Purpose
Creative makers need to believe that the work they do will allow them to fulfil their own sense of purpose and meaning.
Over the past few years, it has become increasingly important for people to find meaning in the work that they do, with the pandemic provoking a level of soul-searching that we hadn’t seen for a long time.
This doesn’t mean everyone now wants to work for an NGO or B Corp; it simply means people want to feel they are using their individual skills and abilities to have a demonstrable impact on things they care about.
For those who have felt disconnected from the work that they do, this moment is giving people the reason they needed to be truer to themselves; life is demonstrably too short to do otherwise.
Employers are now faced with the prospect of either losing disheartened talent through a misalignment of values or helping to build their people into the versions of themselves they most want to be. Employers that do the latter are winning the hearts and minds of the creative makers who actually enable organisational purpose by pursuing their own.
Key questions
How do you communicate your organisational purpose?
Are you purpose-washing - purporting to have an altruistic purpose that isn’t an accurate reflection on what you do or how you behave - or do you have a provable, clear purpose you communicate with teams?
How do you facilitate individual purpose?
Can you and do you facilitate the individual purpose of each creative maker by building and acting on a plan with them? If you can’t, do you make this clear from the moment you recruit them and throughout their time with you?
How do you operationalise purpose?
Are you consistent and clear about how your organisational purpose defines the way work happens, including the way you work, what you work on, who you work with and how work is evaluated and rewarded?
“Purpose, internally, is always worthwhile because it enables you to have a lens through which you can judge everyone's actions or decisions. It needs to be genuine and something you can feel in your stomach, so when they start putting values on the wall, you know you’re f**ked.”
— Strategist, Germany