How to Build a Sense of Purpose Within Your Team

Teams that feel a sense of purpose are happier, stay longer, perform better and are more aligned to your business goals. So how do you build a sense of purpose in your teams?

Firstly, what exactly is purpose?

It is the understanding that your work has meaning and that you are recognised for your efforts.

Why you need to understand the “why”

Understanding why you are doing your job is a key factor in feeling your work has purpose. If you understand the reason you are doing your job it will give you greater clarity in your role and will also play a key part in helping you decide how you approach your work.

If you are a manager or team leader, helping your team understand why they are doing their work will not only make them happier but, as a result, they will also be much more closely aligned to the business goals of the task, making actual success far more probable.

Definition of success

A little trick you can use to help explain ‘why’ is to create a ‘definition of success’.

A definition of success is not - finish this task on x date. It is what success looks like. It may be “success is getting more users on our website” it may be “more five star reviews”, it is not the task itself but how it will affect the user or the business.

At Zappos (the online shoe store bought by Amazon for lots of money) success is defined by the customer always being happy. Having such a clear definition of success makes it super easy for their customer support team to know what to do in all situations. They will do almost anything to make you happy, you can even call them up and ask them to order you a pizza.

Recognition

About five years ago, one of our software teams was struggling, they were disheartened and felt under-appreciated. To fix it, our client had the great idea of asking the end-users of the software our team had built to record a little video sharing how their software had made a difference to them. Then, as a surprise, one Friday he showed these video testimonials to our team. Our developers loved it. Now, every month, we have a special meeting with our client where our team just listens to stories from the users.

Steven Bartlett (Diary of a CEO) does a similar thing in his companies. They have an internal workplace chat channel called “impact” where the teams “share stories, testimonials and positive feedback about how each team member’s efforts has impacted the lives of real people, all over the world.”?

Next steps

If your team understand why they are doing their work and feel recognised for it, they’ll be happier and they’ll perform better. So this month …

• Tell your team what success looks like. Tell them a story, tell them how it looks in your mind.
• Show them how their work is affecting real people in the real world. Set up a Slack channel or share some testimonials.

Here at Secret Source, through our focus on wellbeing, our teams stay together longer and collaborate better. Our clients tell us we produce better code and are easier to work with than their own in-house teams.?

Our recommended reads:

Summer is (sort of) here so here’s some reading / listening for when you’re sitting in the sun on your lunch break.

AI?

• OpenAI GPT 4o - OpenAI released version GPT-4o, this short video - shows how it can integrate text, speech and even vision in real time. Mind blowing.
• Why your RAG doesn’t work - RAG is a framework that uses your own data to supplement an LLM, many, many people are experimenting with it. This article explains why most vanilla RAGs just don’t work very well.
• Pair programming with an LLM - This course - on how to pair program with an LLM we found really useful. What caught our eye was the promo page says: "explaining and documenting a complex existing code base". How many of us have inherited an undocumented codebase?

Company culture / team performance

• The return to office (RTO)? dilemma - Still unsure which route to take? this article is a good outline of the main research. Highlights include; flexible workers experience slower pay growth and high performers are the first to quit after an RTO mandate.
• The science of happiness at work - Each week our founder, Richard,? gives one small behavioural nudge you can use to help your team feel happier and perform better at work. The most read article since our last newsletter is a quick trick to give your team more purpose. Full blog archive here.
• Psychological Safety at X … mmm … Steven Bartlett’s interview with Walter Isaacson about Elon Musk on The Diary of a CEO was fascinating. Elon Musk’s story itself is amazing and for us his views on why psychological safety isn’t important (minute 41) were very enlightening.

And Secret Source…

In the last couple of months we have continued our research into how to integrate AI into our workflows and our clients’ projects and our RAG system is now being used in? a grant / bid generator. We’re also proud to announce a couple of new partnerships.

• New partnerships - We are pleased to announce long term partnerships with Smartest energy and British Car Auctions and completion of a new tool for The British Standards Institute
• AI Grant / Bid tool? -? In March we offered our RAG tool to two users and it has now been developed into a fully- fledged bid application tool. Upload your documentation and the bid requirements and using ChatGPT4 we can produce a first draft, in your voice using your data, in a fraction of the time it took before. Interested? Drop Todd a line for a demo. The bid tool uses ML to search your original documentation and then uses that as the foundation for the first draft. The LLM bases its completion on your documentation and a magical incarnation created by us to work its magic.
• British Standards Institute -? Each year the BSI needs to send out certificates to all their users. It used to be a manual process with letters and stamps! We’ve just updated their system so it is now all automatic, saving them hundreds of hours.
• Two events in London - Thank you to everyone who came to our breakfast and dinner in London in April.?

If you’re looking for a quality IT team this year and want to chat to a company that’s a little different from your standard nearshoring options, we’d love to chat. Just book a call with me or drop me an email.

You know how great we are to work with, so if you know anyone who you think would benefit from working with us, we offer a generous referral fee. More details on our referral page.