Stronger together: Building employee-employer bonds

Lisa Miller, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, uses the term, dysthymia to describe what she calls “the low grade feeling that life is unfulfilling.” In her book The Awakened Brain, Miller maintains that this feeling affects well-adjusted high achievers, who have this sentence running in their heads: “If I can just make it through x, y, z, then I can advance, then I can rest, then I can be happy.”  

Miller offers this challenging observation: “Among successful friends who have had the education, opportunities, jobs, friends and romantic partners they’ve always wanted, it seemed from our conversations that there was still an emptiness.” These remarks also point to what we learned from the pandemic: the importance of meaningful work in the context of employee loyalty and retention. 

Employees’ reasons for quitting during Covid included the search for better pay, a greater work/life balance and long-term dissatisfaction with their job, as well as not feeling respected. While some analysts downplay the number of workers who resigned, calling attention to reshuffling within the same industry, for example, others predict another wave in 2024 of workers shifting their loyalties in an attempt to find a better job. 

What is a better job?

Certainly, higher pay and greater flexibility are factors, as is tuition reimbursement and other benefits and yet, even more meaningful investment in employees’ well-being is what is called for to increase staff loyalty and engagement.  

In terms of employee development, we focused on creating an important link between personal meaningfulness and work life. We did that by bringing individual life-mission work into our workplace. The first question we would pose to the employee is: “Why are you here?” Not only in the company, but even more importantly, on the planet. 

The next question was: “What does this call you to do?” And then the final question: “Who does that call you to be?” This investment in the development of the employees’ own personal sense of meaningfulness created a tremendous loyalty to our company because we were willing to sponsor their own development. 

Fitting the customer into the equation

The pandemic was not an easy time for customers; they were unsettled, panicked and easily displeased. We trained our management in practices for developing awareness, such as being able to drop into the situation differently, with more empathy, when faced with a challenging customer.  Our managers found meaning in working with the customers in this way. Between life-mission work and developing awareness, the employees were highly engaged in helping build a product that served our mission from “soil to soul”.

The pandemic may be over, yet the lessons learned can still serve us. The important takeaway is to show loyalty to your employees in ways that make sense to them. Meaningfulness cannot be dispensed with by merely offering a benefits package. As David Whyte, poet and consultant to Fortune 500 companies, writes in his book, Crossing the Unknown Sea:  Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity: “The inherited language of the corporate workplace is far too small for us now. It has too little poetry, too little humanity and too little good business sense of the world that lies before us.”

What does lie before us? Companies seem to require more and more of their employees: extra passion, creativity and innovation. This can lead to exhaustion and burnout. For Whyte, the antidote to exhaustion is not rest, but whole-heartedness and that comes from a deep sense of meaningfulness.

We cannot emphasise enough the positive impact that occurs by helping an employee develop their sense of being in this world. According to Whyte: “One of the keys to any possible happiness at work must be the little self-knowledge it takes to know what we desire in life, how we are made and how we belong to the rest of the world.” This is what employers need to cultivate in their employees.