Purpose will undoubtedly go down in history as a notable theme of the early twenty-first century. Between Millennials’ demands for purpose as employees and consumers, the August 2019 Business Roundtable statement redefining the Purpose of a Corporation, and the rise of purpose consultants as an industry, there’s clearly a collective interest in understanding the why behind the companies we work for and buy from. Peak ‘purpose,’ according to Google Trends, was the week of January 20-27, 2017. I’ll let you check your calendar for what public event might have provoked those searches.
This focus on purpose is not a passing trend, but rather an issue that we need to resolve before evolving to the next stage of our society and economy. Our grappling to understand what role companies should play is an essential feature of what has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven largely by technology, including the ability to collect and analyze data, artificial intelligence, and connectivity. These technologies are drivers of much of the change we’re seeing in today’s economy, but they aren’t driving the quest for purpose.
We – across age groups, not just Millennials, according to research by Harvard, Edelman, and others – want to know what companies exist to do because of the integration of work and life. This concept of work-life integration has largely replaced the quest for work-life balance of the 80s and 90s. With the rise of Blackberries and other PDAs, the ship sailed on ‘balancing’ our time by putting firm boundaries between the work week and personal time on evenings and weekends. The quest became to fit work around a satisfying personal life, even with conference calls on vacation and Sunday morning email sessions.
With this integration of work activities into our ‘personal time’ (and the occasional midday workout or online shopping spree), we identify strongly with the work we do. Whereas in the industrial era of the twentieth century, you worked from your desk, likely in a cubicle, under neon lighting. You advanced your employer’s interests from Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, or even 8 to 8. But then you went home, or on vacation, and lived your life.
After 30-40 years of service, you retired and collected that gold watch and hard-earned time with the grandchildren. That scenario allowed professionals to segregate their work from their personal identities. And so, if the work they were doing didn’t always align with their personal values, it didn’t create an existential crisis or even discomfort.
But now, we’re on the phone with clients, solving operational failures on vacation, and mentoring direct reports as we cook our families’ dinner, in between reps at the gym, or from the hospital waiting room while visiting a loved one. And so that work we’re doing has become part of your life. Our work is now visible to our friends, our families, and ourselves in our most intimate spaces. Work has become part of us as people.
And it is this integration of our personal identities with the work we do that is driving the dramatic spike in demands from employees that companies operate according to publicly stated values and/or a purpose. Now that we’re doing business within the personal spaces of our lives, it no longer feels OK to upsell that client something you know they don’t need or can’t afford, or to allow a quick fix in the supply chain that increases the single-use plastic required.
(Culled from Forbes)
