How Employers Can Create a Culture of Thriving

Maybe the pandemic, world chaos in supply chains, inflation, foreign wars, or crazy politics are all making workers contemplate how their lives are going to improve in the midst of so much strife. It is important for employers to evaluate how they are supporting the emotional, mental, and financial stress of workers in our times.

Too many surveys show workers are not engaged and looking for other opportunities in the face of so many quitting and job hopping to better the quality of their lives. Along side these issues we must keep in mind other reports about widespread depression, opioid use, and increasing health problems.

Getting the Worker to Passion

How do businesses help workers stay out of trouble and become passionate about their role in supporting the company Mission? Many worker focused organizations look at the obvious concerns of income, free time, and worker engagement. These are important concerns but often treating just the surface concerns of deeper issues.

Thriving is soul deep. It is all encompassing involving the personal life, the career, and life expectations for both. Does the employer want to be involved in these issues at the necessary depth? Does the employer want the worker to deal with these issues on their own? Most of the time yes. But then how does the employer feel about the worker’s lack of engagement and seeking opportunities to move when they should be focused on company business?

The Worker Must Get Engaged in Their Own Growth Process

Part of the problem is helping the worker to focus on issues that would create thriving in their personal and career lives. Thriving is as much about personal progress as it is about material gains. Happiness is a process that we often confuse with the material accumulation. Happiness is a biological reaction or support for certain behaviors.

When we learn, create, contribute, care, protect, and exercise our brain stimulates certain hormones and neurotransmitters that sustain and reward these activities. There is no getting around the biological process nor masking it with piecemeal perks. Stimulating dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins are the key to happiness and thriving.

The worker has to understand, accept, and engage in the right behaviors if he wants to thrive. Giving the worker more pay, more free time, and more responsibility works if the worker sees them as just part of their own evolution to a much bigger goal. In the process of thriving or self-actualizing, there are many summits. Each summit must not be the end, but just one of many to be climbed for as long as the worker wants to thrive, which includes in his retirement as well.

How the Organization Can Get the Worker Started

Supporting some self-education can move the worker to realize his own role in becoming engaged and enthused about his work and his personal life prospects. He must be into growth to thrive. Its a basic. He can’t be passive and demand his organization fulfill his every need for him to be loyal.

There should be a mutual interchange of the worker knowing what he needs, understanding how to contribute to his organization, and having the organization understand how to support his fulfillment. How do these understandings come about?

First, there should be some evaluation with the worker on his level of happiness, his personal efforts toward growth, how his life and work are progressing together, how he can become more passionate about contribution to his organization, and whether being passionate about his work will help him thrive in his job. Then there needs to be an exploration of what is needed to thrive in his personal life and how his work organization can support that.

Thriving is Soul Deep and Requires Certain Elements

Thriving is soul deep and most people that thrive owe it to a reasonable amount of challenge and risk in their lives. Challenge is the best stimulus for happiness brain chemicals. It is Nature’s answer to helping a species advance and become better adapted with offspring that are also better adapted. Man has to learn and improve to find happiness along with his needs for caring, and community, plus increasing health in the form of diet and exercise.

If an employer leaves the worker to find his own way, the employer has to deal the failure of that to occur and how it impacts the organization’s performance. Many enlightened organizations including Microsoft are pioneering innovations in the worker employer relationship to reach new levels of worker performance and satisfaction. Microsoft has said “Thriving is the New North Star”.

Yes it is becoming crucial to dig deeper and look for more comprehensive solutions to create fulfilled, loyal and high performing workers. Peak performance is an achievable state for humans as chronicled in The Rise of Superman by Stephen Kotler. Organizations will thrive with workers achieving peak performance and it is a possibility if both sides understand what is required.

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As a Thriving Worker Consultant, I can engage in conversations with employers on how to begin the process of helping workers thrive and reach peak performance. It begins with a conversation to see how far an organization is willing to go with the advantages and disadvantages of not getting engaged.

Great practices for daily living can be learned with the Markap Series of Books. If your organization would like live presentations or Zoom meetings, they can be arranged for small to large groups.

The Markap Books:

Self-Leadership, Gratitude, Happiness, and Start Now

See Books on the Home Page

Contact me at Mark@markap1.com