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These are uncertain and unsettling times for workers. The institution of employment has been broken apart, made increasingly conditional, and, for many workers, emptied of meaning. At the same time, businesses need people to help them compete, grow, and prosper. For that to happen, employees need to be engaged, motivated, and aligned. And add to this the growing need of the people to do work that matters to themselves, the society, and the planet. How can your business bridge the gap between the reality of your workplace today and the meaningful desires of your employees? We’ve...

Toni Morrison is a great American novelist who, in a recent interview, pinpointed one of the reasons we are entering the age of meaning. For all sort of reasons, life in the Industrial Age of opulence lacked meaningful nourishment. It left people feeling empty, which lead them to try to fill the gap with junk food, junk clothes, and junk ideas. But today, people no longer find it easy to toss off meaning; rather, they are actively navigating to find those things which offer nourishment. Among other things, they are searching out businesses that share their values with respect to social and...

Your business’s performance suffers when people don’t do what your business needs them to do. So why aren’t they doing what you need them to do? To help you understand why you are enduring increasing customer dissatisfaction and employee lethargy, we have prepared a paper, “The Meaning Gap: What it Means to Your Business.” The meaning gap represents the distance that’s growing between your business and the people vital to it’s success. As your business becomes more sophisticated, measured, and managed – in other words, less human – it...

According to a recent study, over half of workers – and an amazing 72% of students – list “a job where I can make an impact” as very important or essential to their happiness. What does this mean to employers? It means that they would benefit from establishing a meaningful workplace for their employees. They would define a “purpose beyond profit” – a statement that sums up how what your company does, and how it does it, makes an impact in which employees play a vital part. They would infuse their workplace with this purpose beyond profit by...

We came across this 1930 quote from the post “This isn’t happiness”, which was featured on the Explore blog. We believe it shows the point at which things started to get ugly. This was a call for a time of mindless consumerism. A time when people “had to be trained”. And boy, were we ever trained. Whatever it was, as long as it was “more, faster, cheaper, now”, we bought it. We filled our houses, then our garages, and then rented storage pods, with stuff we didn’t really want or need. Everything got cheaper and cheaper at a time when we made...

Add a meaningful dimension to your loyalty offering to make it matter more to your best customers, your business, and the world. Your most loyal customers are no doubt financially important to you. But, is your loyalty program just a transactional system, or is it also a rewarding hug for the people loyal to your business? In other words, does your loyalty program have both an ROI and an ROM (return on meaning)? Something for Nothing Everyone loves to be rewarded for being a good customer. Points and perks are powerful ways to say “thank you”. The strongest loyalty programs...

Aligning employees, getting them engaged, and creating a workplace that people not only love to work in, but strive to get a place in, is the “holy grail” for many companies. And with good reason. Without a workplace that people find gratifying, a company runs the risk of having employees working at cross purposes, working at half speed, and spending more time looking for a new job than doing their current job. In our “Meaningful Workplace” paper we talk about the need for companies to change the way they reach out to employees in the age of meaning. No doubt, your...

Hugh Macleod makes the point that many companies diminish the impact of their overall presence by a creating fragmented experience across numerous, uncoordinated silos. In his cartoon, Hugh refers to communication channels, but each of these silos are often multiplied by other silos within companies (e.g. products, divisions, etc.). Regardless, each “silo owner” has their own “strategy”, which in the absence of an overall brand strategy they understand and respect , is whatever they think will work best to reach their short-term goals. Far better that your business...

These two photos were recently featured on a blog we came across, and vividly reminded us about how technology is disappearing from view and being replaced by other purchasing criteria. On the top left, a Mercedes from 1982; top right a recent Mercedes concept car. On bottom left, Apple II from 1977; bottom right, 2012 Apple Retina MacBook Pro. From heavy industry to high tech, progressive and confident manufacturers are literally hiding the “technological guts” of their machines and devices. Once the heroes of marketing, turbo chargers and CPUs are now relegated to powering...