A Key To Employee Engagement: Nourish the Human Spirit
The connection between long-term business success and engaged employees is clear. In this rapid cycle economy, business leaders know that having a high-performing, engaged workforce is essential for growth and survival. According to Harvard Business Review, leaders recognize that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent markets.
10 years ago when our founder and CEO, Cheryl Fields Tyler, launched Blue Beyond Consulting, her vision was to see if she could build the kind of business she was advising others to create—namely a place where both the business and the people can thrive. We’re proud to announce another notable milestone in that journey—Blue Beyond is now certified as a Great Place to Work®.
We’re grateful that Great Place to Work®, and other firms like it, have dedicated themselves to creating quality standards for the workplace, along with reliable criteria for assessing those qualities. The very existence of these culture scorecards confirms what we’ve been saying all along:
- The people we work with are intellectual, emotional, reflective, creative, driven-yet-vulnerable beings who yearn to do something amazing every day.
- Humans thrive on high expectations, and revel in autonomy.
- People are right to expect inclusion in the workplace and gratitude from coworkers.
- We all need to feel safe about bringing our whole selves to work. Only when we’re allowed to be fully human can we make our best contributions, and remain open and supportive toward others.
Great Places to Work Provide More than Compensation and Perks
We find it significant that the Great Place to Work® study, and others like it, do not assess compensation packages, perks, or lavishly appointed offices—though certainly, many Best Workplace winners offer these. Instead, the questionnaires target a company’s performance on “soft” factors—the very measures that we help our clients master here at Blue Beyond. These global workplace quality surveys revolve around topics that include:
- Learning, Growth and Advancement
- Feedback and Recognition
- Interpersonal and Client Relationships
- Autonomy/Responsibility
- Nature of the Work Itself – Is it worthwhile?
- Trust, Innovation, and Outcomes
Interesting, isn’t it? The topics are all about nourishing the human spirit. They’re not new ideas; they’ve long been cited as keys to productivity. What’s new is the recent surge of interest, among companies of every description, in the quality of their workplace culture. They’re signing up for workplace recognition surveys, taking the results to heart, and strategizing to improve their scores.
Herein lies the proof: Soft factors are not subjective. Nor are they ethereal, or even abstract. While sometimes difficult to implement, the factors that make workplaces work can be expressed as business goals, embedded in a culture, and delivered via a consistent set of behaviors to produce measurable results.
Back when we started, our entire company could fit around a dining room table — and we often had meetings in Cheryl’s own kitchen. Today, although we don’t fit around one table anymore, we’re still committed to creating and sustaining an engaged team. This commitment allows us to show up whole, support one another, and be fully present to help our clients achieve their goals.
Our clients tell us that they appreciate that we deliver exceptional results, but what really sets us apart is how we do it—with skill, authenticity, empathy, kindness, thoughtfulness, and an unwavering bias towards excellent execution and a fierce commitment to our client’s success. That’s humbling—and a high standard to set for ourselves. We also know it’s real. Because we are building a place at Blue Beyond where our people thrive—and when that happens, we can help our clients achieve extraordinary results.
Isn’t that what it truly means to be great?