A Swinging Company

While I will explore this subject in more depth in the last chapter of the book, I'll say here that there are three kinds of relationships one can have with work: you either have a job, a career, or a calling. Interestingly, each of those perspectives on work corresponds to a different level of the Employee Pyramid. Someone who sees his or her work as just a job tends to be stuck at the money or survival level of the pyramid. Those who are on a career path (there's no such thing as a job path) find great motivation on the success level in the way they are recognized at work. Yet, outside rewards and recognition can wear out as motivators over the course of a long career because there's a certain level of compliance required. More and more people are finding that they need something that feels more internally generated as their infuser of energy. For those of us lucky souls who experience our work as a calling, there is a natural transformative effect when we find great meaning in what we do, what our company does, or both. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to helping you understand how to mix aspiration and inspiration in order to help your employees see their work as more of a calling.

The miracle of inspiration can move mountains. When I was studying in England, I had the pleasure of spending some time in the town of Henley, which holds an annual rowing Royal Regatta that is known around the world. In watching the rowers' synchronized strokes, I would marvel at how an inspired team that was truly connecting with each other could virtually lift the boat out of the water so that it appeared weightless as it glided. Maybe that's why we call rowing crew. There's magic in how they can take a heavy boat and, through working in unison as a crew toward a common mission, make it glide effortlessly along the water. This fluidity or flow of rising above the water is known as swing in rowing circles. Leaders that develop swing in their companies will create more self-actualized employees and will glide seamlessly past their competitors.

Okay, I know you may be thinking, “Chip, this meaning stuff is only relevant to a small collection of high-minded businesses or nonprofits.” I promise you, within all this woo-woo meaning speak, there is a Stanford MBA moment here. Nearly one-third of Joie de Vivre's more than 3,500 employees clean toilets for a living. Another group—the night auditors—spends most of their waking life doing financial audits while the rest of us are sleeping through the night. Carrying heavy bags, dealing with guests' emotional baggage at the front desk, doing endless laundry—this is a significant part of what my crew does on a daily basis. How do we create a sense of nobility and inspiration in what these bellmen, front-desk hosts, and housekeeping staff do every day? Matthew Fox, an Episcopal priest and author of The Reinvention of Work, suggests that all work contains drudgery; yet, the difference between one job and the next is whether employees have a sense of meaning in what they do. In fact, in China, the oldest symbol for business means “life's meaning” or “life's work.”

Why Meaning Has Become More Meaningful

Before I start prescribing how you can create more meaning in your workplace, let's look briefly at why meaning has become a bigger issue for many of us. I believe there are three primary reasons why meaning is a germane and essential topic in the workplace today versus a generation ago:

1. Corporate transformation follows personal transformation. And we find that Gen X and Millennial generation employees are particularly seeking purpose in their work more so than past generations.
2. Work is a more dominant part of our lives than ever before and has replaced some of the social structures that previously created connection and meaning in our lives.
3. Over and over again, we see that companies that create lasting success have a deep sense of mission and meaning in what they do.

The human potential movement of the 1970s can take some credit for the fact that our twenty-first-century workplaces are less status quo and more status go. During the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, youth dissented, women joined the workforce, racial minorities strived for equality, and millions headed for therapy or a hot tub to discover who they were and where they were going. Personal transformation and empowerment were the buzzwords of the era. It shouldn't come as a surprise that a few years later, these same people who were looking for transformation in their personal life would be expecting more from their work.

More and more, people wanted an opportunity to realize their full potential as whole human beings at work. They wanted to work for socially responsible organizations. They wanted to do interesting work. They wanted to be surrounded by a sense of community. Today, many people see their workplace as a playground for who they are and what they can become. And in this post-9/11, post–credit meltdown era, people are even more focused on finding meaning and inspiration in the here and now. This brings us to my second point. It's not surprising that work has become the touchstone for life's meaning when it dominates so much of our lives. We work 25 percent more hours per week than we did a generation ago (and that doesn't even include the e-mails at home and the text messages on vacation). While organized religion has made an American comeback in the past decade, the reality is that many of the social underpinnings that traditionally gave meaning to our lives—our neighborhoods, our social clubs, our extended families—have diminished in importance due to today's more transient and digital culture. Peter Katz, author of The New Urbanism, says, “We're a society awash in networks, yet starved for community.”⁴ And a well-publicized 2006 Duke University study showed that (despite all the new devices supposedly intended to help us connect) we are significantly more socially isolated than we were a decade ago.

