Finding Purpose in Your Organization's EVP
Channel: Mercer
Date: 2018-12-03

Mercer | https://bit.ly/2UeGh15 | Mercer – Lewis Garrad and Tim Stanscheit Explain the Importance of Purpose in your Employee Value Proposition

Today I’m with Tim who is our life sciences expert working here with me in Singapore and today we're talk about some of the research and science behind the importance of finding meaning and purpose of work. This year, the Mercer Talent Trends Report identified working with purpose as 1 of 5 and merging hr areas of focus. People come to work looking for much than a paycheck. They want to find a meaningful set of experiences and a compelling purpose that they can connect themselves to enabling them to feel their work has impact and meaning in the world. Last year I wrote an article with a colleague for the Harvard Business Review outlining the science and research about meaning and purpose in the workplace. We looked at 3 key areas. The 1st area was a correlation between job satisfaction showing us that people don't love a job because of what it pays them. They love it for the experience that it provides them the opportunity to connect with others, to provide a meaningful impact in the world, and to find a sense of connection in what they do. 2nd people find meaning  through the way that they experienced leadership and a leader's personality makes a significant contribution to that. We find that ambitious, driven and curious leaders, those people who know how to trust others were higher for the values fit in their organization tend to have people who experienced more meaningful work. Last, we find that meaningful work is beneficial for employees. They experienced better health and wellbeing, work together more effectively in teams and likely to bounce back from issues and challenges experiencing them as learning opportunities not failures. Life sciences organizations put a lot of stock in meaning and purpose. What's your experience of this and what kind of data do they have translates purpose into the day to day work with people. They have having an annual survey around most meaningful jobs and what is constantly on top of this chart is jobs related to healthcare and that's no surprise because they're the meaning means you are helping people. So looking at the life sciences industry where their whole business model is centered around helping patients of improving life makes this industry as a whole very purpose driven as well. So looking at their mission statement is in fact you can see that all their mission statements are pretty much the same. They are all around centers of helping the patient and improving life. So we in Apac we are running a networking forum with the 35 biggest medical device and pharmaceutical companies and we're actually calling this forum purpose connecting life sciences because this is the one thing that they definitely all have income. So now it seems to be fairly simple to say, well, this organization is purpose driven, so it means to drop some meaningful for the employees and just looking at the business model and what the companies are doing that is the case. So framing their business model to wards a purpose that is appealing to most of them places because they can always. What they're doing is they're showing patients stories day in and out. They are only present in these organizations so people really can see what their products are doing. I mean, one of the things that you talked about there that I think is really important that our stories, so you talked about the importance of bringing patient stories and talking about how the work that your organization does is influencing people in the world. And you know, that's something that we really see as well. You know, um, there's a lot of research and sort of an emerging set of thinking that shows that people really connect very powerfully to narratives and stories. Uh, and when they work effectively, they help people. You get a different sense of, I don't really understand something on a different level, so I hope what we've done today has given you a brief sentence of how important it is for people to find meaning and purpose at work. That there is real incredible research that shows just how influential a feeling, a positive sense of purpose in the workplace can be and how organizations like life sciences organizations do that on a day to day basis. 

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