Meaningful Workplace Archives

Meaningful Millennials: In the Workplace

Posted on February 11, 2016November 22, 2024 by Saja Chodosh

This is the second installment in our weekly series entitled “Meaningful Millennials”, where we interview millennials on a variety of different subjects that are top of mind for us in the studio.

As a brand strategy firm, we work with our clients to help develop strategies that enable their brand, their business, and their workplaces to be more meaningful. This year, there has been a lot of work in the studio around employer branding, improving employee engagement, shifting culture, recruiting top talent internationally, and understanding how to create a meaningful workplace for millennials.

So, as a millennial myself, I asked other millennials: What makes a workplace meaningful for you?

What makes us come to work each day? What creates purpose and drives productivity? What adds meaning to everyday work life?

I reached out to 12 millennials and the following are the top-line findings:

Human, one-on-one connections and relationships in the workplace foster feelings of support, belonging, and growth that are really important for millennials.
We don’t want work to be just work. We long for a work culture that encourages balance – a space for learning, growing, and risk taking.
Workplaces that share our values encourage this growth because they make us feel naturally connected to what we do.
Millennials want to care about the work we do and want the people we work with to care, too. We like sharing values with co-workers, but also enjoy independence and the freedom to be our authentic, unique selves within the workplace. This stimulates creativity and productivity, and adds meaning to each day.

Want more specifics? Here’s what millennials have to say.

“A meaningful workplace is one that helps you grow and achieve what you would not be able to independently. I hate the idea of work-life balance and clichés like ‘do what you love.’ Work is part of your life. Every aspect should be lived and enjoyed wholly.”

—Bryan Ku, Designer at SYPartners, CCO at Nerd Skincare, Creative Director at Hummock Island

“Levity. The opportunity to talk and joke with one’s co-workers.”

—Beau Sperry, Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, Biomedical Ethics Research Program at Mayo Clinic

“Overflow of trail mix. Having morning meetings to chitchat, bounce around weekend plans, goals, and aspirations. Setting up silly monthly challenges like ‘squat challenge Mondays’ to keep the environment active and healthy, which in turn makes for a productive team. Setting up mandatory ‘social’ jogs around the office keeps the energy up and is an easy way to get to know your co-workers quirks, values, and vulnerabilities. Lastly, lots of photos! A bulletin board full of inspiration, families, friends, and funny office moments brings meaning to walking into the office every day. Oh, and a gratitude jar.”

—Sarina Karwande, Student of Physical Therapy, Western University of Health Sciences

“A meaningful workplace is one with smiling co-workers greeting you in the morning, as well as saying their goodbyes to you in the evening; colleagues patiently helping coach and provide the proper advice for all your unanswered questions; and, most importantly, laughter filling the room the majority of the day.”

—Lauren Rhodes, People Coordinator, Coupa Software

“Easy. One word: windows. And not the OS.

Employers, please, window your workplace. Go gaga for glass. Our brains thank you.”

—Nick Martino, Publications Assistant, Public Library of Science

“My idea of a meaningful workplace is somewhere where everyone is a team player and the idea is to be the most productive while having an enjoyable time at work.”

—Isabelle Hale, Interactive Accountant, Snipp

“My workplace has felt most meaningful in moments when our team is able to step back from the flurry of details and logistics to talk about the impact our work has on the world. To situate the sometimes-tiring work of email and spreadsheets within our real mission as an organization is invaluable. I am lucky enough to have landed in a workplace with mentors who encourage this sort of ‘zooming out”’that makes the day to day consistently inspiring.”

—Nicole Stanton, Program Coordinator, Aspen Words

“Work/life balance is a high priority to me. A meaningful workplace is also somewhere where you are able to enjoy your co-workers on a deeper level, rather than just as colleagues. You spend more time with your co-workers than you do with your family and friends, so it’s important that you have a strong and supportive team.”

—Shannel Singh, Senior Staff Accountant, Riaz Inc.

“The ability and opportunity to take risks and have support from those in your workplace to those risks is meaningful to me. If you’re lucky enough to work in an environment that allows you to express the love you have for whatever craft you are passionate about, then allowing yourself to expand your interests with the support of others is one of the best situations you can be in.”

—Axel Cubias, Freelance Grip

“I think the relationships I build make a workplace most meaningful for me. Even if you absolutely love what you do, the people you do that with are what make your experience fulfilling. Beyond that, good working relationships are what foster support, creativity, personal growth, and just overall positivity! I also think having a deeper motive or goal makes a workplace meaningful. It would be really hard for me to work somewhere where people just go through the motions or don’t feel at least some connection to what they do.”

—Avery Geisler, Strategy Associate, Initiative

“Being comfortable in the workplace is huge. I don’t mean that I have to wear a T-shirt and jeans, but comfortable as in ‘I like the people I work with and enjoy what I’m doing.

