How Leaders Can Turn Around Loss of Employee Purpose at Work

Brian
Hi, welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Ani, how are you today?

Ani
I'm doing great, Brian. How are you?

Brian
Great.

Ani
I like your blue shirt. Thanks. I like your blue shirt, too. Excellent.

Brian
We're feeling blue today and ready to roll. Yeah. Excellent. So here we are. This is episode 82, and this week we're going to talk about how leaders can turn around loss of employee purpose at work. Yeah. This topic spurned out of an article that Ani came across recently- In Gallup. In Gallup.

Ani
Yeah, and it's a topic that's been swirling around actually quite a bit recently, Brian. Gallup wasn't talking about this, but as people are talking about the rise of AI, one of the things that's coming up is this, Oh, we might have a purpose crisis coming up as well. That's been a thing that's been starting to be talked about and people have been talking to us about since we're really great at helping people with purpose. I thought the Gallup article was really interesting as it was pointing actually toward purpose as a part of the article, but not in the ways that we talk about.

Brian
Yeah. So one of the things that the article, I think actually the title of the article was the Great Detachment. Correct. And so I think it's interesting how we talk about just cultural trends, and we label things like the great resignation, the great detachment now. There's interesting stats in there of why they're calling that now.

Ani
Wait. They were saying this isn't the great resignation. We had heard about that about 10 years ago or so.

Brian
Because people actually aren't resigning.

Ani
Exactly. But they are detached.

Brian
Yeah, but they are detaching more.

Ani
Right. And so they're still there, but they're detached. They're not happy. Isn't it just the thing that organizations have been trying to solve since the dawn of time?

Brian
Yeah. And there just seems to be a continuous de-evolution of the employee-employer relationship since COVID. There's probably a lot of things boiling, bubbling, pressure cooking, and then COVID just broke a lot of stuff open, and things just haven't seemed to find their footing yet.

Ani
No. And one of the things that's happening that we're hearing in organizations is people aren't calling out elephants in the room. They're not having conversations about the things that are obviously the problem, and it just keeps boiling, boiling. Yeah.

Brian
So you keep getting more detachment, more disengagement. There's some statistics from this article that I thought were pretty interesting, saying that currently, 51% of employees are watching for or actively seeking a new job. That's a lot. Yeah, that means whatever organization that you're a part of, half of the people, slightly over half of the people, are either looking for a new job or waiting for a new job to open. That's a bit frightening. And expensive. Yeah, and expensive. All that stuff. That's across all industries and all sectors, by the way. Again, that's just something that's happening culturally everywhere. Certainly, organizations that we work with are experiencing that. The healthcare field is an area that's happening now, and maybe in a higher rate than that. Again, since COVID, a lot of burnout in healthcare professionals, for sure. There's another interesting stat that's happened since COVID, that the percentage of extremely satisfied employees has dropped from 26% to 18% today. In 2020, which is still pretty low. That's what I was thinking. So across sectors, in 2020, only 26% of employees say they were extremely satisfied at work, and now it's 18%. So less than one in five, less than one in five of your employees say they're extremely satisfied with their work experience.

Ani
Wow.

Brian
So let's just pause on that for just a second, right? So what this article goes on to talk about that there's five primary reasons for detachment, for when employees detach from their organizations, from their work responsibilities, from the people around them, all those kinds of things, and here they are. One It was rapid organizational change, which is happening all around us. When people experience rapid organizational change, they tend to detach. The hybrid and remote growing pains that happened, again, that sparked during COVID. They are not over. People went remote, and that creates attachment. Then people were forced to come back in, and they didn't want to come back in, so that creates detachment. That is still a thing. The whole hybrid remote pains that are happening. Hey, since COVID, there's been new customer expectations. Customers have different expectations about how they believe they should be treated or the services they should be provided, at what level they should be provided. Customer expectations are changing. That makes sense. That puts pressure on an organization.

Ani
Heck, yeah, it does. It's a lot to navigate. Yeah.

Brian
Not only are the external customer, external pressures, expectations changing, also new employee expectations. Organizations are dealing both with expectations from the outside from their customers, but they also have changes in expectations from the inside from their employees.

