Why employees have the upper hand now more than ever before

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Employee satisfaction, as a concept, didn't emerge until the rise of the industrial economy and unionization. If employees were unhappy, management could predict a strike and stoppage of work.

Since then, the standard for management has been to consider employee engagement an accurate measure of satisfaction. Instead, research suggests the focus should be employee fulfillment: Do employees have the ability to reflect on and create meaning around their work?

Now, in the information economy, employees are often the means of value creation. This provides a unique advantage in which management must consider employee fulfillment in order to remain profitable.

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AARON HURST

Aaron Hurst is a globally recognized entrepreneur who works to create communities that are empowered to realize their potential. He is the CEO of Imperative, a B Corp advocating for Purpose-Oriented Workers and supporting the organizations that embrace them. Hurst is the author of The Purpose Economy (2014) and a regular advisor and thought partner for many global brands.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Aaron Hurst: Thirty years ago or so, we started having this movement to talk about employee engagement, that the goal of organizations is to have engaged employees. And there's been a lot invested in this. Companies are measuring it. There's consulting firms that make all their money off of it. I mean, this has become sort of mainstream, sort of corporate employee measurement. We suspected that not only was engagement probably not the right way to measure this, but actually might be part of the problem when it comes to fulfillment at work.

So in this most recent study we looked at, sort of this question between what is the difference between engagement and fulfillment? And we saw some pretty marked differences. But we also saw that people truly understand the difference. So, when we asked people, would you rather have an engaging job or a fulfilling job? People overwhelmingly said, I'd rather have a fulfilling job, right? We also asked them, you know, how would you describe engaging work versus fulfilling work? And you saw it as completely different words that were used to describe them. One was about doing, and being busy, and active, which is employee engagement. The other one was much more about the state of being. It was about relationships. It was about the emotional relationship to work, which we know from psychology, is actually really what matters. And I think this matters in a lot of different ways.

I think one is, what creates an actual sense of fulfillment at work is the ability to reflect, and to actually process your work, and to think about it, and to create meaning around it. And in a culture in which we're talking about like being engaged, we're looking for people just to be busy. And the idea of spending time reflecting doesn't look like engagement. So, we're actually sort of creating this culture with engagement that actually gets in the way of employees being fulfilled.

One of the things that really distinguishes employee fulfillment from employee engagement is that when we ask people who's responsible for your fulfillment, so at the end of the day, if you're fulfilled or not, whose responsibility is that? And, overwhelmingly, again, people said they were responsible for their own fulfillment. That's a pretty big difference from how we thought about employee engagement, where the discussion has all been about the assumption it's your manager. It's the company. It's what the organization is doing for you that makes it engaging. That's a totally different approach to HR and leadership when you make that assumption. When you start off with this idea of fulfillment being your own responsibility, leadership is very different. Leadership is about enabling people to get out of their own way because people also said they were their number one barrier to fulfillment, not their manager, not leadership, they were their own greatest barrier. So leadership's increasingly about getting out of the way of people being able to actually realize that difference.

I think understanding the different between employee engagement and employee fulfillment requires understanding the history of how we even got to employee engagement in the first place. So if you go back thousands and thousands of years before any economy existed, and we were just sort of working in the Serengeti in ou...

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