Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Elise Hu. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Do you know your company's mission statement? Well, organizational psychologist David Berkus says it doesn't matter. Something else is the key to staying motivated and to motivating teams at work. In his 2022 talk from TEDxReno, he shares the question companies should be asking for more meaningful work and workplaces. After the break.
Chapter 2: What is the key question to inspire teams at work?
In 2014, KPMG's leadership had a problem. Accounting is boring. Apologies to any accountants in the room, but that really was the issue. The senior leadership of one of the world's premier accounting firms had been working for a while to improve morale and engagement across the nearly 30,000 employees of the firm. When they started, morale was in the tank.
Only about half of employees had a favorable opinion of the firm when surveyed, which is to say about half of employees had an unfavorable opinion of the place they continued to work. They had tried to pull the standard levers, perks, pay increases, more flexibility, more opportunities to advance, but their initial gains had leveled off. And it's easy to understand why.
Accounting, in particular auditing, can be a boring and thankless job. For most of the day, you're staring at documents and spreadsheets. You're sitting in a cubicle provided by a client who doesn't actually want you there and doesn't want to answer any more questions either. And so having run out of traditional ideas, KPMG's leaders decided to do something different.
They decided to put purpose at the core of their engagement effort. And what they did first was particularly bold. They told stories. They launched what they called the We Shape History campaign, a promotional campaign designed to tell the story of how KPMG had been involved in pivotal moments in world history.
They told the story of President Roosevelt's Lend-Lease Act, which sent billions of dollars in aid to the allies during World War II and how he tapped KPMG to manage logistics. They told the story of how KPMG accountants resolved conflicting financial claims, which laid the groundwork for the release of 52 US hostages in Iran in 1981.
They told the story of how KPMG certified the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1994. They told stories about how KPMG's work served a higher purpose. And they hung posters everywhere to remind everyone of those stories. It was bold and it worked, sort of. It moved the needle a little bit. What they did next was brilliant.
To understand why their next move was so brilliant, though, we need to talk about purpose.
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Chapter 3: How did KPMG improve employee morale?
See, most of us think of an organization's purpose or mission as a bold and lofty ambition, like helping win a world war or certify a historic election. And most leaders think that to convey a purpose that truly inspires, they need a compelling answer to the question, why? As in, why do we do what we do? And this is where it gets weird because then most leaders look to their mission statement.
And even though mission is different than purpose, but like that's a totally different talk. They look at their mission statement. They work to rewrite it, to make it more compelling. They go through rounds and rounds of editing and focus group testing. And when their heavily workshopped, perfectly worded statement is complete, they send it out to employees in emails that get deleted.
They print it on posters that get ignored. They put it on a page on the company website that no one visits. Because it turns out most people are less inspired by a compelling answer to why and more motivated by a clear answer to the question, who? As in, who is served by the work that we do? I mean, think about yourself.
If I asked you to think of a time when you felt highly engaged and inspired at work, you probably wouldn't mention the time your boss recited the company mission statement verbatim. Instead, you'd probably think of the last time you got a thank you from a client or a coworker, the last time you felt your work was important to someone else. To explain this further, let's switch cubicles.
Let's move from the cubicles of auditors at an accounting firm to the cubicles of student workers at a university donation call center. You thought accounting was boring. And maybe you got called by one of these student workers in one of these call centers. They call in the evenings. They always have a perfectly worded script. It always ends in a request for a donation.
So you end up having to say, no, I don't want to donate $1,000 to the new stadium. No, I don't want to donate $500 to the new student union. No, I don't want to donate $20.05 to commemorate my graduation year. It's like some collegiate version of green eggs and ham. No, I don't want to donate in a box or with a fox. No, I don't want to donate in a house with a mouse.
Kid, I don't want to donate here or there. Kid, I'm just trying to pay off my student loans. Then you can call me back about donating. Think about the person on the other end of that line. They're sitting in a windowless room. They're constantly dialing people destined to hang up on them, yell at them or worse. It's got to be boring. It's got to be boring. It's got to be thankless.
It's got to be draining. And you can see it in the numbers. Annual turnover in these types of call center jobs exceeds 400%. You do the math on that. That means that in any given year, the entire staff quits every three months.
In fact, when Adam Grant and a team of researchers were looking for ways to improve morale at a call center at their university, one of the first things they noticed was a sign in one student's cubicle. It read, doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit. You get a warm feeling, but no one else notices.
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Chapter 4: What stories did KPMG share to engage employees?
They got 42,000 stories because they stopped talking about purpose as a collective why and started talking about it as an individual who. They didn't give every employee a uniform answer to the question, why do we do what we do? They helped each employee find a specific answer to the question, who is served by the work that we do?
And just like in the call center research, that switch made all the difference in the world. So what does this mean for you? Well, if you're in a leadership role, it means part of your job is to become chief storytelling officer, always ready to tell the story of the client or coworker or community member whose life is made better by the work your team does.
And if you're not in a leadership role, you can still motivate yourself and other people by capturing every instance that you come across. Every time you hear about someone who's served by the work that you're doing, every thank you that you get, capture it, save it for when you or anyone else needs a powerful story about how the work that we're doing matters.
Because in the end, that's what we all want from our work, isn't it? People want to do work that matters. And they want to work for leaders who tell them they matter. And the most powerful way to tell them isn't to tell them some grandiose answer to why do we do what we do. In fact, it isn't to tell them anything at all. It's to help them find the answer to the question, who?
So let me ask you, do you know who is served by the work that you do? Thank you. Genomics pioneer Robert Green says many parents want their healthy newborn's DNA screened for diseases that may or may not show up later in life. There is an argument that knowledge is power, and many families would like to know everything, whether it's treatable or not.
The debate over revealing the secrets in babies' DNA. That's next time on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. Subscribe or listen to the TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
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