If more people are working and commuting longer hours and have less time for external social activities that create deeper relationships, it's not surprising that they thirst for this sense of social connection from work. Actually, I think it's ironic that one of Joie de Vivre's favorite annual employee gatherings for the past decade has been our Bowl-a-rama night when we take over a bowling alley, each hotel's employees come dressed in their own homemade costumes based on a central theme, and we drink, bowl, eat pizza, and share stories. If Harvard's Robert Putnam is correct in his “Bowling Alone” (an essay and book) theory of social isolation, then it's up to the corporate world to help fill that vacuum.

As for my third point, great companies have great causes. Apple was initially founded on the premise of the “democratization of the desktop” and has morphed that cause into being the world's leader in mixing aesthetics and music with technology. Southwest Airlines is about the freedom to fly and connect with loved ones through the low fares they offer. Companies like Genentech and Medtronic are all about making better lives for their customers through scientific breakthroughs of new medical products. As Bill George of Medtronic says, “People must be motivated by a deeper cause. . . . People don't come to work to earn money for themselves and the company. They come to work because the product does something worthwhile, and this is what gets people inspired.”⁵

Maslow believed employees could become self-actualized through “becoming heroes by participating in heroic enterprises.” Few companies have infused the sense of meaning in what they do and created “employees as heroes” along the way better than Medtronic.

In 1962, five years after the company's visionary founder Earl Bakken invented the pacemaker, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Bakken and his board of directors wrote a simple mission statement—“to restore people to full life and health”—that became infused into every component of each employee's life at Medtronic. When employees join the company, they go to the “Mission and Medallion” ceremony where they receive a mission card and a book describing the company's history and mission. They get to meet the CEO and hear anecdotal stories about how Medtronic has changed the lives of both patients and employees. Each new employee is given a medallion with a depiction of a sick person rising. When Bill George was CEO, he would say to new employees, “I ask in accepting this that you accept the mission of Medtronic and look at it and display it to remind you that the purpose of your being here is to restore people to full life and health. If you get frustrated, note that there is a higher calling.”

This sense of meaning is reinforced at the annual holiday party in which six patients tell their life stories and explain how Medtronic's products have saved their lives. With two thousand employees and their families gathered, and thousands more Medtronic employees watching by videoconference around the world, these patients' stories help create a peak experience for Medtronic's crew. George describes this annual event as the “defining moment” for expressing the meaning that Medtronic creates in the workplace. He has told me, “One story tells a lot more than the number of patients served.”

The Two Components of Meaning in the Workplace

If you've never read Viktor Frankl's well-known book Man's Search for Meaning, I recommend you buy it today. His story—a psychiatrist imprisoned in a Nazi death camp trying to understand the meaning of life—is captivating, intellectually stimulating, and profoundly inspiring. From this experience, he came to believe people have a “will to meaning,” as he found that those who survived in the camp were more likely to have a sense of meaning in their life and a need to express themselves through that meaning once they were out of the camp.

He writes, “The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.” This eloquent man lamented, “People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”⁶ Once he reestablished himself after the war, he looked for ways to create meaning in people's lives, including in the workplace. He wrote about how people who were jobless were assumed to be useless and that uselessness meant they felt meaningless. But when Frankl convinced unemployed people to volunteer philanthropically, their “unemployment neurosis” disappeared, and they were more likely to become employed faster. Frankl, who survived the concentration camp, was fond of quoting Nietzsche to his unemployed patients: “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”⁷

It would be interesting if we could refer to a Meaning Index like we do the Dow Jones Stock Index so that we could quickly scan who is playing at the top of the pyramid and who isn't. In reading Frankl's book and in studying dozens of meaning-driven companies, I've come to realize that workplace meaning can be dissected into meaning at work and meaning in work. Meaning at work relates to how an employee feels about the company, their work environment, and the company's mission. Meaning in work relates to how an employee feels about their specific job task. Pollard captures the potential synergy of this dichotomy with the following passage from his book, The Soul of the Firm, “As a person sees a reason for the task that is personally satisfying and rewarding and has the confidence that the mission of the firm is in alignment with his or her own personal growth and development, a powerful force is unleashed that results in creativity, productivity, service quality, growth, profit, and value.”⁸

I believe that meaning at work is even more important than meaning in work. When employees believe in the work of the company, the whole Hierarchy of Needs is satisfied. Those employees clearly have their base needs met because they have confidence in the financial viability of the company, which means they have a secure job. Believing in the company's mission also typically creates deeper alliances among employees because that sense of being part of a crew gliding above the water, and the pride that comes from that success, satisfies our social or esteem needs. Finally, our self-actualization needs can be met by feeling that we are part of an organization making a difference in the world; plus, “meaningfulness-at-work practices may indirectly render the work itself more meaningful.”

