As organizations slowly return to the office, employers are acutely aware that nothing will be the same as it was before.
Quarantining and shelter-in-place mandates have given people time to reflect and ask the big questions about life and career — Why am I doing this? Is my job meaningful to me? In addition to questions around purpose, mental health experts have sounded the alarm on health and well-being. We may be living out the last of the ‘old normal’, when business and employees intersected without a visible sense of purpose. As employees gradually return to the office, are organizations equipped to handle their concerns?
Focusing on purpose may feel counter-intuitive or even frivolous in turbulent times. None of us know where the global economy is headed, and shareholders will still measure business returns in dollars rather than that ‘fuzzy’ sense of helping people to find work which has meaning. But at the same time, we all know there are financial gains from staying committed to one’s purposeful objectives.
What could a business gain if it acted to ‘be more’, ‘do more’, and ‘offer its people more’? As organizations design new return-to work-policies, the guidelines and practices must include purpose and well-being.
Is Purpose Worth It?
For the past 5 years, researchers have uncovered the causal relationship between organizational purpose and financial performance. Alignment of organizational and individual purpose drives engagement and performance. For Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock and Ratan Tata, former CEO of the Tata Group, purpose is a moral imperative for organizations to invest in for growth within the communities they serve. George Seraphin from Harvard Business School found that “firms with mid-level employees with strong beliefs in the purpose of their organization and the clarity in the path towards that purpose experience better performance.”
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