The balance of employee passion and business outcomes

Finding the right mix of ensuring that your employees are passionate about their work, yet still achieving commercial and business success, can be a tough juggling act.

In a recent conversation with HR Leader, Jared McGrath, who is the founder and chief executive of SmartwFM, spoke about the keys to allowing people to work their passions into the fabric of an organisation and why this is so critical in the modern market.

“The first thing I'll say [is that] we have to be commercial. When I talk about people's experience and putting people first, I'm not saying that you do that at the expense of being commercial and running a viable organisation. [At the same time] If you don't provide a great experience, someone will just go somewhere else to get it, because that's what people want.”

It’s a crucial point that McGrath makes, as there's often a distinction that is made where you can’t have both, either employee wellbeing and passion is favoured, or business outcomes are favoured. When in reality, the orgnisations that have cohesion between the two, are often the ones that thrive.

McGarth also spoke to what he calls the ‘value flow, or ‘value chain,’ which acts as a corporate hierarchy that intertwines people and purpose.

“There's, what I would call, a value flow. It starts at the person, then it starts at the family and then it sort of goes to community, and then it goes to society and then it goes to the planet. The corporate purpose sits somewhere in that value chain and different organisations have different corporate purposes and there's nothing wrong with it.”

“But I think it's important for the organisations to define to the people that work for them where they feel fit in that value chain so that the person can decide whether their purpose aligns,” said McGrath.

With employees facing a cost of living crisis and ongoing high inflation, paired with the myriad of business challenges going on at the moment, that purpose factor can be an imperative piece to achieving those sought after business outcomes.

It is however a process that depends on your organisation. There is no blanket way of approaching employee purpose, its organisation to organisation.

“What's important for my business will be something different for your business. And I think it's [about] that sort of value flow and about defining the corporate purpose. You need to align the experience to what you're trying to achieve as an organisation.

If I'm a corporation and I'm just trying to drive shareholder return through increased profits, then I might place a different weighting on the people's experience. Whereas if I'm trying to automate the ways in which we interact with the people in our organisation and try and make that as seamless or as touchless as we can, then I'll have a different weighting on that people experience side of things,” said McGrath.