When someone finds meaning in their work (they like what they do each day) without meaning at work (they aren't enthused by the company's mission), it is much less likely that there is a halo effect or indirect payoff in helping to improve their engagement with the organization. In fact, the larger the gap between a positive in-work feeling and a negative at-work feeling, the faster that employee is likely to depart the company.

The following figure will help you understand how to evaluate any employee's sense of workplace meaning.

What does Joie de Vivre do to foster a sense of meaning both at work and in work? With respect to connecting our employees with the company and its mission, we have found that the simpler and more succinct our mission, the more powerfully it engages our employees. Years ago, I wrote a nine-sentence vision statement that defined my sense of who Joie de Vivre was in the world. It never resonated with most of our employees. So later we created a team of managers and employees to write a short mission statement, which became “creating opportunities to celebrate the joy of life.”

I came to realize that virtually every company has a conscious or unconscious two-word mantra that describes who they are and what they do in the world. Sometimes these mantras are publicly known, like Apple's “Think Different.” Sometimes these mantras may be unconscious but nevertheless describe the behaviors of the company and its people. Nike's would be “Kick Ass” if they claimed a shorter, more amped-up version of their “Just Do It” philosophy. Airbnb's is “Belong Anywhere.”

Joie de Vivre's mantra is “Create Joy,” and since the time that lovingly crafted two-word truth revealed itself in 2006, it has become a rallying cry for everything we do. Employees took it upon themselves to create colorful rubber bracelets with “Create Joy” emblazoned on them to remind us throughout the day that this is what we're here to do. Our president Jack Kenny has a sign outside his door asking each of us, “What did you do to Create Joy today?” Another employee took it upon herself to add the phrase to all of the T-shirts we wear at the annual AIDS Walk fundraiser in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The two-word statement was so compelling that during the walk, our team started chanting it, and hundreds of other walkers started chanting it, too.

Danny Meyer, arguably the most admired restaurateur in the country, calls this “naming it.” This means defining who your company is and making sure people who are interviewing with your company completely understand that vibe. Danny and his Union Square Hospitality Group, who operate the most impressive collection of restaurants in Manhattan, named their approach to business enlightened hospitality, and this strategy has helped them attract the right kind of people who fit their organization.

I had the opportunity to have breakfast with David Cragg, who spent five years with Genentech in a variety of roles, including the vice president of human resources. He says that part of the reason Genentech has been considered one of the country's best employers is the “purity of purpose” of the organization. Early in its history, Genentech made a commitment to both basic science and translational science (how science is used to help people). While most biotech companies focus on the translational science—because it's where the profits are—Genentech has made a commitment to science for the sake of science and has 150 postdoctoral scientists at the company, both to bolster their research and development and as almost a community service to bolster basic science research. That purity of purpose helps Genentech attract the best and the brightest in the field of biotechnology.

When Fortune magazine crowned Genentech “America's Best Company to Work For in 2006,” they opened their profile of Genentech in the following manner: “Domagoj Vucic didn't come to Genentech for the rich stock options or the free cappuccino or the made-to-order sushi or the parties every Friday night. He came from the University of Georgia seven years ago because he believed Genentech could help him answer a burning question: What is it that keeps caterpillars infected with baculovirus alive for an entire seven days before they explode into a gooey puddle? Figuring that out could, believe it or not, be a big step toward curing cancer.”⁹

I'm not sure what Genentech's two-word mantra is, but their four-word motto is “In Business for Life.” If you go to their website, you will see just how they've made the link from all this esoteric science to the patients who have been the recipients of their trailblazing cures and drugs. Specific patients are profiled in ways that remind both the consumer and the Genentech employee just how meaningful that motto is.

