On this week’s ‘Engaging People Powering Companies’ podcast, Amrit spoke about purpose in the workplace. No matter your industry, function, or role, purpose permeates through all of it. He shared a quote by Viktor Frankl:

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstance, but only by a lack of meaning and purpose”.

As humans we want meaning and a sense of purpose, and this can’t be separate from work because work is a subset of life. We spend too much time working, for it not to be a playground for us to find meaning and purpose in our lives.

I’m sure you have had experiences in your working life, as I have, where the company ‘purpose’ is drummed into you, to the point that you could probably recite it word for word, yet the lived experience often feels a million miles removed from it.  It can feel cold, soulless and what’s more, it may even feel in direct opposition to what happens day to day, out on the floor, in the trenches of doing the do.  

The company purpose then, can feel like just words, a tick box exercise that does very little to help people feel a sense of connection to a shared passion. It can become something that lacks integrity, and so instead works against the organisation silently, in the background, because it doesn’t connect with people - and we humans want to connect!

A survey of over one thousand employees by McKinsey, found that 70% of participants felt ‘their sense of purpose was defined by their work’. It also stated that when we live out our purpose at work, we are more productive, healthier, more resilient, and more likely to stay with the company that fosters this environment for us. If our personal feeling of purpose aligns to that of the company, then add to that, higher engagement, loyalty, and a want to shout about the company we work for.

The findings by McKinsey, complement insights from academic research, pointing to the fact that we require more from our roles and the organisations we choose to spend our precious lives working for. Organisations can tap into this humanness and bring it to life for their employees, by being clear and passionate about their own company purpose, and then by helping people discover and live out their personal purpose for themselves, through the shared passion of what brought the employer and employee together in the first place. It’s a win win!

On the podcast, Amrit talked about two aspects that bring purpose to life: passion and action. Without these two critical components, purpose statements are just words. We want our employers to help us act upon our passion, to love what we do, and to create the right culture for us to bring our purpose to life with action.

For me, well, I was choosy. I knew I wanted to make a difference to people’s lives. I knew I wanted to help people find permission to be more human in their day to day working environment, because it isn’t just about work, it impacts our whole lives, in and out of work. It’s about living. We don’t want to work all the hours, giving up our souls only to bring home the scraps we have left to our loved ones. I wanted to help people find balance in life through fulfilment at work.

I found The Engagement Coach, and I can work in alignment with my personal purpose, because that is literally my job.  I feel incredibly lucky.

We don’t have a purpose written up or a mission statement that I am aware of. Amrit can tell me otherwise! What we do have, is such a strong sense of purpose, which is spoken about at every meeting, in every proposal and course we create, and is backed up in our working week by living and breathing what we work to help others find. We recruit for fit, based on values and make sure that everyone that works here or that we are looking to work with, understands that this is for the people, with the people, with no tick boxes allowed!

We are very clear about our purpose, and we do everything on purpose.

Looking back on my career, something that I would often share with the various teams that I managed, was how work can be a playground for us to discover who we are, and what makes us feel fulfilled. Regardless of the KPI’s and the performance on paper, who are you here? Which bits do you love? I wanted to help people understand, that who they are, and what they do, is what helped us achieve our overall performance.

If you’re in a role where you feel needed and valued, where you’re working with others who have a collective shared passion for what you are all doing, and everyone is working together to make this a reality, then I would urge you to just take a minute to understand what you’re experiencing right now. This precious and magical moment is more than the feeling of someone just enjoying work or being engaged or committed to their job. This may be the feeling of someone having discovered their purpose, and being able to bring their purpose to life through their work, and what greater feeling could there be than that…

You can listen to this week's podcast episode here.