Tech is so huge around San Francisco and start-ups are on every corner. They all do a good job of trying to create this “sexy” look to bring in employees with arcade rooms, events, and fun perks. For me, that sounds like fun, but it can easily distract from what is really important. For me, that’s a company’s values.”

—Alex Hanepen, Information Systems Intern

“I’ve spent countless hours slaving away in the service industry as a butcher and cosmetologist to realize I’m not a magician, but a killer with a knife. Now, I’m a writer for an awesome company producing work that’s not only important to me, but has a positive impact on my life. I’ve found that if you want your work to be more than a job, and instead be a positive force in your life, you need three things:

self determination: being in control of your own choices
complexity: being able to master new skills and grow
direct connection between effort and award: seeing the payoff—whether financial, spiritual, or personal

The combination of these three things made my work meaningful.”

—Lauren Padia, Technical Writer, Salesforce

“In my opinion, the center of a meaningful workplace is the creation and focus on a cohesive workplace culture; a culture in which there is an understanding of work/life balance, an understanding that life outside the office comes first, and an understanding that we no longer live to work, but rather work to live.”

—Joshua Goldsmith, Brand Manager, Mark Miller Subaru

Here’s what we learned this week from millennials.

Relationships within the workplace matter.
Open the windows. Take a walk. Sunlight and lightheartedness are essential.
Balance is key. Work/life balance, feeling comfortable enough to take risks, being supported to succeed, and the ability to constantly grow and learn.
Focus on the greater impact of your work and your core purpose as an employee. This adds meaning to everyday and makes millennials feel like they are making a difference and doing work that matters.

Next week, we will continue our “Meaningful Millennial” series, discussing what drives brand loyalty for millennials.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design consultancy

Why Workplaces Aren’t Meaningful Now

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

Third in our Meaningful Workplace series.

Disillusioned by the age of conspicuous consumption, worried by the state of the planet and its people, rocked by war, corruption, and financial crises, and immersed in a swirl of information, news, opinion, and gossip, people are searching for meaning in their lives.

Today they feel a need to align with people, ideas, and companies that make them feel they’re part of something bigger than themselves.

People are seeking a sense of purpose, a reason for being, and the answer to the question, “Why is this good?” Today their idea of good is shaped by an increased awareness of their own needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations – and a heightened concern for the planet and empathy for its people.

Wanting to feel good about what they are doing

These factors have made people more discerning than ever.

They no longer simply accept slick marketing messages. They scrutinize the products they buy, the companies they buy from, and the employers they consider. They reject products, companies, and employers that don’t share their values, mutual ambitions, or offer the opportunity for a meaningful connection.

We believe people seek out employers that clearly state – and live out – their meaningful ambition for the greater good. They don’t simply want to feel good, they want to feel their jobs are creating good for themselves, for the company, and for the world.

Ambivalence at work

“Where do you find people, our most important asset, on a balance sheet? Under expenses.” –Paul Herman, HIP investor

Business has long been focused on producing widgets, growing market share, managing costs, and delivering shareholder value. And, while employees are a very costly factor, both in terms of monetary and management time, the process-driven, measurement-hungry, and org chart world of business has been lacking in human respect, empathy, and meaning.

As such, businesses have been far more focused on the “what” and “how” of their enterprise — and have played scant regard to the “why.”

Lacking a compelling reason for being, it’s not unreasonable that employees might feel ambivalent about their work and their employer.

Emotionally neutral to employees

Also, most businesses haven’t yet figured out how to evoke positive emotions in a credible and meaningful way. They may know how to stage a glitzy motivation campaign that cause short-term bumps in performance, but they don’t realize the value in consistently and subtly evoking a set of positive feelings through their attitudes, behavior, and actions.

As such, most workplaces feel pointless and emotionally neutral to employees, hence the litany of employee-related problems and challenges facing today’s business leaders. To thrive in a hyper-competitive, fast-accelerating, and harder- to-differentiate-within world, businesses need to rethink how they reach out to employees.

It’s time for businesses to make their workplaces more meaningful.

Did you miss Part 1 and 2 of this series?

Read Being Meaningful: It’s the Key to Better Engaging Your Employees and Getting Employees to Respond Positively.

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.

Getting Employees to Respond Positively

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

Getting Employees to Respond Positively is the second in a series on Meaningful Workplaces.

Meaningful Workplaces are built by companies that aim to produce a more meaningful outcome from, and for, their people.

To become meaningful, these companies adopt a new stance vis-à-vis their relationship with their employees. They strive to reduce the distance that’s been imposed through organization structures and prevailing attitudes. They seek stronger emotional connections up, down, and across their enterprise. They see their task as making their company fit for the future by making it fit for humans.

