Purpose-Driven Engagement

How do you get people to get past their differences to work together on a project, whether that be differences of opinion or communications style or something else?

It’s BetterUp we’re very fortunate because our entire organization, all of us have coaches, so we also are always working with coaches ourselves and are able to actually talk through, hey, if we have a different style or whatnot.
We encourage our teams to really make sure that they’re digging in on some of that stuff with their coaches as well, being clear on how are these decisions actually being made too.
So I think we…And they’re all different frameworks, but we actually use the ACID Framework, right, so that there’s real clarity on who is actually like driving something, but at the end of the day, who’s ultimately approving something.

What about employee engagement, especially now when so many of us are working remotely? What strategies do you use to not only cultivate but also maintain employee engagement at a high level?

Yeah, so it’s really interesting, across BetterUp, we do a couple of times a year, what we call our Culture Canvas, where we go in and do a deep dive like survey with our entire employee base to understand again how people are doing and then also where are there opportunities to improve?
And this was an area where we wanted to dig in, really to your point, especially after the last two years, and we know that overall people are feeling this lack of connection and how do we get connection is a big part of that engagement, right? Like if someone doesn’t feel connected or don’t feel like they’re a part of something bigger, it’s hard to feel that connection.
So we actually do the Culture Canvas at the company level and then coming out of that, we break up across the entire organization to do what we call our Culture Caucus, which is about actually breaking up into all of the employee groups to say, okay, so as a leadership team, we could sit here and come up with a bunch of ideas, but what are your ideas?
And so we actually take real time. We take a few hours across the teams and these breakouts to pull together a bunch of ideas and then we go through them as a leadership team, assess it, and then put in place like, “Hey, how do you actually hear the changes that we’re going to make?”
And we commit to them and we call them our Culture Commits because we as a company, we very much practice conscious business, right? So when we say we’re making a commitment, we do it. And so it’s important to us on the culture side, we do that as well.
And from marketing, we actually did a version of that in marketing too, to just really understand how can we actually drive more of that engagement? And again, I think part of it goes into understanding what makes someone feel like they’re engaged. Part of that is helping drive collaboration. Part of that is that sense of connection. And then part of that is also helping people understand that there is a bigger purpose to the work that they’re doing.
So, we actually had done some research a couple of years ago that showed basically nine out of ten people would take a pay cut if it was to work on something that they knew had purpose, right, and that they were a part of something bigger.
And so we actually know that purpose is a huge driver for people. And so versus a company, it’s also constantly reminding the teams of like, here’s the purpose and here’s what we’re trying to do and why it’s so important.