Dive into an eye-opening episode on burnout, failed employee engagement initiatives, and the struggle to create authentic culture. Workplace culture strategist Jessica Kriegel teaches listeners how to align on purpose and foster employee fulfillment in the world of remote work.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Jessica Kriegel is a workplace culture strategist, Fortune 100 Thought Leader, speaker, and the author of Unfairly Labeled: How Your Workplace Can Benefit from Ditching Generational Stereotypes and The Culture Equation.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
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COLLABORATION OVERLOAD
The pandemic forced many businesses to make the sudden shift from in-office to remote work. This meant that teams had to learn to collaborate in new and sometimes challenging ways. Meanwhile, managers were trying desperately to engage their employees. But what was lost in the pursuit of employee engagement?
According to guest Jessica Kriegel, “Collaboration overload was the first instinct of most organizations that were moving into a remote environment in the early pandemic.” From Zoom Happy Hours to Walk and Talks and Jeopardy games, leaders’ attempts to “intentionally create culture” led to overwhelming tech burnout and increased levels of stress, both of which contributed in part to the Great Resignation we saw months after the shift.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
The Struggle Continues
“I think most organizations are still struggling to figure out how exactly to intentionally create the work environment that you want to have when we’re all working from home. Because it feels like the only tools we had at our disposal were being in person together, which is sad because it’s not the way that we show up together, in the format in which we show up together. It’s in the experiences we create for each other with what we say and do.”
The Holiday Party
“There are two kinds of employees. There’s the employee that looks forward to the holiday party, and there’s the employee who absolutely hates going to the holiday party. And those two employees are not necessarily more or less bought into the culture. A lot of that just has to do with your own personality style. And so I think it’s sad when companies lean too heavily into those kinds of mandatory fun activities to engage in culture.”
Finding the Meaning
“I’ve been following the Anti-Work Movement for a year now. […] And it started as a radical fringe group on Reddit. Basically, people who were not upset about working, which is a common misconception, but were asking deeper questions about work, such as ‘Why do we work?’ […] And it’s not people who don’t want to work. It’s people who want to work with intention, who want to feel like there’s meaning in the work that they do.”
A New Mission
“So we propose replacing the idea of employee engagement with something new called employee fulfillment. Fulfillment is the extent to which your character and abilities are being fully developed. So to what extent do you feel fulfilled here? Can you feel whole here? Are you developing in your character, in your abilities, beyond just your work tasks, but you as a person? And when you meet that Venn diagram intersection, that’s where the magic happens. It’s where companies are fulfilled, people are fulfilled, people are making money, companies are making money. Everybody wins.”
Culture vs. Purpose
“I think culture fit is a scam. It’s just an excuse to allow unconscious bias to infiltrate into the system, which is terrible for decision-making. When people think about culture fit, they think, ‘Who do I wanna get a beer with? You know, they’re a good culture fit.’ And so you’re going to end up feeling like the people who look and talk and act and have backgrounds like you are a better culture fit than people who are different, so culture fit needs to also die a quick and painful death. And instead, we need to ask about purpose fit. What is your purpose, your personal purpose, and does it align with the purpose of this organization?”
The Role of the Leader
“Every leader needs to think of themselves as the Chief Reminding Officer. We need to start every meeting […] by stating our purpose. It gets tedious. It gets repetitive. It can sometimes be uncomfortable and a little bit embarrassing for leaders because they feel like we’ve done this before. They’re going to be annoyed with me for continuing to repeat this. But it’s the only way to ensure that every single person in the company knows the purpose. And if they don’t even know the purpose, then how in the world are they going to know if they have purpose fit?”
Uniting Behind the Shift
“This is a culture shift, and I always say that culture is leader-led, but it’s co-created by every level of the organization, so it’s something that obviously the top-level leader needs to endorse. The executive team needs to get behind it. HR typically manages the process and facilitates it, but it cannot be HR-led because then it’s just another HR initiative. It can’t be manager-led because then it doesn’t have executive buy-in. It can’t be executive-led because most frontline workers don’t even have any interactions or visibility with the executive team. It’s a co-created, co-owned process. But leaders need to pave the way.”
LEARN MORE
Find free resources on culture, employee fulfillment, and other timely topics by going to the Culture Partners website here.