Fundamentally, a company’s purpose is its reason for being in business besides profits. It’s the difference you make in the world – why you exist. And it’s born out of actions, not words. The real challenge lies with bringing your purpose to life within the fabric and culture of the organisation.
Why is this important? It connects people to a shared goal and creates drive and a passion for their work that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. It also helps to differentiate you in a crowded marketplace and attract and retain the right, like-minded talent.
Transforming lives – a Lucid Purpose
At Lucid, we’ve spent the last few years working hard to make sure we are more than the end product of our expertise. We want to transform the lives of all those we touch, including our clients, partners, team members, our communities and our planet. To do this, we have had to become conscious of the impact we are making at every turn – where purpose is concerned, actions speak louder than words.
This sense of purpose has never been more important and providing our people with a clear understanding of how their jobs contribute to the bigger picture was a priority throughout 2020 and will continue to be, especially now we are all working remotely.
Creating a remote community
As advocates of agile working, we already had the technology in place to deliver a safe, secure and effective remote working strategy to everyone when lockdown began. However, we had no playbook for the digital transformation that our delivery teams needed to manage. The learning curve was steep. This put pressure on our teams, and while it was unforeseen, we have learnt and continue to learn valuable lessons in managing and motivating a remote workforce under increased pressure. Regular temperature checks and the ability to act on insight to swiftly course correct are crucial to success.
Our aim is always to support our people to work from home rather than live at work.
It’s a fine balance and we have sometimes gotten it wrong in the past by not acting fast enough, asking the right questions or spotting the signs. But we are getting better at it, and this is where employee engagement comes in.
Employee engagement – follow the evidence
We create and deliver evidence-based solutions for our clients every day so why is it that many organisations don’t take the same approach when it comes to employee engagement? The answer is: because it’s difficult. While COVID-19 has upped the ante on employee engagement, evidence still points to more people being disengaged than engaged at work and this is still not a good place to be. Disengaged employees are unproductive, unfocused and have the potential to negatively affect those around them.
At Lucid, we want a thriving culture with proactive and engaged employees who bring their full selves to work and tackle tasks without being asked. We want our people to want to be part of different initiatives, like our D&I committee or a specific strategic taskforce, because they believe that their contributions and efforts will benefit not only their careers but also the organisation and its purpose, which they feel invested in and aligned to. Evidence shows that non-thriving cultures are ten times more likely to be negatively impacted by crisis than thriving cultures.
To achieve this, we have invested in our tools and infrastructure. At Lucid, we focus on the six key domains that make up the Talent Magnets™ as identified by the O.C. Tanner Institute in their 2018 Report – Purpose, Opportunity, Success, Appreciation, Wellbeing and Leadership – and how these determine an employee’s decision to join, engage with and remain at any place of work.
For example, we have a well-established system of reward and recognition combined with plenty of opportunities for people grow and progress in their careers. In 2020, we promoted 63 people – that’s over a quarter of our entire workforce. We provide a full suite of remote L&D tools as well as bespoke classroom training and 1:1 executive coaching. We also have a comprehensive wellbeing programme called LucidBeing as well as our most recent initiative, Lucid Littluns, providing information and resources to help our Lucid parents help their Lucid littluns at home.
We know there are still plenty of lessons to learn but we are always listening, re-evaluating and course correcting. Our regular surveys and touchpoints provide a voice for our people so we can continue to translate insight into action and follow the evidence. Ultimately, this all contributes towards making our purpose to live every day by providing life-transforming solutions for those we touch. For our teams, clients, partners and for patients.
By Angela Young, Chief People Officer, Lucid Group
@MedEdLucid