Ani
That's a lot, Brian. That is a lot of pressure on organizational leaders who are already stressed out. And by the way, if half of the people in the organization are feeling detached, I will be willing to bet that we're also talking about some of the leaders.

Brian
Yeah, right. Exactly. Because the leaders are part of that half %.

Ani
We know that they are. Exactly. Because we've been talking to some of them. Exactly. All of that pressure, plus the pressure that you're feeling, detachment inside, and not talking about it, probably because of all of those repercussions. So this is just like a pressure cooker.

Brian
Yeah. And if you go back and listen to last week's podcast where we talked about the BANI world, you start to get a feeling of the brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible experience that the world is today, and leaders are having to deal with that. I just want to blither this topic about- Yeah, I just want to shake it off, right? So there's one more reason, though. That's only four of them. So the fifth reason that this article cites for this trend towards detachment is broken performance management practices. But it makes sense that that would happen because if there are hybrid remote growing pains going on back and forth, by the way, rapid organizational change, hybrid remote growing pains, new customer expectations, new employee expectations, then whatever management practices have been in place at that point, they're not going to work. They will be broken, which means now you have systems that aren't being utilized, that aren't working. Now you have employees inside the organization that have no idea, there's not clarity around what they're supposed to be doing or how they're supposed to be doing it and how they're supposed to be relating to customer expectations. All that lack of clarity and procedural understanding creates more detachment.

Ani
We have a lot of clients who work in the boutique consulting spaces with organizations. Brian, a lot of my clients right now are working with organizations on exactly what you just said, like performance, management, evaluation systems right now. There's a bunch of that going on just in our world. I have to shake my head and go, Oh, my goodness, here for a second, because I think we're probably creating these new management systems, performance evaluation systems on top of problems. When you're not addressing underlying problems and you're trying to create these new systems and solutions on top of those things, it's just a recipe for more problems.

Brian
Yeah. Let's just talk really quick about getting under those problems. The article goes on to talk about the significant decline in the two critical elements of employee engagement. If we're talking about detachment, engagement, those are two sides of that coin. When employees are engaged, now they are active, engaged in the organization. When they're not engaged, they can be considered to be detached.

Ani
Right. One of the key things that the article was bringing to light was the importance of intrinsic motivation, Brian.

Brian
Yeah, that was one of them. That's the second one. The first one, let's just name the first one, then we're going to talk about the second one. The first one, I think, is actually pretty clear. It's a clarity of expectations at work. I don't know if we have to say anything more about. 

Ani
Most people feel like they don't understand the expectations. Clear communication is not happening. Clear that up.

Brian
Yeah, that's not a hard one to understand. It's like, get down to the business of clarifying expectations.

Ani
I think part of the problem with that is that from what I'm hearing from leaders is there's not uber clarity around what the expectations are supposed to be. So there's still this figuring that out thing that's happening. And part of the problem with the fact that people don't know what the expectations are is that not only are they not being communicated clearly, but organizations need to be taking the pause to be doing the strategic work within leadership to make sure that it's clear within leadership and make sure that it's clear there, because I'm hearing it's not always the case. I know, of course, it translates down without clarity.

Brian
Yeah. Let's just put that one there and say that's an important one. The one we want to focus on, because it's actually the one that we are more expert in and really expert in, is the idea of the other area of decline was where employees feeling connected to company's mission and purpose.

Ani
Well, I thought this was really interesting in the article, Brian, because they were talking about the importance of intrinsic motivation, and then they started talking about making sure that companies felt motivated in and around the company mission.

Brian
That employees felt motivated in and around the company mission.

Ani
But as I was reading the article, I was thinking, Wait a minute. Are we missing something here? Because are we talking about intrinsic motivation or not? What are we talking about? What do we think intrinsic motivation means? What do you think? What does intrinsic motivation mean?

Brian
Well, for me, intrinsic motivation is intrinsic to the person, to the employee.

Ani
That's what I thought.

Brian
When we go a little bit further into this article, there's a couple of other things I thought, points they made that we need to talk about and understand, to your point, exactly. Some of the statistics showing that employee alignment to company mission has dropped from 38% to 30% since 2021. What that means is that only 30% of your employees feel aligned with your company mission. Right. So right now. You can see that's a problem. Yeah.

