The search for purpose at work
06/06/2021 09:09
When we think about this idea of individual purpose, the way we think about it is it’s an overarching sense of what matters in a person’s life. I like to use the term “North Star”—this idea of having a sense of direction, intention, and understanding that the contribution you’re making is going somewhere. Now, that’s a technical definition but I think we all intuitively know what it feels like to be on purpose. It’s when you feel energized and inspired and alive.
I think one of the things that’s been really challenging during the pandemic was a bifurcation. There were people who were frontline or customer-facing or critical workers, who had to go to work in a time when livelihoods took a back seat to lives. It felt risky.
And that really brought front and center the idea of “my primary purpose at this point is I have to work, and I’d like to make it home without getting sick.” But for a significant other portion, people were removed from the workplace while still having to do work.
We had this unbelievable smashing together of two worlds: the home world and the work world. I think it’s really brought to the fore “Well, what exactly does work mean to me? What do I have to get out of it? Is it merely a check that facilitates the rest of my life or is it something more purposeful?”—using that word quite explicitly.
Can we put a finer point on starting with the person and leaving behind the arrogance that the organization thinks it dictates to people what their purpose is? That is just nonsense. Individuals decide what their purpose is. It’s the organization’s role and opportunity to figure out how to help people bring that purpose to a finer point of what matters to them and to figure out whether or not they can create a role or an experience within the organization that helps meet that. So a big portion of this was, one, starting with the idea that the person was in the prime role and, two, the organization was in a facilitative role, not in front.
I’d love to unpack purpose a bit more because, to Bill’s point, I often think about it at the corporate level. It is something that usually speaks to higher values or a higher mission. On an individual level, can you give me some examples of how people define their purpose?
When we think about employees themselves and how they think about their own sense of purpose, one of the things that we were surprised to find in the research is that about 70 percent of people say they define their purpose through work. And, actually, millennials, even more so, are likely to see their work as their life calling. So what that means is that people are looking for opportunities in the work they do day-to-day to be actually contributing to what they believe their purpose is.
, I hear “life calling” and I can’t help but think that’s a little bit sad. Bill, maybe I’m just biased here. Is work our life calling right now because we don’t have a lot else to do but be on our Zoom calls and work? Is this a good thing?
as someone who’s been trapped in a home that was supposed to be a weekend retreat, I’ve basically not left here in 14 months. I can see how we’d land at that idea. Let me take a slightly different take on it. I think what the millennials are saying to us is “Anything I do, I’m going to do with gusto. Time is zero sum. There are only so many hours in the day. If I’m going to do something, it has to work for me. And part of it having to work for me is that it has to work for others.”
But it also gets way clearer the role that work has to play. Work may have an economic contribution, in terms of carrying and providing for the people you love. But you likely also start getting way more specific in terms of where you’d like to put in your time and your effort. That could be education. It could be making people safer. It could be making better roles or jobs for communities. The whole point is, as you get a little further down the line and you start to have other people who need you in terms of your providing care for them, then work goes from diffuse to quite specific pretty quickly.
Individuals have purpose. Organizations don’t give that to a person. The organization as an entity, as a group of people collectively trying to do something, may have a stated, shared purpose. And you’d like to believe that alignment matters there. In fact, a good portion of the research we continue to do is about moving from the attractiveness of individuals seeing the stated purpose of the organization to getting a sense of whether or not that’s real, seeing how they could fit in, and then whether or not they can realize that in their daily activities—and whether or not that firms up a sense of belonging.
So organizations can be a conduit. They can make their purpose visible. They can clearly show a link between what they’re asking a person to do and the stated purpose. But the individual alone has agency in deciding what their purpose is and whether or not it aligns with the company’s.
There’s a lot of focus right now on wellness, Naina, and what we can do for employees, with the recognition that certain groups—working mothers and others—have really suffered during this pandemic and have opted out of work. What are some of the levers that you can use in this situation, since we can’t give people a sense of purpose other than giving them space to reflect? Is there anything else that can be done to heighten the engagement and make it easier for people to feel purpose in what they do?
So where companies can start is understanding that you’re not getting anywhere unless you have an authentic organizational purpose. This is a time in which there is tremendous change going on in the world. Having an authentic organizational purpose is about spending real time reflecting on the impact a company has on the world. It’s not just about nice corporate-social-responsibility contributions and making big statements. It’s actually about engaging your employees on what that impact is. And what we found is that employees who say their organizations spend real time reflecting on the impact they make on the world are five times more likely to be excited to work for the company.
These reflections and dialogues are one of the things that we’re most excited about really helping our clients with, and helping ourselves at McKinsey as well. There’s an opportunity to really pause and reflect on the individual’s sense of purpose and how that links with the company and what the company is trying to do for the world—especially at this moment, when there are so many things going on in the world that really demand business to make a greater contribution to society
A good portion of that job was just that there needed to be something more to her life than being a housewife and a mom. It didn’t mean she didn’t love us or didn’t love my dad. But she needed something for her. Some sense of freedom. Some sense of belonging to something outside the home, not being defined by it. And so for her, a lot of it really had to do with freedom and, to some extent, contributing to the family economics. But mostly it was about freedom and autonomy and being able to enjoy something. So she ended up becoming a bookkeeper—you know, accounts payable, accounts receivable—and then, over the course of 20 years, ended up running a plumbing-supply house, being the general manager. A rather phenomenal arc, honestly.
I think for individuals, it’s important to see through a lens of just how important purpose is for autonomy, how important it is for freedom, for stability, for caring for others, or moving into what Naina was talking about in terms of equality and equity. You may not fulfill all of them but you can certainly fulfill some of them. And I think one of the things we’re seeing is that as people have more time, they have more affinity. They have more belonging. They have more attachment to what the organization is doing and what they’re doing individually. So maybe it becomes a bit of a virtuous cycle and it can be reinforcing.