We’ve got some good news for nonprofits that often struggle to complete financially for employees with better resourced employers in the for-profit world.
Money isn’t everything.
And if money is scarce, you don’t have to settle for being an employer-of-last-resort.
What you do have to do, however, is engage the passions of people and help them connect their work to what matters in their lives – their purpose.
Big shift
“Over the last two decades, the relationships that individuals expect to have with their employers and their roles at work have begun to shift,” says Alaina Love, COO and president of Purpose Linked Consulting and co-author of The Purpose Linked Organization: How Passionate Leaders Inspire Winning Teams and Great Results.
It’s true that employees can no longer realistically expect to find a lifetime of security with any employer. But it’s also true that more and more of them do expect to find some on-the-job personal fulfillment wherever they are.
“After years of studying employees at all organizational levels and examining the drivers of engagement most likely to motivate a company’s best and brightest, what I’ve learned boils down to four simple and unalterable realities,” says Love.
Here are those realities:
- “Beyond a certain baseline level of pay and perks, giving your employees more money will not guarantee their engagement and loyalty, nor will it help them develop that essential connection between their own purpose and passions and the job you’re asking them to perform.
- Millennials and baby boomers have more in common than leaders might expect. Both groups are searching for more personal fulfillment from their jobs and are becoming increasingly unwilling to settle for less.
- As a leader, you have the capacity and the responsibility for shaping a work culture of engagement. Purpose and passion are the two best tools in your leadership arsenal for crafting that culture.
- Choosing to ignore these facts assures two outcomes for your organization: the human-potential gap (the difference between what your workers can do and what they’re actually delivering) will only widen; and productivity will ultimately suffer.”
Read Love’s entire article about the importance of meaning and fulfillment on-the-job.