Ani
Like you said earlier, we're talking to a bunch of leaders who don't feel aligned with company mission. I just want to call that elephant out for a second. That's a problem when we've got top leaders who don't feel an alignment with the company mission, and then we expect the employees to get on board with that. Okay, keep going.

Brian
Yeah, that's a problem for sure. Yeah. So let's just pivot for a second to say, what's the research say about when you actually help these two critical elements. Sure. So improving clarity of expectations, and this is a quote right from the article, "Improving clarity of expectations from today's levels to best practice levels can lead to a 9% increase in profitability and an 11% improvement in work quality." What they're saying is simply clarifying expectations to levels of best practice. You get a 9% bump in profitability and you get 11% improvement in work quality with your employees. That's just clarifying expectations. Sure. Okay, so there's that. What about the next one? Improving the connection between employees' jobs and the mission or purpose of their organization can lead to a 32% reduction in turnover and a 15% improvement in productivity. What they're saying is if you can effectively align your employees'... Job. Yeah, their job.

Ani
They're saying job. I just want to be clear about that because they're saying doing.

Brian
With the mission or purpose of the organization, then you get a 32% reduction in turnover and a 15% improvement in productivity.

Ani
I will bet those numbers would be drastically higher if they saw purpose and motivation more about who the person was and who they are rather than what they're doing. I know that sounds paradoxical, but that's why it must be true. Because productivity will skyrocket as soon as we start to change the conversation we're having around motivation and purpose. Yeah, exactly. Besides the fact, I just want to point out that if we're expecting that what's going to happen is that leaders are going to inspire, I'm pretty sure they use that exact word in the article, people to get on board with the company mission. Do you know how much sustained energy that takes? Because we're not actually talking about internal motivation. We're talking about leaders and managers needing to continually use their resources, their energetic resources, to inspire and bring along other people. And that's not through internal motivation. Correct. That's actually going to take even more energetic resources from already drained leaders.

Brian
The article goes on to make four suggestions of how to actually make this pivot. I think as we read through these, we thought these suggestions were, by honestly, meh. I don't think they were really hitting on what you're talking about, Ani.

Ani
I think they're recycling what they think has worked in the past, but hasn't. That's my impression.

Brian
What they're saying is, and this one makes sense, to clarify and model the mission and values of the organization. Absolutely. Clarify the mission, clarify what needs to be done. Sure.

Ani
Model, it says, right? You just said that. Model it.

Brian
Now, this one, it was help employees see how they contribute to something bigger. Now, I thought this was interesting because that doesn't always land because not everyone is interested, internally motivation-wise, to contribute to something bigger.

Ani
Exactly.

Brian
That's not motivating for everyone.

Ani
Such a fantastic idea. But practically, exactly, that's not how everybody's motivated. It's not how they work. We need to know how people are motivated so that we can use their internal motivation, and that might not be it.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. It goes on to the next one. They said, "Ask employees to share stories about what makes them proud of their work." That also is not inherently motivating, I would say, for many, many people. That actually could be detachment. That could create more detachment for people.

Ani
It certainly could.

Brian
We're not paying attention to what does inherently motivate that person. Hopefully, you can see where we're going. Now, the last one is ensure the employee experience is delivering on the company's mission and values. When I heard that, I was like, Oh, no. It's like, now we're making sure that the employee, they are delivering on the company's mission. I think that's where the problem exists.

Ani
We haven't taken any consideration into this person and what really motivates this person and who this person is. Then we're going to ensure that you're meeting the company's mission. This is what we've been trying to do for a really long time, and it hasn't worked for a really long time. It's still not going to work. It's not going to move the needle sustainably.

Brian
It seems like we're still way behind in organizations of the yesteryears, where the expectation that people are just going to show up and do their work because they're they are going to be proud of their work. We're talking the '50s. We're talking... We're 50, 40, 50 years past that. We've been in evolution now for a sustained period of time where the signs from employees are very, very clear that they want to be recognized as individuals. They want to be recognized, valued, and seen as heard for what's important to them. They want to be recognized. They don't care as much, I'm sorry to say, about the company's mission.

