In this new era, leading with a human lens is more important than ever.
In other words, there’s an increasing shift towards a more people-centric approach – a workplace culture that celebrates strengths and helps employees discover their purpose. A workplace where humans are at the forefront – rather than the business strategies and profits.
Leaders of people-centric companies understand it’s the people who make their company successful. After all, when people feel valued and appreciated they perform with a stronger intrinsic motivation, have a deeper sense of purpose, and a greater level of engagement.
So you need to look beyond your corporate values to inspire your employees. What workers really need to feel engaged and satisfied by their jobs is that sense of direction, intention, and understanding that the contribution they’re making means something.
Trust us – if you can uncover the sense of purpose felt by employees, you’re on your way to driving your company forward to a stronger position in the market.
Why is it important to uncover one’s purpose?
McKinsey research shows that almost 7 out of 10 employees are currently reflecting on their purpose due to the pandemic. The employees that say they’re living their purpose at work are:
- 6.5 x more likely to have higher resilience
- 4 x more likely to report better health
- 6 x more likely to want to stay in the company
- 1.5 x more likely to go above and beyond to make their company successful
- The bottom line? Help your employees identify what they want from your organisation, what they enjoy, what makes them feel useful, and what propels them forward.
Get this right and your company will quickly reap the benefits of an inspired and motivated team.
Identifying strengths to find your employees’ purpose
Effective strategic leaders know the best place to focus their efforts for improved business and increased growth is within the business itself. This means focusing on its greatest asset – its people.
One way to achieve this is to incorporate a strengths-based approach. By cultivating a culture that recognises and fosters everyone’s unique potential, experience, and contribution through strengths-based development initiatives, you’ll ultimately see improvements in productivity and engagement.
The first step is to identify the unique talents and assets that your employees possess. While you might be able to determine many of these strengths through personal observation, you can also consider the following questions to ask:
- What do you enjoy doing during your time off?
- What did you enjoy the most in your previous positions?
- What do you most look forward to doing at your job each day?
By giving employees a platform to express how they really feel in their current role – and whether they see purpose in the work they do – you can guide them on a journey of development through focusing on their strong points. To gain additional insight, ask employees to list each other’s strengths. This helps recognise areas they’re not aware of, but others can easily see.
Using data to connect purpose with role placement
At Humanico, we believe in a data-driven approach around employee strengths and motivations. When it comes to promotions and moving staff within the organisation, it shouldn’t just come down to coaching, performance reviews, length of employment or the other natural bias we have seen time and time again in traditional hierarchical based systems.
Our platform allows you to leverage data insights to uncover gaps, trends, and patterns of ALL your employees, not just the usual top 15% – as well as find their purpose through understanding their natural talents and then cultivating them, individually and collectively. Observation-based promotions simply don’t work when someone is working in a role that doesn’t play to their strengths. They just don’t have the opportunities to display where their true strengths lie, and as such the company misses out on the diverse talent that exists in their own backyard.
We collect data via our unique and engaging employee journey including a proprietary Motivation and Engagement (ME) survey and CliftonStrengths Assessment; a journey that is frictionless and builds trust between employer and employee so companies can truly understand how all of their people think, feel and behave. Concurrently, the benefit to every employee enables them to tap into their purpose and really shine in your organisation by aligning their strengths to the work that best suits them.
In summary
Leading with a human lens means striving for success by focusing on all your employees first. To do this effectively, you must embrace a people-centric approach by gaining a deeper understanding of their natural talents, inherent strengths and overall sense of purpose.
Once you’ve uncovered these areas, you can unlock and reveal your company’s true potential.
Start the conversation today by contacting us
