Let’s take a look at each one to better understand what’s required to build and sustain each. What’s critical about each of these dimensions is that for employees to thrive in all four, mechanisms must be in place to sustain all four. As a secondary benefit, they may feel more confident and meet new colleagues from across the organization, but the actual need to thrive with confidence and community is not sustained by a training program. Employees may learn new important skills, which in turn helps them expand their capability. The dangerous truth is that one great training program, for example, may contain elements of two or three of these dimensions.

Too many organizations make the mistake of hoping their efforts will be silver bullets – that one great effort will yield all four. While they are interdependent, what it takes to cultivate them is actually distinct. What’s important to understand is that the work to cultivate all four of these is different. There Is No Silver Bullet for All Four Dimensions We will be devoting an entire quarter, and this edition of the Navalent Quarterly to more deeply understand each of these dimensions of a thriving organization and community. Sadly, too many of today’s large corporations still treat these needs as discretionary, not as mission-critical. If corporations have any hope of not just retaining employees, but truly building a thriving and vibrant environment in which employees want to contribute, they will have to do all four of these exceptionally well. Without one of them, the ability for an organization to create the conditions in which an employee can thrive will be compromised. Each plays a vital role in establishing the conditions for the other. The figure below highlights how interdependent these dimensions are. I’m valued (significance thriving): I’m thriving in my need to contribute meaningfully. I’m known (relational thriving): I’m thriving in my need for community. I’m confident (emotional thriving): I’m thriving in my need to feel safe and hopeful. I’m developing (professional thriving): I’m thriving in my need to expand my influence and ability. In our experience, employees are thriving when they can consistently claim the following four statements: Consistently, they pay attention to four integrated needs of their people, all of which combine to determine the extent to which employees actually thrive. In our diagnostic work of more than 200 organizations over the last decade, we have seen what great organizations do to help employees thrive. How Great Organizations Help Employees Thrive In and of themselves, these approaches aren’t bad, but as we saw with our Fortune 100 client, they are just incomplete. Increasing a sense of meaning and purpose in the workplace, unleashing the passion of people, and scores of other self-help gimmicks have created an entire industry that helps desperate organizations find ways to retain employees and maximize their contribution. Searching for an answer, every possible methodology for improving employee engagement has been looked at. Recently, however, countless studies have shown how deeply organizations are failing at providing thriving conditions for their employees.Įverything from excessively low employee engagement scores to rising turnover costs and the increase of sole proprietorships tells us that people have lost faith in the promise of the corporation as a place where they believe they can thrive.

Research shows that a thriving employee means a growing company. Their attempts spawned entitlement among their employees, whose appetite to be taken care of had become insatiable.Īll organizations want their employees to thrive. After four years of improving employee benefits, instituting flexible dress policies, giving people Friday afternoons off in the summer, and hosting multiple family events throughout the year, their employee engagement scores were actually lower. We recently worked with a Fortune 100 company that was hell-bent on making the “Best Places to Work” list.

Thrive meaning in business