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Welcome to Bite Size – our bi-monthly blog where we explore a topic in bite size form – short, sharp and easy to digest
Balancing your employees’ self-improvement and value systems with that of your company can be challenging at the best of times, let alone when we are dealing with a global pandemic.
It is hard to adopt the right company culture when individuals in your organisation might have differing views of what will fulfil them. For each individual, their self-fulfilment might be different from that of their work peers. And if this self-fulfilment is at odds with the company goal, how do you keep everyone happy?
Firstly, it is important to realise the role fulfilment plays in our lives and how critical it is. According to Aaron Hurst and his third Workforce Purpose Index research, people prefer fulfilling (meaningful) work to engaging (busy) work.
Yet, interestingly, the research also shows that people believe it is their personal responsibility to define what fulfilment means to them, as it is something they create for themselves. It’s not something for which their boss or company are responsible. In other words, it’s not an entitlement.
One wonders, though, why is fulfilment important to identify for each individual in a work environment? Because fulfilment links directly to core measures of business success.
“Fulfilment is created when people connect their daily experiences to their identity, past experiences, and aspirations. This is what we call a ‘Purpose Mindset’ and while similar to a Growth Mindset, it also includes values, generosity, and direction,” says Aaron Hurst, Imperative co-founder and CEO.
The result of the 2019 Workforce Purpose Index identified four practices that are strong predictors of fulfilment and highlights the implications for leaders to implant and strengthen these among their employee populations:
- encourage greater employee self-awareness
- participants who engaged in peer coaching reported greater clarity, more meaningful connections with colleagues, greater growth, and feeling psychologically safe
- create a culture of ‘Employees First’ as employees report better outcomes when they feel the organisation is employee-centric
- managers must lead by example by cultivating their own Purpose Mindset
From this research it is clear that a successful company culture and value-based system must place employees’ self-fulfilment requirements at its core in order to be effective.
At CLP, we base everything on Trust. For each individual, flexible working hours have been critical to their personal (and the company’s) success. We have always offered a flexible working arrangement to every one of our team, regardless of their personal circumstances. We also value our culture of Feedback and foster Responsibility over Hierarchy. Trust and transparency have created a team that works smoothly and efficiently together, regardless of whether they are together in the office or not.
We do stipulate a number of core hours but how these are undertaken has a degree of flexibility depending on the individual. We believe it is imperative our employees can live their lives in a healthy and flexible way. There is no one set formula as everyone has different life requirements. The balance is found in communication among the organisation’s stakeholders. The only thing we do insist on is that the whole team is in the office, together, one day of the week – be that virtually or face-to-face.
So, for us at CLP, we believe self-fulfilment comes from trust and flexibility. This allows our team to build their own purpose but in a way that works for them, and as a result, for our organisation.