Making Work Meaningful in an Uncertain World

BY Angelica Frey | December 29, 2022

Earlier this year, the company formerly known as Waste Management got a major rebranding: it’s now known as WM. “It wanted to be known for more than picking up trash. We’re in the center of the circular logistics of sustainability,” Shweta Kurvey-Mishra, WM’s VP of organizational and talent development, said during a From Day One webinar titled, “Making Work Meaningful in an Uncertain World,” moderated by Fast Company senior editor Lydia Dishman.

Companies wanting to be known for more than their services and products are in line with the fact that, in the last few years–and especially since the pandemic disrupted our routines, habits, and workflow–people have been expressing the desire to delve deeper in their purpose and their employer’s. Fifty-six percent of the 3,500 respondents of a Gartner survey maintained the pandemic made them want to contribute more to society and, on the other hand, a Harris Poll found out that 86% of business-to-business leaders claim purpose is indeed important, but half of them say they lack the capacity to center their company’s values around it.

Yet shifting beyond business results is what makes employees shift from an “I have to go to work” mindset to “I get to go to work,” the panelists asserted. Among the highlights of the conversation:

Towards a ‘People First’ Approach 

“What gives me fulfillment is to help people, scaffold them and help them through their journey and sort of matchmaking them to the ideal opportunities in our company,” said Heather Wollerman, who at the time of the webinar was the VP of HR and global talent management at the industrial-technology company Enpro Industries. (She is now a VP of talent management at McGraw Hill.) This year, for instance, Enpro started piloting a Purpose Workshop for employees at all levels. The core question is asking people what they’d want to accomplish in a lifetime, and then applying whatever answer they give to the work environment.

This matchmaking mindset also permeates Weill Cornell Medicine, where Eric Saidel, a senior director of HR, finds purpose in helping “each individual member to some aspect of our mission,” he said. “The key is connecting people to that mission.”

On that note, last year WM launched an Employee Value Proposition Campaign, which revolves around six Cs, which include culture, colleagues, and contribution (among others). “We created Lunch and Learn, with active lunches where people would talk about what C they were being impacted by,” Kurvey-Mishra said.

The webinar’s speakers, top row from left: Shweta Kurvey-Mishra of WM and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company. Bottom row: Eric Saidel of Weill Cornell Medicine, Heather Wollerman of Enpro Industries, and Katharine Anderson of Light & Wonder (Image by From Day One)

These efforts, however, can transcend physical proximity. At Light & Wonder, which provides gambling products and services, a recent launch was a Global Diversity Calendar. For example, when one joins a meeting with employees connecting from different countries and cultures, one might not know what holidays are being celebrated outside one’s own country, and it also lists a number of events and historical areas of significance related to a particular place. “It was to ensure employees would see the world as global in scope,” said Katharine Anderson, Light & Wonder’s director of HR service center operations.

Making Peace With Work Being a Work in Progress 

Sure, those initiatives are not a one-stop success formula. “There is more work to do,” said Kurvey-Mishra. “How can we reach the desk-free population in a meaningful way?” In fact, while WM workers do have on-board mobile units in their trucks, they’re prohibited from actively using their cell phone while on shift for safety concerns.

Another issue is about balancing people with profits. “I don’t think we've quite figured that out yet,” said Wollman. “It’s something we’ve been talking about but we don't have the magic solution.” A good start, for them, is moving away from traditional performance-review management, which is substituted by periodical engagement questions on a particular topic. A typical topic would be “psychological safety.”

In this case, the health-care industry has been a bit ahead of the pack. “We always had the structure of direct feedback,” said Saidel. “If you have a positive encounter with a patient, there’s this opportunity to feel connected to the work that we do.” A way to make the intended points come across more poignantly, however, is through sharing information about the company’s successes in breakthroughs in research and medicine.

Meeting Generation Z’s Standards

Gen Z, which will make up to 27% of the workforce by 2025, is quite preoccupied with finding a workplace that honors humanitarian, environmental, and social-justice causes, “So, every interview that we hear, we’re creating metrics about what is important for our candidates, and we’re using that to inform our advertising. The storytelling has to be internal too. Anecdotally visible, but also through data and metrics,” said Kurvey-Mishra. “They stay because they understand the mission that we’re on.”

That, of course, means looking beyond their product offering in a significant way. The same applies to the health care industry. “We use a lot of water,” said Saidel, singling out the research departments. “Not only is it important to the environment and to the world, but also to the candidates we want to attract. We’re getting those questions. What are we doing to make the world a better place beyond saving lives, treating diseases and advancing research?”

Anderson outlined that, upon hiring her company’s first head of corporate social responsibility (CSR), a strategy soon followed. “What we have is four pillars: environmental sustainability; corporate giving; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives; and responsible gaming, because for us as an industry that’s an important area,” she said. “In all of those areas, there are continuous initiatives and efforts, and we drive efforts that encourage their involvement.”

It can start with small steps: one way to reduce waste is, for example, curb the use of single-use cups, said Anderson. “Rather than keeping a lot of disposable cups, we went ahead and issued hot-cold mugs in the organization at the Las Vegas office.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Boston.

