The Office of the (Near) Future: Remote-First Work
Surprised by your employees’ productivity working from home? You may be considering how you can capitalize on the transition that’s already occurring and accelerate the shift to a remote-first work environment. However, before you do, there are some critical lessons that you can learn from businesses already working in a virtual environment.
Reimagining the office
As human beings, it is difficult to think about the future without viewing it as an incremental improvement over the present. In today’s virtual environment, most organizations are attempting to recreate everything that was happening in an office environment and do it online. This is a common mistake that happens all the time – but it’s not actually the most effective way to transition.
In addition, many employers have invested significant sums of money in corporate campuses to improve collaboration. As companies have invested more in keeping people engaged at the office – leaders are left wondering how to walk away from these major investments and what takes their place.
So, how do you transition to a remote-first environment?
1. Reimagine don’t recreate: List out the assumptions you have about in-person work and provoke each one of them, reimagine what those tasks and activities might look like in a virtual work environment.
For example, many assume that: “if we become remote-first, we’ll never see each other again.” If in-person interaction is critical for your company culture and productivity, repurpose the office environment as a co-working space for employees to collaborate with each other when they need it. This opens opportunities to use smaller spaces that are closer to concentrations of employees, for example a co-working space in the city and an option for those in the suburbs – shifting away from a more traditional corporate campus.
In the COVID-19 environment, this requires some thoughtful consideration on what types of interaction need to occur in person and which interactions can happen over the phone or video chat, but there is no need for absolutes. Provide your team with options to meet in person if they prefer and can do it safely.
What does this look like in practice? A great example to look at is Automattic - a distributed digital publishing company (think WordPress and Tumblr) with over 1200 employees spread across 77 countries and 93 different languages. While a fully remote organization, the company still values in-person interaction, which helps them to maintain their culture – they have simply flipped the standard ratio (mostly in-person and infrequently remote) to mostly remote and infrequently in-person.
2. Lead the change: If leaders are still in the office, the rest of the company will aim to come into the office – if you want to be remote-first, leaders must commit to being remote themselves.
Face time with senior leaders is often considered an important rite of passage for corporate cultures, and the more time a leader spends communicating with you the better chance you have of being noticed for a promotion or a high-impact project.
In a remote-first organization, leaders can create a level playing field for a distributed workforce that rewards outcomes and not the person who is the first one in, last one out, or sends emails at all times of the day.
In shifting to remote-first, your leadership team must model the way they want employees to act. This means the leaders must also go remote and build new communication habits in their organization to allow for asynchronous collaboration and updates.
We are going fully remote first at Quora. Most of our employees have opted not to return to the office post-COVID, I will not work out of the office, our leadership teams will not be located in the office, and all policies will orient around remote work. (1/2)
— Adam D'Angelo (@adamdangelo) June 25, 2020
3. Flip the ratio of in-person to virtual interactions: In-person interactions don’t go away in a remote-first world, they are more targeted and thoughtful. Provide stipends to employees for team meetings, one-on-ones, and other interactions and set guidelines on when in-person interactions should happen and when they are not needed.
People are surprised when I say this, but I think in-person is really key. And so we just flip it, so instead of saying you have to be around your colleagues 48 weeks of the year and do whatever you want for a month, we say be wherever you want for 48 weeks out of the year and for three or four weeks a year we’re going to bring you together.
- Matt Mullenweg Automattic CEO
Remote-first companies need to set clear expectations and guidelines for when teams should come together (in a co-working space, coffee shop, or elsewhere) and limit those interactions to ones that add more value being together in-person than virtually – flipping the old co-location ratio as Automattic has done.COVID-19 has challenged common biases of where work can be done most productively, and you’ll find that teams (equipped with the right tools and resources at home) can be surprisingly productive without being co-located.
And who says you can’t have office perks while at home? It can be as simple as repurposing the money invested in your latte machine to provide a stipend for a green screen, dual monitors, microphones, and a high-quality web camera (and maybe an UberEATS subscription for some snacks when desired).
4. Create a new rhythm of communication: Asynchronous communication involves a new communication rhythm — repurposing emails/check-ins and other meetings and creating new norms for how information is communicated and how others can contribute to building on ideas from other parts of the company.
