He got up at the usual time. Breakfast, the train, the short walk to the office, through the revolving doors and the oversized reception to the lift, the stroll to his desk, the cursory smile and nod to the others already there, and then the press of the switch on the computer to start his day. The meetings, the emails, the coffees, the emails, the al-desko lunch, the emails nothing out of the ordinary. And then the switch again – this time to stop the day before starting the journey home. More emails on the train. Then eat, (just a few more of those emails), sleep, and repeat. Work for him is neither bad nor good. It is what it is. Projects appear and disappear. Initiatives arrive with a fanfare and fade away. Work feels continual and heavy with conflicting demands. And, whilst it is perpetually busy, it is also empty, with no tangible sense of daily achievement or real progress. Goals are written but feel abstract and purposeless, although veiled with the promise/threat of the performance appraisal rating. Every day he goes through the motions, present but, unwittingly uncommitted. And so it is for many individuals working lives.

The motivation crisis

Gallup’s latest ‘State of the Global Workplace’ report, shows that 85% of employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged. Whilst this figure seems staggering, it makes more sense when you see from their research that the not engaged proportion, which is 67%, aren’t the worst performers, but they are indifferent to your organization. They give their time but not the best of themselves. Ideas and energy are withheld. To quote Gallup’s report, “They likely come to work wanting to make a difference but nobody has ever asked them to use their strengths to make the organization better.” I would go one step further, to suggest that workplace environments and performance management approaches, for these individuals, are quashing the desire to engage and inject an undercurrent of fear. The fear of not achieving the target, the next change initiative or not reaching the assigned KPI is tied to the ultimate performance rating.

This global disengaged ‘norm’ has a huge economic consequence, currently estimated at $7 trillion in lost productivity. So why are we getting it so wrong? We know from many years of research into workplace engagement, that the returns are not just to the bottom line, but to the health and wellbeing of our teams. Retention improves, productivity and innovation are boosted and profits go up. We want – need – engaged employees, but very few organizations and their leaders, who influence 70% of the employee experience, know how to achieve true engagement.

The way we are working is not working, and we need to change. We need to apply the correct formula for motivation and create workplaces fit for humans. The culture needs to support, at a neurobiological level, why we engage. The good news is, is that we know the motivational formula a key ingredient of which is purpose. A sense of purpose (that what we are doing each day is worthwhile) is one of the core drivers of intrinsic motivation. Without it we detach and disengage, we have no direction and the work day simply passes us by. We accept the status quo and languish in the land of busy.

The Sisyphic condition

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished by the gods for his dishonesty. He was condemned, for eternity, to push a boulder uphill only for it to roll back down again once he reached the top. Prisoners in the Haidari concentration camp in WWII were put to labour in two four-hour shifts, but the labour was not intended to have a productive result. Instead, it was designed to break the prisoners’ morale, by making them dig holes only to fill them in again, and build walls to break them down. With no goal, no reason, no purpose this futile work is often referred to in behavioural economics as the Sisyphic condition. We are not automatons. We need to care about why and for what purpose we do the things that we do, which, back to behavioural economics, is termed the Meaningful Condition. Most often that purpose is grounded in how we contribute to others, our community and society as a whole. To spend our days in repetitive cycles with no sense of meaningful progress is demotivating and draining. To be able to answer the ‘why I do my job’ not just ‘what I do’ gives us a reason for our roles to which we can connect. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, studied motivation in the workplace.

She identified meaning as a key to motivation. She looked at why the happiest people tackle and dedicate much of their lives to some of the most challenging problems turning around innercity schools, working to feed the homeless, or caring for terminally ill children without a penny in return. She says “People can be inspired if they care about the outcome.” We can translate this into the workplace. Every person, no matter their role, needs to know, and emotionally connect to, how their contribution feeds a greater purpose.

Consider for a moment the following purpose statements:

Johnson & Johnson: ‘To alleviate pain and suffering’

Merck: ‘To gain victory against disease and help mankind’

Sam Walton founder of Wal-Mart “To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people.”

Disney; ‘To use our imaginations to bring happiness to millions’

Southwest Airlines, as one of the earliest low-cost airlines: ‘To give people the freedom to fly’.

There is nothing, in any of those statements, about profits, shareholder value or cost efficiency. If you asked those around you why your organization exists, what would the answer be? What would your answer be? In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins notes, “Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.… To make the shift from a company with sustained great results to an enduring great company of iconic stature… discover your core values and purpose beyond just making money (core ideology) and combine this with the dynamic of preserving the core/stimulate progress.”

We cannot underestimate the value received from connecting to a purpose. It gives us a sense of worth and significance. We are social creatures first and foremost, and relationships are formed quickly when there is a shared goal. Our evolutionary history shows that for most of our time on this planet we existed within small groups, each individual contributing to the survival of the whole. To give back, to provide useful skills and support, and to work together on shared tasks, solving problems that benefit the community triggers our reward circuitry so that we are motivated to ensure the group’s ongoing survival. Making purposeful connections in our workplaces will activate that same intrinsic motivation mechanism.

We cannot underestimate the value received from connecting to a purpose. It gives us a sense of worth and significance.

Bring the impact closer

How close are those who work with you to the result of their work? How do they experience, and what do they know about, the impact of what they do on a day-to-day basis? Call centre operatives whose work was to raise funds for university scholarships received a letter from and met a scholarship beneficiary. 4 weeks later, those who had met the student increased their time on the phone by 142% and raised 171% more than those who had not met the student. When radiologists saw a patient’s photo included in an x-ray file, they wrote 29% longer reports and made 46% more accurate diagnoses. Getting teams closer to the outcome of their work will inspire and motivate them. A day’s work without meaning is just work.

Live life on purpose

A reason to get up, that life makes sense and that you add value to the world has an impact on our health. Research reviewing data from ten studies investigating the relationship between purpose in life, mortality, and cardiovascular events involving over 136,000 men and women, carried out in 2015 by Dr Randy Cohen and colleagues, found that people with a high sense of purpose, direction and meaning as measured by psychological surveys had a 23% reduction in mortality and 19% reduction in cardiovascular events as opposed to individuals with a low sense of purpose. Furthermore, regardless of the individual’s country or the definition of their purpose, the effect was consistent. Cohen et al.’s conclusions were that possessing a high sense of purpose in life is associated with a reduced risk for all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events. Nobel Prize winner, Elizabeth Blackburn has run many studies to see how the actions, thoughts and beliefs we experience affect our ‘biological age’. In a 2010 study, Blackburn and colleagues found that an increased sense of purpose in life was associated with increased telomere length (which protects our chromosomes from deterioration) and thus a younger biological age. Okinawa in Japan is one of the nine ‘Blue Zones’ in the world cultures identified and studied because inhabitants live measurably longer healthier lives. In the Okinawan language, they have the word ‘ikigai’, translated as ‘the reason I wake up in the morning’. A sense of purpose is amongst the factors in common with all the Blue Zones and in fact, the researchers list a sense of purpose as worth up to seven years of extra life expectancy.

So improved productivity, engagement and health are just some of the benefits of having a sense of direction, meaning and purpose. To find meaning in our work gives us motivation to commit and focus.

Einstein once wrote ‘It would be possible to describe everything scientifically…but it would make no sense, it would be without meaning as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.’ Is your workplace a series of unconnected wave pressures or do you hear the symphony as teams connect to a core purpose?