These are strange years. Digitalisation is delivering results. We know everything about our customers: how much and where they spend, whether they are satisfied or not, how they click, and how many seconds they stay on a page before betraying our love and jumping to someone else’s content. We have put customers at the centre and we spend fortunes to keep them there. We spend to attract them, to serve them, to chase them, to win them back, but only when it pays. We do all this using technologies and platforms that promise productivity, and we are preparing to outsource intelligence because the artificial promise is too disruptive and too much of a game changer to leave to others. In financial statements, investment items are clearly broken out, and in industrial plans companies showcase the resources they will allocate to innovate, to become faster and more efficient. Fine. Fair enough.
And then there are people. We talk about them a lot, endlessly. Offices are redesigned to be smarter, in line with the work they are meant to host. “Wow” services and hyper-Instagrammable events are rolled out for employer branding. Generative, inclusive, kind leadership models are relaunched. And of course. All of this makes sense.
Yet in the accounts, the cost of people is still a line item to be optimised and contained, especially on the income statement, where strong performance on personnel costs is a quick win for EBITDA and a way to boost the company’s valuation. Yes, value. Everything in the name of value.
Time out. Let’s rewind and see what we are really missing. What makes our sales pitch land weakly when we sit down with a client? Why do we use the same technologies everyone else has, yet still end up with more of the same instead of something genuinely new? What is the scarce ingredient that turns project meetings bland? What makes the promises different companies make when hiring new talent sound so alike and so flat? What stops the spark that lights motivation in a young woman learning the craft from an experienced colleague?
It weakens, gets standardised, thins out because it is taken for granted until it is forgotten: meaning. In organisations, “meaning” is being lost. Meaning is not just the why that sets you apart, but the soul that moves people and brings them to life. Meaning is an emerging property of a real community, a group of people who know one another, exchange ideas, and connect to build bonds and collaborate beyond roles, budgets and KPIs. Meaning is transmitted like culture, through contact and rituals, through stories that are told and stories that are lived together. A sense of community is the vehicle of meaning. An organisation that operates as a community generates a magnetic pull that helps it keep the people who matter, attract others, help them grow and extend their time with the organisation. If it is true that younger generations are more nomadic, it is also true that whoever can retain them for longer on average will reap more than those stuck in the bus-stop trap, where every month people get on and get off the ride. With no meaning.
Meaning is carried the way culture is: through shared practices and rituals, through stories we tell and experiences we live together.
We need to build communities, nurture professional tribes, and design programmes and services that mix and match different skills, interests, forms of knowledge and ambitions beyond the boundaries of function or project. Every day, we have to keep telling the story that connects individual action to purpose. We need to introduce open, autonomous flows of contact and relationships that interpret and energise new trends, languages and artefacts created by those who know how, not just by those who are required to do it.
If we are good at explaining to customers why they should choose us, we need to become even better at conveying why Marina or Ahmed should join our team, beyond the usual contractual basics such as pay, benefits and welfare.
These are strange years. Companies are valued on the basis of a multiple of EBITDA, yet there is no line item in the accounts that tells us whether the team producing that number is as strong as a community bound by a shared destiny, cohesive and driven by a magnetic, regenerative sense of purpose that gives that performance a better chance of being sustained over time. So how much is a company really worth? How much is an organisation worth? If it is alive and dynamic like a community, it is worth far more than one that no longer is, all else being equal on EBITDA.
For 22 years at Logotel we have been working on community and meaning. And never more than now have we felt how much they are needed.