Leaders should consider building a new asynchronous rhythm of doing business. Instead of emails and calls (which in a distributed workforce are tough to schedule across time zones) – consider a blogging system like what Automattic uses called P2s to document progress on projects.
P2s are posts written every day by employees to summarize what they have been working on, the problems that they might have encountered, and the discussions they had that day. If you think about the purpose of in-person meetings, whether face-to-face or on Zoom, this is typically what people are doing – unearthing hidden information from the organization to see what folks are working on, reach group decisions and find ways to collaborate.
By documenting what is happening on P2s, it has become a cultural norm at Automattic for all employees to read P2s and uncover what is happening around the company. This communication method creates a transparent organization without FOMO (fear of missing out) when not included in a meeting or copied on an email chain. Using an internal search index, you can look up P2s and follow certain topics (like Google Reader) to stay informed on progress.
5. Honor what made your culture great while continuing to grow: Continue to honor what makes your culture great, remote-first doesn’t mean you have to lose it – it offers new opportunities to build your culture and invite more talent into your organization that you previously may not have had access to.
If you ask any leader what makes their organizational culture great, you will likely get a range of responses from company to company. Some companies value a strong safety and compliance culture that enables them to reduce risk in their work environment, while others value an entrepreneurial environment where they are afforded creativity to take on challenges. Employees on Glassdoor rarely say that office perks make a company great – it’s about the people, work environment, and opportunities provided.
Those same positive attributes can be reimagined (not recreated) in a remote-first environment. It can be as simple as creating space on employees' calendars for “making time.” Making (or Maker’s time) is a concept created by Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, which advocates for blocking a large portion of each day for individuals to do focused project work without fear of interruption or task-switching – for example blocking each morning until 12:30 PM for individual work.
By reducing the need for emails and check-in calls, it creates more dedicated work time for employees to creatively solve challenges and is a great example of reimaging the virtual workplace vs. recreating interactions we typically had in person when located next to each other.
To encourage comradery, you can promote small team or one-on-one interactions amongst employees by providing gift cards for lunch or coffee so employees located near each other can meet and network. Another option is for leaders to participate in targeted, fun interactions across the company – for example, virtual trivia nights, a virtual scavenger hunt, or hosting a “bring your kids to work” on a company or department-wide Zoom call. Anything to create a positive environment representative of your company culture.
Remote-first work allows organizations to honor and celebrate what made their office cultures great and re-invest time and resources to continue improving on that culture forward in a distributed work environment where you have access to more talent outside of your city.
So, what’s next?
The current work environment offers both challenges and opportunities. Shifting to a remote-first permanently can make sense for organizations moving forward that have seen the benefits of this shift but doing so doesn’t need to be a daunting challenge. By learning from organizations who have been doing this and doing it well for years, your organization can meet the challenge of the future, while preserving your culture, accessing new talent and reimagining your work environment to unlock productivity.
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Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation, and almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. To understand what actually makes those teams work, BTS analyzed 6,702 leader coaching goals and 3,211 leadership team survey responses using our High-Performing Team Assessment model, comparing what leaders say they are working on with what teams say is getting in their way.
Meetings are a universal ritual in organizational life. While managers on average spend more than half their working hours in meetings, many leaders can’t shake the feeling that meetings are falling short of their potential. Are they advancing the work, or quietly draining energy? At BTS, we study teams not as collections of individuals, but as living systems. This perspective reveals dynamics that traditional methods often overlook. Rather than aggregating individual 360° assessments, we assess the team as a whole to examine how the team functions collectively. Applying that lens to one of the most common team activities (meetings) uncovers patterns worth paying attention to. Drawing on thousands of team assessments in our database, we focused on two meeting behaviors:
- Do teams meet regularly?
- Do team members leave meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps?
Our question: How strongly do these behaviors relate to overall team effectiveness?
What the data revealed
Using data from 1,043 respondents (team members and informed stakeholders) we ran a Bayesian analysis to evaluate the predictive power of each behavior. The results were striking:
- Both behaviors were linked to higher team effectiveness.
- But one mattered far more: leaving meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps was 3.9x more predictive of team effectiveness than simply meeting regularly.
- And teams that often or always wrap up meetings with next steps rated 0.66 points higher on a 5-point scale of team effectiveness than teams who sometimes, rarely, or never close with accountabilities - that's almost a full standard deviation higher (0.96 sd)
Meetings aren’t the problem, muddy outcomes are.