Ani
They won't until they feel seen or recognized for them. You know what? Why should they? Because we need to be able to see, hear, and value our employees for who they are first.

Brian
Yeah, the company's got to go first. I think that's so important. That's very clear now, very clear in the research, very clear in what people are saying. Go in and do interviews with anybody in organizations. They want to be recognized for who they are by the company before they recognize the company's values.

Ani
I'm sure this makes sense for more than just this contextual thing I'm going to bring up here. But from a standpoint of the map of consciousness, Brian, this whole plan makes no sense. It's not going to work. We're expecting to bring people from zero to 100 on the map of consciousness, and it doesn't work like that. This isn't how humans work. This isn't how evolution, consciousness, thoughts, mind, intelligence works. It doesn't work. But if we look at the map of consciousness, we would see there's a map for these things. If we look at things like the motivational mapping, there's maps for these. There's literal maps for this stuff. But it requires us to see employees as people who are making up the folks who are moving this thing forward and to value that. And that takes paradigm shifts. Yeah.

Brian
This is why we choose to use the motivational maps as a primary assessment with the work that we do with individuals and with organizations, because it is a very quick and unobtrusive way to understand what intrinsically motivates people. Now, I'm just actually super excited now. Motivational maps just came out with an app for the phone. Oh, yeah. Managers and employers now at their fingertips can open up on their phone the Motivational Map results of every one of their employees and look, and it'll give you strategies for motivation in the app right there. That was wonderful. You can actually call up an employee, look, Oh, what can I do to help them feel more motivated? It's right there.

Ani
That was one of my favorite things to see with the app because you could read the map and figure things out on your own, but literally has what to do right there in the app. I thought it was really brilliant how it was done.

Brian
It's getting so much easier for every interaction as a leader that you have with your employee to just do a quick glance and say, What motivates them? It's literally one sentence that you can say to them and that will motivate them differently than a different way, you would say it to somebody else. When you do that with people that you work with often on your work teams, it becomes second nature. Then all of a sudden, you've got this culture of motivating one another. When people feel more energized within themselves, when they feel motivated within themselves, they're much more likely to say, 'You know what? I have the energy now to align my work with the organization's mission.'

Ani
And humans naturally want to be part of teams and communities and groups of people. They naturally want to do that as long as they have enough energy for themselves. So when we help our employees to have enough energy for themselves, they're going to naturally want to be a part of the group, of the team, of the community. Another Gallup report recently, Brian, was talking about the importance of hope.

Brian
Interesting.

Ani
That leaders are really using hope when they talk to employees. And did you have other things you wanted to relate about the actual article? No, go ahead. Okay, so I just wanted to bring in this idea because we spent a lot of time talking about how, "wow, there's some stuff that really needs to change". And I believe that now is the time. And we are perfectly placed as humans who create organizations to really understand more about who we are as individuals so that we can be better as a collective. I believe that we have the resources. I believe we've never before in history had the resources that are just perfectly timed for us to finally do something more meaningful and different as groups of humans. Like the Motivational Maps and other resources, we have the resources to be able to do it now. And it's a choice that we're going to make as leaders and groups of people. And for us as individuals, too, individuals are taking a stand for what they will and won't tolerate. That's happening. So are we going to meet that with this movement and really, really see people, hear people, and value people so that we can do more as humans?

Ani
I think it's time to do it.

Brian
It's a transformational opportunity. It's a transformational shift that has to happen. It's time for the mountain to go to Muhammad. There's that saying, if the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad needs to go to the mountain. Here's a very clear case that the mountain needs to go to Muhammad. The companies need to act first. The companies need to go to the individuals in order to help them feel more motivated and physically motivated without having an expectation that the employees are going to come to the mountain to actually create that change. It's time to make that shift.

Ani
Because they already won't to come to the mountain.

Brian
Right. If they were going to come, they would have come by now.

Ani
But they're not. We can do this. We can do this. Now is the time. Thanks for joining us for this important to us episode. We hope it was important to you, too. If you know somebody who should hear about this stuff, make sure you share it. We always love to hear your comments and insights. You can comment below if there's a place where you're listening or watching to do that on social media, and of course, at [email protected]

Brian
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Bye-bye.