increasing a sense of meaning and purpose in the workplace, unleashing the passion of people, and scores of other self-help gimmicks have created an entire industry that helps desperate organizations find ways to retain employees and maximize their contribution.
In and of themselves, these approaches aren’t bad, but as we saw with our Fortune 100 client, they are just incomplete.
Call-out/Tip
Addressing only some employee needs, or taking a programmatic approach to addressing only one of them (e.g., offering incentives for increasing employee engagement and retention in your department or offering “discovering your passion at work” seminars) will still lead to employee’s failure to thrive.
How Great Organizations Help Employees Thrive
In our diagnostic work of more than 200 organizations over the last decade, we have seen what great organizations do to help employees thrive. Consistently, they pay attention to four integrated needs of their people, all of which combine to determine the extent to which employees actually thrive. In our experience, employees are thriving when they can consistently claim the following four statements:
I’m developing (professional thriving): I’m thriving in my need to expand my influence and ability.
I’m confident (emotional thriving): I’m thriving in my need to feel safe and hopeful.
I’m known (relational thriving): I’m thriving in my need for community.
I’m valued (significance thriving): I’m thriving in my need to contribute meaningfully.
The figure below highlights how interdependent these dimensions are. Each plays a vital role in establishing the conditions for the other. Without one of them, the ability for an organization to create the conditions in which an employee can thrive will be compromised. If corporations have any hope of not just retaining employees, but truly building a thriving and vibrant environment in which employees want to contribute, they will have to do all four of these exceptionally well.
Sadly, too many of today’s large corporations still treat these needs as discretionary, not as mission-critical. We will be devoting an entire quarter, and this edition of the Navalent Quarterly to more deeply understand each of these dimensions of a thriving organization and community.
There Is No Silver Bullet for All Four Dimensions
What’s important to understand is that the work to cultivate all four of these is different. While they are interdependent, what it takes to cultivate them is actually distinct. Too many organizations make the mistake of hoping their efforts will be silver bullets – that one great effort will yield all four.
The dangerous truth is that one great training program, for example, may contain elements of two or three of these dimensions. Employees may learn new important skills, which in turn helps them expand their capability. As a secondary benefit, they may feel more confident and meet new colleagues from across the organization, but the actual need to thrive with confidence and community is not sustained by a training program.
What’s critical about each of these dimensions is that for employees to thrive in all four, mechanisms must be in place to sustain all four.
Let’s take a look at each one to better understand what’s required to build and sustain each.
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“I’m learning” – the expansion of capability and influence
While having a great training curriculum is certainly a start to providing learning opportunities for employees, it by no means is a surrogate for an environment that values ongoing knowledge, curiosity, openness to new approaches and ideas, and a genuine desire to broaden one’s reach.
Beyond the classroom, an employee’s ability to thrive in his or her own development means that leaders are constantly offering helpful feedback, providing opportunities to stretch and try new things, inviting dissent, and encouraging employees to think differently about their work.
Practically, what this means is that access to important decisions, information, and initiatives, the chance to offer new perspectives, and priority budget investments made to build the skills needed for the organization’s most important work are routine parts of how the company is run.
“I’m confident” – feeling emotionally safe and hopeful
How many times have you heard an organization referred to as “toxic”? We can recognize such companies instantly. Sadly, it’s because they are more commonplace than we might want to admit. Culture change efforts of all types have been proliferated in attempts to eliminate the negative and fearful environments of such organizations, usually to little avail.
Call-out/Tip
Instead of being threatened by an employee’s expansion of skill or ambition to broaden his or her career, organizations in which people thrive in learning are eager for people to express the desire for greater impact.
The emotional psyche of an organization operates as deeply as a human one. To restore and sustain its health also requires the organization to work as deeply as an individual might. Embedded intricately into the fabric of an organization’s
- Policies
- Processes
- Governance, and
- Leadership
are the devices that determine the emotional health of an organization.
While it’s true that a boss widely has the most immediate impact on the confidence and emotional safety of an employee, behind that boss can lie a host of devices that can undermine even the best leadership. Unfair compensation and reward processes, a lack of transparency in decision-making, capricious allocation of resources, and constantly changing priorities are a few of the more common perpetrators serving to erode confidence and hope.
“I’m known” – connecting with a great professional community
Scores of data points have validated how critical great relationships in the workplace are; but a million affinity groups, communities of practice, networking forums, and team building events later, greater trust, cohesion, and friendship still elude colleagues.
The kind of vulnerability required for someone to truly say “I’m known” is far greater than answering the question, “If I were an animal, I’d be a . . . .” The good news is that organizations are making genuine attempts to convene and connect people, acknowledging the importance of strengthening people’s networks across complex organizations.
Leaders need to model the degree of authenticity and vulnerability required to truly be known, and then champion the behavior into all organizational convenings –
- Annual meetings
- Conferences
- Networking and affinity forums, and
- intact teams and interdependent departments where performance hinges on the relationship
“I’m valued” – knowing my contribution matters
The literature on finding meaning in the workplace has grown exponentially for good reason. People come to work every day on the hunt to validate one foundational hypothesis: I’m on the planet for a good reason.
Call-out/Tip
In small organizations, one of the greatest laments of (and resistance to) growth is the loss of a familial sense of connection. “We used to all know each other’s names,” goes the cry of expanding organizations.
To the extent that they can leave their workplaces with a strong sense of significance – secure in the knowledge that their contribution made a difference and is valued by the organization for whom it was made – that is the extent to which you can predict they’ll return the next day and do as good or greater job.
As 70% of the workforce is disengaged, it is an easy bet that employees are going home feeling anything but valued. This doesn’t mean leaders should go on “praise my people” campaigns.
Rather it means making sure that all processes associated with performance and talent management leave no stone unturned in letting people know exactly where they stand, how their work connects directly to the larger mission regardless of their role, and how much the organization appreciates that contribution.
Wondering how to solve the mystery of how to help people thrive in your organization? Do all four of these exceptionally well, and there’ll be no mystery. Your employees will tell you that yours is the best place to work. Leave one or more to chance, and learn to be satisfied with mediocre outcomes or, perhaps worse, entitled employees.