You spend the majority of your waking hours working. As an employee, you should be feeling purposeful at the office or at least have a decadent cup of coffee available.
You enjoy your office and like your boss, but sometimes you commute home feeling disengaged. It makes sense. Nearly half of American workers reported feeling unhappy at work, according to the Conference Board reports. This unhappiness is closely linked to feeling disengaged and unpurposeful at the office.
These employees aren’t seeking new work opportunities to resolve their unhappiness. Like you, they want to feel more helpful and appreciated by their current employers. Businesses are trying to resolve this problem, but they get stuck on measuring employee engagement instead of providing new innovative ways for you to engage.
As an employee, you should have opportunities at work to advance your professional goals and personal passions. Good management should help you explore your interests while implementing a plan for you to develop new professional skills in the process. Great management should lead the office in developing a workforce united with purpose.
Purpose-oriented workers frequently prioritize personal fulfilment and helping others over their financial or career goals. Employees with purpose are also 47 percent more likely to be promoted over their coworkers and expressed higher levels of job satisfaction, according to the Workforce Purpose Index. Involvement with your business’s corporate social responsibility CSR initiatives is an opportunity for you to feel purposeful and develop new skills.
Employees actively involved with their company’s CSR initiatives expressed an interest in diversifying their volunteering work through paid-leave service days,
company-wide volunteer events, and payroll giving schemes. A varied selection of CSR tasks allows you to explore more of your passions and develop a wider range of skills.
Purpose-oriented employees aren’t just young, millennial workers either. In fact, baby boomers over the age of 50 reported higher levels of purpose and satisfaction within the workplace than millennials. All generations of employees benefit when allowed to personalize and explore new opportunities within their philanthropic passions.
In a survey, 84 percent of workers hope their company shows them new ways to get involved with their local communities. Additionally, 83 percent of employees said they wished their company provided them opportunities for them to do with friends and family.
This desire reinforces the social purpose received from volunteer work. You should be able to foster relationships through your volunteering, whether it be between new friends, coworkers, or loved ones. Studies have found developing office friendships is vital to your long-term happiness as an employee and community service activities are a great way to create a new office friend.
KindLink helps employers do CSR better. Through our digital platform, your company can provide you with an easy-to-use employee profile, like a social media account, where you can filter through your company’s initiatives as well as outside volunteer activities. You can narrow down your passions on our site and volunteer or fundraise for a charity you admire.
Charities will show you exactly where your support went, and your company will be able to measure your donations and volunteer work. The skills you developed, like problem-solving and communication skills, will be generated into a report and provided to your CSR manager or HR team. With KindLink you can use this personal data to track your skill development, which all in all will help you advance to your next promotion.
You spend the majority of your waking hours at the office, and you should be feeling more purposeful while you’re there.