Teams often default to frequency, setting cadences of check-ins or standing meetings. Our data suggest that what differentiates effective teams from the rest is not how many meetings they hold, but what comes out of them. A team that meets less often but ends each session with clear accountabilities will outperform a team that meets frequently but leaves outcomes ambiguous. In other words, meetings aren’t inherently wasted time; they become wasted time when they don’t translate into aligned action.
A simple shift that pays dividends
The good news: improving meetings doesn’t require radical redesign. Small changes reinforce accountability and dramatically increase the value extracted:
- Close with clarity. Reserve the last 5–10 minutes of every meeting to confirm: What decisions have been made? Who owns what? By when? This habit shifts meetings from “discussions” to “decisions.”
- Make commitments visible. Use a shared action log, team board, or project tracker so next steps are transparent, and progress is easy to follow. Visibility builds accountability.
- Assign a “Closer.” Rotating this role signals that closing well is everyone’s responsibility. The Closer ensures the team doesn’t drift into vague agreements, but leaves aligned and ready to act.
When teams adopt these habits, the difference is tangible: less rehashing of the same topics, faster progress on priorities, and a stronger sense of shared ownership. These small shifts compound quickly, making meetings not just more efficient, but more energizing and effective. In a world where teams face relentless demands and limited time, focusing on how meetings end may be one of the fastest ways to improve how teams perform.
Most leaders focus on strategy—not because they undervalue culture, but because strategy feels concrete. It has structure, timelines, metrics, and deliverables. It’s visible and defensible. When pressure is high, strategy gives leaders something they can point to and steer. Culture doesn’t always feel that way. It’s harder to define, harder to measure, and often lands in the “important, but not urgent” pile. That’s not a leadership flaw. It’s a gap in how we’ve equipped leaders to lead.But if you want to change how your organization operates, you have to start with what people experience every day.
Below are six no-fluff actions from our recent event, , designed to help you leave your team stronger than you found it.
Culture Without the Fluff→ Don’t miss events like these! Sign up for our newsletter or visit our events page to see what’s coming.
1. Build shared habits
If strategy defines where you’re going, culture determines whether you’ll get there. Strategy can shift quickly, with a new market, goal, or CEO. Culture can’t. It’s shaped by the beliefs, habits, and norms that don’t pivot on command—and that’s where friction starts. The disconnect doesn’t usually show up in big moments. It shows up in how decisions get made, what’s prioritized under pressure, and whether feedback is honest or avoided. These daily behaviors signal what really matters, regardless of what the strategy says. That’s why high-performing organizations go beyond communicating direction. They turn strategy into clear expectations for how people should work, lead, and collaborate—and then reinforce those expectations through routines, incentives, and leadership behavior.
Try this:
Pick one strategic priority and ask: What should people be doing differently if this is truly our focus? If you’re not seeing those behaviors, there’s a gap. Ask yourself: Do our daily habits match the future we’re trying to build?
2. Use the levers you already own
Culture change doesn’t have to start with a massive initiative. It can start with the levers you already own. Culture lives in the mechanics of your team’s work: how meetings are run, how frontline decisions are made, how failure is treated, and what behaviors leaders model. These small signals shape big beliefs. That’s why abstract values and vision statements alone often fall flat. They’re not wrong, but without action behind them, they’re just words on a page. Real change starts by zooming in on specific moments that shape how work gets done, and making small, intentional shifts. Want a culture of accountability? Focus on what happens after meetings. Want more innovation? Look at how failure is handled during team reviews.
Start here:
Pick one lever (like how meetings are run) and ask:
- What messages are we sending through how we meet?
- Who speaks up? Who stays silent? What actually gets decided?
Then make small adjustments that reinforce the culture you want—not the one you’ve inherited.
3. Avoid the tempting pitfalls
If you’ve ever rolled out a new set of values, launched a culture initiative, or shared a bold new vision, only to see behavior stay exactly the same, you’re not alone. Most culture efforts stall not because leaders don’t care, but because they start with what’s visible and familiar: messaging, posters, kickoff events. These feel like the right moves. But they rarely shift what people actually do, and rarely resonates in a meaningful and lasting way In our recent webinar, we shared six common traps that organizations fall into often with the best intentions. Here are three that come up again and again:
- Relying on values to do the heavy lifting. Most teams have clear values, but that’s not the problem. The challenge is turning those values into real habits. If the way you run meetings, make decisions, and give feedback doesn’t reflect what’s on the wall, people notice—and disconnect.