They create a Meaningful Workplace master plan that defines their compelling reason for being, identifies how they want to leave people feeling, and states how they wish the company and its employees will behave.

Building an organizational master plan

They use the resulting master plan to create a common ground of understanding, respect, and ambition. The master plan then serves as the foundation for other initiatives designed to realize a business’ ambition, feelings, and behavior, including:

“Macro plans” that adapt the company’s structure, policies, and procedures;
“Mini plans” that engage groups of employees; and,
“Micro plans” that engage employees individually.

These initiatives inspire employees to align their intent, attitudes, behaviors, and actions to the meaningful outcome the business seeks. As this kicks into action and becomes increasingly contagious within the workplace, the work experience fundamentally changes for the better, from top to bottom, across silos, disciplines, borders, and cultures.

Employees respond positively to a Meaningful Workplace

As a company transforms the way it reaches out to their employees, their employees change the way they respond back to the company.

Employees eagerly engage in the work at hand, align with the company strategies, collaborate with one another, and contribute their energy and skills. They confidently deal with peers, prospects, customers, partners, and suppliers. They proudly tell their family and friends about the company they work for.

And all the other people vital to the business’ success (customers, partners, suppliers, investors, community leaders, influencers) start to sense, appreciate, and are drawn toward the new spirit of shared ambition that emanates positively from the business.

Did you miss Part 1 of this series? — Being Meaningful: It’s the Key to Better Engaging Your Employees

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

The Key To Better Engaging Your Employees

Posted on January 13, 2016November 22, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

The workplace is in crisis. And engaging your employees is not easy.

Workers are not engaged. Productivity is down. Morale is low. Many employees obviously don’t see the point of what they, or their employer, are doing.

How can a business turn the tide of employee dissonance?

How can it become fit for a future that’s bound to be more competitive, complex, and commoditized?

How can it connect with people who are no longer blindly accepting corporate propaganda — people who are more “we” than “me” focused? People who are more discerning about the ideas, products, and brands they buy into, the businesses they buy from, and the companies for whom they work?

Tomorrow’s most successful businesses will have shifted their workplace to a more meaningful employee engagement platform. Using meaning as a springboard, these winners will have built places in which people want to work, are proud to work, and excel at their work.

What makes something meaningful

In the course of a day, our senses open us up to millions of stimuli, each of which presents itself and demands our attention. To cope with the avalanche of input, our system quickly decides which stimuli are significant enough to be acknowledged, and which are so significant that they must be remembered.

In other words, our system decides what matters — and what doesn’t.

The stimuli we remember can be significant in two ways. On a primal level, some of our memories help us survive against danger. On a higher-order level, some of our memories are cherished because they are relevant and emotionally important to us. These memories are meaningful because they directly connect us to what we hold to be important: our needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations.

When something remembered is meaningful to us, it resides with one foot in our brain and one in our heart. When a situation provokes us, we rapidly bring the memory to mind as a thought wrapped in emotion.

Being meaningful – the key to engaging your employees

The resulting feeling often spurs us to action and re-engagement with the source of the memory. Assuming the second experience is in the same vein as the first, there is a compounding effect that makes the memory even more meaningful.

For a business looking to better engage its employees, being meaningful by doing things that matter is the key to being cared about enough to be remembered and cherished.

Creating a meaningful workplace is about establishing a high-order connection with employees and benefiting from the compounding effect that comes from a constant stream of meaningful experiences tied directly to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of employees.

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.

How I See Our Culture – David Ogilvy

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Jerry Holtaway

I worked for Ogilvy and Mather for nine years. At the beginning of my time there, it was still a privately-held company – though within a few years of my tenure, it was absorbed (and changed forever) by WPP.

I came across this piece written by David Ogilvy (whom I had the pleasure of meeting once), about the culture of Ogilvy back in the day.

I think all leaders should use it as a culture check-list for their companies.

From The Unpublished David Ogilvy.

Here is how I see our culture.

A NICE PLACE TO WORK

Some of our people spend their entire working lives in our agency. We do our damnedest to make it a happy experience. I put this first, believing that superior service to our clients and profits for our stockholders depend on it.

We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble – with their jobs, with illness, with alcoholism, and so on.

We help our people make the best of their talents. We invest an awful lot of time and money in training – perhaps more than any of our competitors.

Our system of management is singularly democratic.

We don’t like hierarchical bureaucracy or rigid pecking orders.

We abhor ruthlessness.

We give our executives an extraordinary degree of freedom and independence. We like people with gentle manners.

We like people who are honest. Honest in argument, honest with clients, honest with suppliers, honest with the company – and above all, honest with consumers.

We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough.

We do not admire superficial people.

We despise office politicians, toadies, bullies and pompous asses.

We discourage paper warfare.