Joie de Vivre creates a sense of meaning at work by engaging our employees in a wide variety of key initiatives:

• Philanthropy: While our company has a great history of being actively involved in the communities in which we're located, we had never officially tabulated our impact until 2006, when we came to realize that we raise more than $1 million annually (in cash and in-kind donations) for various nonprofit organizations. Not bad for a small regional company. But this internal philanthropy audit also showed us how disparate our efforts were, so we organized a Philanthropy Task Force with people throughout the company to help us develop a more strategic approach to how we give back. Now, Joie de Vivre's corporate entity supports four particular types of causes that really define the California experience. Our Cultural Ambassadors—one representative from each hotel in the company who together act almost like a city council with respect to cultural issues in the company—help create one companywide philanthropic event per quarter to support each of these four causes. Yet, we didn't want our individual hotels to lose track of their grassroots connection to community, and we didn't want the staff of those hotels to lose their autonomy of choosing which local organizations to support no matter what the cause. After the task force discussed this with each hotel, it was determined that we would define a modest annual goal for each hotel (to provide cash and in-kind donations to the organizations of their choice) of $200 per room or $20,000 for a 100-room hotel. This democratic approach to philanthropy has allowed our rapidly growing company to involve its line-level employees in not just the execution of our community service but also the strategy behind the decisions of who we support. Or you could take Microsoft's approach and offer a dollar-for-dollar match of employee charitable contributions.
• Company Strategy: Most companies, including ours, do off-site retreats with the top managers or leaders in the company, but rarely are line-level employees included in such an important and team-building activity. One of the things we've learned from Market Metrix, the company that surveys our employees' satisfaction twice a year, is that a positive score associated with the phrase “I feel powerful at work” has a significant impact on employees' sense of esteem and engagement. Years ago, we realized that if we truly wanted to empower our employees as entrepreneurs, we needed to include our front-desk staff, bartenders, and bellmen in an annual off-site retreat for each hotel so that they could have a voice in where their hotel was going in the next year with respect to customer service initiatives, capital improvement projects, and enhancements to the employee work environment. Is it difficult creating service retreats for a business that's open 24 hours a day every day of the year? Of course it is. We need to bring in employees from other hotels to run the business while our team is off-site, but the results are dramatic because it means our employees feel a strong connection to the strategic direction of the hotel, and our guests recognize that the vast majority of our employees act like entrepreneurs.
• Joie de Vivre University: Virtually every company has a training program, and most do a pretty good job of engaging their employees in suggestions for the curriculum of their corporate university. We've found that some of our most meaningful programs or classes have bubbled up from our employees. Our Silicon Valley hotels decided to create a Spanish-speaking Inspired Speakers Series because more than half of our employees in that region speak English as a second language. Their first class was called “Life Enhancement” and included 54 Spanish-speaking employees listening to four Spanish-speaking managers—who had moved up through the company—express how they navigated their rise to leadership in an English-speaking country. This inspiring class led to a second one that was focused on how to raise kids (since a vast majority of our Spanish-speaking employees have children, and 77 percent of their kids were under the age of 12) in America and what kinds of community programs were available to their families. Our Silicon Valley Employee Work Climate Survey scores skyrocketed soon after we started this bilingual Inspired Speakers Series.

Creating Meaning in the Day-to-Day Work

Up until now, I have focused more on the subject of creating meaning at work, but completely inspired employees also feel engaged with their day-to-day work. For the doctors, police officers, and teachers of the world, finding daily meaning probably isn't that difficult. But for the rest of us, sometimes it takes a change in our perspective. Robert Stephens, the founder and chief inspector of the Geek Squad, the tech service company that was purchased by retail giant Best Buy to help service the home technology needs of its customers, says, “The Geek Squad is not going to cure cancer, but we will repair the computers of people who do.”

One of the best approaches I've ever seen with respect to making this linkage between what we do daily and what the company does was profiled by Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in the book Resonant Leadership. Summa Health Systems of Akron, Ohio, spent quite a bit of time interviewing their employees to understand what gives meaning to them before creating the following statement on a wallet-sized card that each employee carries with them:

You are Summa. You are what people see when they arrive here. Yours are the eyes they look into when they're frightened and lonely. Yours are the voices people hear when they ride the elevators and when they try to sleep and when they try to forget their problems. You are what they hear on their way to appointments that could affect their destinies. And what they hear after they leave those appointments. Yours are the comments people hear when you think they can't. Yours is the intelligence and caring that people hope they find here.

