What makes employees excited to come to work? At Facebook, the biggest factor isn’t a great manager or lots of perks or work-life balance. According to an internal study recently undertaken by the company’s HR department and Wharton professor Adam Grant, the key element of employee engagement turns out to be pride in the company. “When people feel proud to work here,” the authors write in the report, “they are more satisfied, more committed, more successful, and more likely to recommend [Facebook] as a great place to work.”
Below are a few things the team’s data revealed (you can read the full report right here):
- Pride is tied to three primary factors. The first is optimism—believing in the company’s future. The second is mission—caring about the company’s vision and goals. And finally there’s social consciousness—having confidence that company is improving the world.
- The team noted those three elements across the whole company, whether employees work in technology, marketing and sales, or other roles.
- Grant conducted experiments that showed the value of truly grasping how your work makes a difference. In his research, he found that when university fundraising callers met a scholarship student who benefited from their efforts, their weekly phone minutes went up 142% and their weekly revenue went up 171%.
Facebook encourages this sense of pride in various ways. For example, there’s a company-wide Q&A session every Friday, and it usually ends with a story about someone whose life was impacted by Facebook. A recent session ended with a video of a Syrian refugee family living in the U.S., who discussed how Facebook and WhatsApp help them communicate with family in Syria.
For much more on what the team discovered, check out the full Facebook study.
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