The way up the ladder is open to everybody. We are free from prejudice of any kind – religious prejudice, racial prejudice or sexual prejudice. We detest nepotism and every other form of favoritism.

In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else.

Like all companies with a strong culture, we have our heroes– the Old Guard who have woven our culture. By no means have all of them been members of top management.

Wise words, from a wise man. Creating meaningful workplaces and a strong culture is not an old concept, but it is getting harder and harder to achieve.

To read more about how Emotive Brand thinks about building more meaningful workplaces, download our paper below.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

Employer Brand: It Doesn’t Happen by Messaging Alone

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Tracy Lloyd

“The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.” – Saint Augustine

People today, including employees and prospective recruits, are looking for more meaning in their lives and in their work. This is why there has been a rise in budgets directed to more meaningfully connect with employers and an increase in budgets to develop a company’s Employer Brand.

Messaging alone won’t pull employees in

This is especially true when investing in your Employer Brand, and trying to build a Meaningful Workplace. It becomes far more involved than simply sending a PDF of the master plan to every employee or hanging posters in the cafeteria. Indeed, every aspect of the master plan’s deployment needs to be done in a highly sensitive and respectful way.

It has been said that messaging is dead, meaning that the idea of simply creating and broadcasting a bank of words, no matter how charmingly poetic they may be, simply doesn’t cut it any more.

Such business transmissions smack of company speak, and worse, of marketing. Eyes glaze over. Defensive shields are erected. Pure messaging attempts fail.

The goal, after all, is a meaningful outcome that seeks to bring the employer and the employee closer together. This is not to say messaging doesn’t play a role in the development of an Employer Brand.

What it does say is that messaging cannot be the primary tool for instilling a sense of ambition, for evoking feelings, and for creating a meaningful culture.

This excerpt is the eighth in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

Photo credit.

Purpose Becomes Ambition in a Meaningful Workplace

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Tracy Lloyd

“Ambition” is the new “purpose.” Workplaces become meaningfully relevant when employees see the point of what they and their employers are out to do: the company’s “why”, it’s reason for being, it’s meaningful ambition. When presented in a credible, inclusive and authentic way, the company’s meaningful ambition is respected, admired and embraced by employees because it aligns to their personal values and answers their desire for meaning.

Continue reading “Purpose Becomes Ambition in a Meaningful Workplace”

Cooperation vs. Collaboration for a Meaningful Workplace

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Tracy Lloyd

Successful businesses in the future will share a common characteristic: a cooperative approach to employee engagement, morale and gratification. Stowe Boyd is a super-smart researcher and author who focuses on “The future of work, and the tectonic forces pushing business into an unclear and accelerating future.” In his work he has made the following observation:

“In the collaborative business, people affiliate with coworkers around shared business culture and an approved strategic plan to which they subordinate their personal aims. Continue reading “Cooperation vs. Collaboration for a Meaningful Workplace”

The Meaningful Workplace – Help Them Create Good

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Jerry Holtaway

Disillusioned by the age of conspicuous consumption, worried by the state of the planet and its people, rocked by war, corruption and financial crises, and immersed in a swirl of information, news, opinion, and gossip, people are searching for meaning in their lives. Continue reading “The Meaningful Workplace – Help Them Create Good”

Business Success is All About Building a Meaningful Workplace Culture

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Jerry Holtaway

“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” – Albert Einstein

A business’ fate is determined in large part by its culture. A business culture is the reality created by how people act, react, and interact with each other based on their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions.

The most damaging business cultures are those in which aggression, neglect, and punishment leave employees feeling they have no reason to commit their energies and skills, share their ideas, or help the company advance.

Wanted: A culture that unites and connects employees

A culture built principally around rewards for individual or group performance pits individuals and teams against each other, often in ways that create class systems, in-fighting, and divisive loyalties. The winners in such cultures find meaning in their rewards. The rest are left wondering what the point is for them and their employer.

A passive, benign, and inert business culture leaves the business subject to the aggregate confusion that results when each individual employee’s quirks, tendencies, and potentially questionable morality and ethics are accommodated.

The most beneficial business cultures are those that unite employees around an ambition, make them feel emotionally connected, and surround them with people who share their ambition, feelings, and behavior.

4 factors in transforming your culture

By consistently and intentionally conveying a meaningful ambition and evoking a set of unique and positive emotions, businesses can transform the meaningful outcome of every aspect of the work experience:

The physical environment – the aesthetics and functionality of the workplace;
The policies and procedures – the actual rules of the company as well as the way in which employees experience them;
The attitudes and behavior of fellow employees – the feelings evoked when dealing with superiors, peers, and reports;
The moment of contact – the nature of company/employee and employee/outside world interactions.

A Meaningful Workplace culture is based on the way employees experience these factors – what meaning is conveyed and how they are left feeling.

This excerpt is the sixth in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

Photo credit.

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