- Expecting HR or culture champions to lead the culture shift alone. HR and champions play a big role in culture, but they can’t do it without leaders. People take their cues from credible influencers in the business: what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and how leaders show up under pressure. That’s where real culture change starts.
- Announcing culture change before actually changing anything. This is a classic case of show don’t tell. When leaders talk about change without shifting the day-to-day experience, people become skeptical. They’ve heard it before. What earns their belief and commitment is seeing leaders act differently in ways that directly affect their work.
P.S. We’ve rounded up 3 more pitfalls worth avoiding. See them here.
Start here:
Surface the unspoken. Ask: What do people believe they’ll be rewarded for today? What would they have to believe to behave differently?Culture change requires shifting the mental models that shape behavior.
4. Shift the beliefs beneath the behaviors
You can’t shift behavior without understanding the beliefs behind it. If teams aren’t collaborating across silos, it’s probably not because they don’t want to—it’s because they’re rewarded for competing, not collaborating. If leaders aren’t taking smart risks, it might be because failure has been punished, not treated as a learning moment. These everyday behaviors are just the surface—what’s driving them are deeper, often invisible beliefs that probably outlast the tenure of some of your employees.
Start here:
Ask: What are the unspoken rules here? What would someone need to believe for this behavior to feel natural, safe, and worth it? Until you name and shift those beliefs, culture efforts will stay stuck at the surface.
5. Don’t let your culture fall behind your tech
Honestly, the real surprise would be if AI wasn’t reshaping your culture. Some organizations are going all-in on experimentation. Others are still figuring out what their approach will be. But wherever you are on the curve, one thing’s clear: this moment feels a lot like the wild west. And your talent is picking up on that. Leaders are signaling the need to adapt and innovate—but rewards and incentives often tell a different story. Without clear signals from the culture that it’s safe to try, valuable to learn, and worth the risk, even the smartest tools won’t be used to their full potential.
Ask yourself:
- How are we capturing what’s working with AI—and making those insights visible and usable across the organization?
- What are we taking off people’s plates to give them the time and space to learn, experiment, and adapt?
- Have we updated the priorities, deliverables and expectations to reflect the new reality—or are we layering AI on top of an already full workload?
- Are leaders helping people see the personal value in this shift—so AI feels like a path to growth, not a threat to their role?
6. Start small, scale fast
Most leaders assume culture change has to be slow and sweeping. But it doesn’t.We’ve seen major progress start with one small shift—the kind that’s visible, repeatable, and high-impact. The key? Start where the energy already is: a team that's eager, a leader who's ready, a process that’s stuck. Then focus on one behavior that’s holding things back—and change it. From there, scale what works.
Start here:
Use this simple 3-step exercise to find a small, high-impact place to start:
- Pinpoint a stuck spot: Where is strategy getting delayed, deprioritized, or lost in translation? Common areas include:
- Team meetings that always run long but lead to no decisions
- A new tool or process people aren’t adopting
- A frontline team disconnected from the broader strategy
- An area with low engagement or slow execution
- Identify the blocker behavior:
- What specific habit, mindset, or expectation is in the way? (e.g., defaulting to top-down decisions, rewarding speed over learning, fear of trying something new)
- Make one shift—and scale what works
- Change that behavior in one team, one moment, or one process.
- Capture the impact. Then share the story and replicate what worked.
Change spreads through stories. Show people what’s possible, and they’ll move with you.
Culture change is hard. Doing it alone? Even harder.
We work with teams around the world to:
- Spot what’s working—and what’s getting in the way
- Test small shifts that create big ripple effects
- Keep momentum going as change starts to spread
Reach out to us to start a conversation!
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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
Learn more about business simulations
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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.
It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”
Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.
We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?
To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”
For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.
This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.
To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.
The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.
romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.
As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.
As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .
Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.
Leading with Purpose, Part 1
Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.
When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.1 They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.
Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.
As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”
I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.
In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”
Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.
According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.