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He said, “We will see a 3-dimensional way of learning, using AR and VR technologies.  Which offers the opportunity to do really targeted training. Meta is a fantastic opportunity for that.”Given the possibility of technologies like the metaverse, what type of skills do we need to develop to be successful in this complex world? One skill is data literacy, Swaminathan asserted. “Reimagining data as a required skill across all sections of the enterprise requires a journey that HR would have to define and sustain in terms of training, learning and development, skills identification, and such. And when I say data analytics, I definitely do not mean just programming. There are a lot of skills around that that we would have to understand and unpack. This is a great opportunity.”When looking at skills, the professional or soft skills came most into focus. “[Draup] conducted one very interesting study. We talked to managers who were really looking at experience levels, and were asking for critical thinking. It’s not just technical alone. About eight of the ten skills we gathered were on the end of the professional or soft skills.” He added that HR professionals have the opportunity to define learning tracks for all of these components, and to have a learning track that would make these roles available to early career professionals.“The biggest thing that is happening in AI is human-AI convergence. There are a lot of activities that need to happen at an analyst level to enable that because it’s not a race against machines. It’s a race with machines. In the next five years, there are going to be a lot of opportunities for everyone in the room.”–By Christina CookKey Steps Business Can Take to Harness and Activate Their PurposeAs we transition into a post-pandemic workforce, it is important for business leaders to recognize that the desires of employees have changed. One result of the pandemic is that it gave us all permission to be more purpose-driven as part of a shift in priorities. The workforce is demanding more from employers, and there’s a desire to work for brands that stand for something and do good in the world. Brittany Hill, CEO and founder of Accelerist, a platform that seeks to make it easier for companies and causes to work together, explored this trend in a presentation at the conference. She described Accelerist’s approach to uncovering your company’s purpose, how to take action, and how purpose-driven work leads to higher levels of employee retention, job satisfaction, and business growth.Hill said she has always been a “do-gooder,” but her career didn’t start out that way. She got her start as a professional dancer, and while living and working in New York City, she woke up the day after the 9/11 attacks and decided she wanted to live her life with more purpose. After launching her new career at Fortune 500 companies in the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR), she worked in nonprofit fundraising before launching her own organization.Accelerist is a software platform that supports companies in their CSR efforts by identifying what those efforts should be, activating their consumers and workforce around those efforts, and how CSR efforts are affecting business growth. Accelerist also measures the impact of CSRs in the community.Brittany Hill, CEO and founder of AcceleristThe future of work is moving beyond workforce engagement into workforce purpose. In response, there has been a 75% increase in hiring people who are devoted to supporting purpose in a company, Hill said. Corporate giving and philanthropy has increased by 25% in the 12 months ending last fall. “Companies are standing up and recognizing that this is important. And executive pay is tied to environmental, social, and  governance (ESG) goals. Companies are investing in purpose-driven goals, and we all are benefiting from it. As a result, they have higher retention, they have greater customer loyalty, and they have increased brand reputation.”How can companies focus in on their purpose? Hill said it starts with “5 key principles.” The first principle is the Butterfly Effect. This theory states that the actions we take create a ripple and can ultimately affect events across the globe. Hill said, “That’s what we have to remind ourselves every day. One thing today can have a huge impact on others around you tomorrow.”Second, there’s a focus on objectives and key results (OKRs). How do we bring that into purpose? What’s our objective here? And what are the key results that we want to see?The third key principle is the power of three, in which you focus on your three most important goals of the day. This leads into the fourth principle, one of “ruthless prioritization.” Hill said, “What is our priority today? How can we be ruthless about focusing in on that? There are so many of us that are drinking from the firehose. What are the things that we’re just going to focus on today, this week, this month, this quarter, this year? And that’s how we make progress.”Finally, companies need to focus on motivation. Citing a survey conducted by Accelerist on the topic of workforce engagement, Hill said, “96% of employees said that volunteering in their community is important to them. Forty percent said that they would feel more positive about their employer if the company provided more opportunities for them to get involved. So, two things remain true: Consumers and employees want to lead and work for a purpose-driven company, and purpose investments have an impact on bottom line.”Now that business leaders understand the positive impact of purpose-driven work, how can they put it into action? Hill shared four tenets, beginning with engagement. “Second,” Hill said, “is moving beyond engagement and providing true ownership for the workforce. They want to have employee resource groups (ERGs), they want to help you build culture, and they want to contribute to the strategic development.” This all contributes to the third tenant: belonging. Finally, Hill said, “Its transparency. We want to know the impact we are making. We want the brands that we love to stand for something and to do something, because it’s not only critical to our survival as people. Now it’s actually critical to the survival of business.”–By Christina CookIs Your Company Developing An Inclusive Culture?While having so many organizations discuss the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is a tremendous positive, it’s even more important for companies to build and execute corresponding programs. Someone has to be accountable for that, but it’s probably not the first person in the C-suite most would think of.“The chief diversity officer is not accountable for DEI,” said Iesha Berry, chief diversity and engagement officer and head of people experience at DocuSign. “Neither is the chief people officer accountable. They have roles at the table of executive leadership, where the accountability lies with the executive leadership of the firm, which ultimately ends at the CEO. So when it comes to accountability for DEI, it really starts with the CEO and then is modeled in behaviors.”Berry spoke on an executive panel exploring the question, “Is Your Company Developing An Inclusive Culture?” and moderated by April Simpson, senior reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news organization focused on inequality.Berry as well as Allison Lyons, VP of HR at Frontier Communications, both indicated that the CEO has to bear the bulk of a company’s DEI accountability burden. “We have a CEO that believes in it, that speaks to it,” said Lyons. In painting a verbal picture of her CEO’s passion for DEI at Frontier, she said his messaging to those who do not also recognize its importance amounts to: “If you don’t want to work in our organization, that’s fine. Move on if you don’t believe in this initiative.”The panel on inclusivity, from left: Abbie Cowan of Atos, Iesha Berry of DocuSign, Allison Lyons of Frontier Communications, Donald Knight of Greenhouse Software, and Ryan Mitchell of CBREThe organization has recently developed focus groups, including ones composed of veterans and women, that discuss what Lyons said are “non-customer-service-related aspects of the business,” with Lyons acting as administrator. Frontier also conducts DEI-focused polls of its employees. 

Christina Cook and Michael Stahl February 12, 2023