In the search for the special sauce of employee engagement, “purpose” has become one of the biggest buzzwords in People & Culture circles – and rightfully so. On average, we will spend 90,000 hours of our lifetime at work. We deserve to feel like we are contributing something meaningful to the world in that time. But what does this purpose really look like in the workplace? It is seen as an inherently positive factor in employee satisfaction and performance, but my research on workplace well-being has shown that the true anatomy of a purpose-driven employee is complex, unique, and not nearly as straight-forward as you might think.

I define purpose-driven work as any work that makes a meaningful and prosocial contribution to something that is greater than the self. The most commonly recognized examples of this type of work are education and health-care. For example, consider teachers: while they do receive compensation for their work, many teachers have selected the teaching profession because they believe in the inherent importance of education; they have prioritized a meaningful and prosocial consideration of something greater than the self in their work. Across hundreds of data-driven Insights reports over the last three years, I have started to see clear trends emerge in how these purpose-driven employees compare to employees who do not have the same degree of purpose in their jobs.

METHOD AND ANALYSES 

The Insights Survey is a quarterly or bi-annual pulse survey that assesses 20 core drivers across employee engagement, culture, well-being, and performance. To best understand the anatomy of the purpose-driven employee, I aggregated the data from every Insights Survey that was live between October and November of 2018. In total, this dataset consisted of 3715 employee responses across 12 organizations. I coded every employee response to indicate either high or low-levels of purpose depending on how central a prosocial contribution was to that individual’s job. This process was conducted at the employee-level; for example, a teacher would be coded as “purpose-driven” because of their direct proximity to students every day, whereas a finance employee in the same school-board would be coded as “not purpose-driven” because they do not have the same direct proximity to the student on a daily basis. I then conducted independent samples t-tests comparing purpose-driven employees with non-purpose-driven employees across all 20 Insights Drivers.

 THE HEALTHY PROGNOSIS

On the healthy side of a purpose-driven employee, the data helped to support the reasons why purpose is so sought after in organizations. Results suggested that purpose-driven employees are significantly more engaged (p < .001), significantly more inspired (p < .001), and are significantly more likely to go above and beyond on the job (p < .001) than employees who are lacking this type of purpose in their jobs. This makes sense - purpose-driven employees never need to ask, “why am I here?” Every day, teachers gets to teach the students in need that make their job meaningful; nurses get to provide care for the patients in need that make their job meaningful. In purpose-driven work, there is always a clear reason to be engaged and inspired and this helps to create a strong and emotional attachment to the work that they do. This type of attachment can come at a cost, however, and the complexity of this purpose-driven work does have drawbacks that are less frequently discussed.

 THE HEALTH COMPLICATIONS

Despite the clear benefits of feeling meaningfully connected to your work, results suggested that there are also real and often undiscussed health complications of purpose-driven work. Specifically, results indicated that purpose-driven employees are significantly more stressed (p < .01) than non-purpose-driven employees, and reported significantly lower levels of general well-being (p < 0.5), resilience (p < .001), and self-efficacy (p < .001). It is important to note that these scores represent employees’ self-perceptions. For example, many people would consider nurses to be some of the most resilient people in society – but this data suggests that nurses still report their own resilience as lower than many other occupations. This is a powerful illustration of how the weight of this purpose-driven work can affect even the strongest of people. Importantly, however, results also suggested that this weight can be managed under the right conditions.