If you're noisy, so is the hospital. If you're rude, so is the hospital. And if you're wonderful, so is the hospital. No visitors, no patients, no physicians or coworkers can ever know the real you, the you that you know is there—unless you let them see it. All they can know is what they see and hear and experience.

And so we have a stake in your attitude and in the collective attitudes of everyone who works at the hospital. We are judged by your performance. We are the care you give, the attention you pay, the courtesies you extend.

Thank you for all you're doing.¹⁰

If you're a Summa employee, you have a good sense that everything you do touches both the customer (patients) and the reputation of the organization. Summa has done a masterful job of defining its employees' work by its purpose and not by its task. When employees think of their work from the perspective of the ultimate purpose, as opposed to the specific job description, they are able to see their role as more expansive and more linked to the organizational mission. Thus, the organizational success is their success, and a genuine sense of accomplishment can result for the employee. There's no reason why your company can't create a meaningful message for your employees.

New York University Professor Amy Wrzesniewski has built a reputation on her theory of “job crafting” or revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Job crafting is a means of changing both the tasks and the relational perspective of employees to their work so that they feel more control over their jobs and a deeper connection to the organizational mission. Wrzesniewski cites a number of studies that show how job crafting can create meaning in what an employee does day to day. One particularly interesting study relates to how nurses were moved from a role as a task master to that of patient advocacy, and in doing so, the nurses were both more satisfied in their jobs and more effective in their delivery of care. For those of you who want to understand how job crafting can help you turn your employees' work into a calling, I recommend you do an Internet search to obtain a copy of the article, which is listed at the end of this chapter.

One of the ways that Joie de Vivre tries to expand our employees' perspective on what they do is to ask them to spend the night in one of our other hotels. Each of our employees is invited to stay for free twice a quarter at a Joie de Vivre property. It's remarkable how fresh one's perspective becomes when we move from being the employee to being the customer. Front-desk hosts realize just how important that moment of truth is when the guest arrives at the front desk for the first time. The housekeeping staff realizes how vacuuming in the hallways before 8 A.M. can disturb guests' sleep. Bellmen come to appreciate how the banter of conversation that goes on with guests on the way to their room allows the bellmen to become a “listening post” for how the hotel staff can address the guests' specific and unique desires during the course of their stay.

It's all about creating fresh eyes and a fresh perspective. Nike's chief of design John R. Hoke III was profiled in BusinessWeek magazine about how he created inspiration for his designers. Hoke sends them on design-inspiration trips: to the zoo to observe and sketch animals' feet, to a lecture on Dale Chihuly's fancifully colored glass sculptures, to the Detroit auto show to understand the form and silhouettes of cars, or to an origami class to understand the structural constraints of the ancient Japanese art form.

Creating meaning in the day-to-day work of cleaning toilets or designing shoes may be less about improving the specific work conditions—assuming they are in satisfactory shape—and more about changing the perspective of your people. Meaning is in the eye of the beholder. The more you can create peak experiences—whether it's coming face-to-face with an appreciative customer or building a sense of deep community among your people—the more likely your employees will see the meaning in what they, and the company, do.

I know this meaning stuff isn't easy to talk about in most workplaces. But we're all familiar with popular films that show the difference one person can make to others. If one of your employees is feeling apathetic, rent them Mr. Holland's Opus, Schindler's List, or It's a Wonderful Life, and see whether that sparks some meaningful inspiration in them.

Congratulations. We've made it to the peak of the Employee Pyramid. Hopefully your lungs are acclimating to the high altitude. Most companies don't spend much time in this rarified place because executives have a hard time measuring meaning. Traditional human resources departments worry about the legalities of discussing something that verges on spirituality. Most managers don't contemplate the difference between a job, a career, and a calling. No doubt about it, though, creating employee meaning can be your secret weapon in differentiating yourself from your competition. But remember that meaning can mean different things in different parts of the world, so what worked in your American division might not work as well in Japan or India. I was giving a speech in South Africa and was introduced to a book called Meaning, Inc., which does a fabulous job of giving an international perspective to the issue of workplace meaning.

Don't forget that focusing on the top of the pyramid is what you do once you've satisfied the money and recognition needs of your employees. If you have a weak foundation for your Employee Pyramid—as is true in many nonprofit organizations—at some point, even if your mission is full of meaning, your employees will have to leave you in order to pay the rent or feel individually recognized somewhere else.