Tag Archives: purpose

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Your Employees Are Happy . . . And Other Popular Myths!

Are your employees really happy? What does “happy” actually mean? Are we even asking the correct question? Perhaps we should ask; “Are your employees engaged at work?”

According to Gallup only 31% of US workers are engaged at work (the numbers in Canada are similar to this). This is scary! It means that 69% of our workers are either not engaged or, worse yet, actively disengaged. This is costing our economy billions of dollars each year!

Being happy or satisfied at work is not the same thing as being engaged. According to Gallup, paying people high wages, providing Ping-Pong tables and free meals may result in “happy” employees and high employee satisfaction survey scores but it does not mean that your employees are engaged and productive. Jim Clifton stated; “A winning culture is one of engagement and individual contribution to an important mission and purpose. Human beings are not looking for company-bought goodies — they are looking for meaningful, fulfilling work. It is the new great global dream — to have a good job, not a free lunch. The dream is to have a job in which you work for a great manager; where you constantly develop; and where you can use your God-given strengths every single day.”

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What Does Your Organization Value?

Over the past month or so, my blog posts have dealt with organizational vision and mission. In the Vision post I defined organizational vision as “a picture of the future which creates an ideal and unique image of what the organization will become and/or the impact it will make.”. In the Mission post I defined organizational mission as “a definition of where you are going and what your organization is doing right now to attain the vision.”

So, what are organizational values and how do they fit in with vision and mission?

Organizational values are the bedrock of an organization. They are the foundation on which the organization is built. They describe the individual and corporate behaviors that will get the organization from where it is now, to achieving the mission and living the vision. Values are the driving forces that will lead your organization to success. A few examples of organizational values are;

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What is Your Company’s Mission and Why Should You Care?

A few weeks ago, I posted “What Is Your Company’s Vision and Why Should You Care?” In this article I defined Vision as “a picture of the future which creates an ideal and unique image of what the organization will become and/or the impact it will make.” I wrote about the importance of keeping the vision of your organization concise but powerful and portable so that it can be easily remembered, modeled, communicated and transferred.

Equally important for your organization is a mission statement. The mission statement defines where you are going and what your organization is doing right now to attain the vision.

Where the vision statement is broad, the mission statement should be specific. The vision for the organization should remain constant over time while the mission can change depending on what the organization is able to achieve and depending on market forces. The mission statement can also include some key success factors and parameters that allow the organization to clearly see and measure success as you move towards fulfilling the mission.

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What Kinds of Questions is Your Organization Asking?

“Organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask” (David Cooperrider)

Cooperrider is basically saying that your organization takes on the culture of the questions being asked by the leaders.

In his book “A More Beautiful Question“, Warren Berger explained it this way: if your leaders ask questions like; “why are we falling behind our competitors and who is to blame?”, then the business will end up with a culture of turf guarding and finger pointing. However, if the questions are more expansive and optimistic then this will be reflected in the company culture. Berger goes on to say that “we all live in the world our questions create.”

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Code of Ethics

I recently read “Die Empty” by Todd Henry. This is an amazing book that challenges the reader to understand their purpose and to live out their life fully so that they will not have any “unwritten novels, never launched businesses, unreconciled relationships and all the other things that people thought ‘I’ll get around to that tomorrow'” left in them when they die. One of the better concepts that I pulled out of the book is something Henry calls a “Code of Ethics.” This is not a list of rules like the 10 commandments that everyone absolutely needs to follow everyday. A Code of Ethics is a set of principles that apply to you personally and define how you approach everything in life. This code will be different for everyone as we are all unique individuals with unique gifts, talents and interests. Although I had thought about this some in the past, this book motivated me to write out my Code of Ethics. They are;