HR practitioners have all the right ingredients to become impactful culture leaders and champion meaningful work, and legendary business thinker Seth Godin has the recipe for them to follow.

For his latest book, The Song of Significance, Seth Godin asked 10,000 people in 90 countries about the attributes of the best job they’ve ever had. 

The criteria included familiar survey options, from being paid a high salary to assuming greater responsibility, but Godin included additional choices, not involving pay or power. 

“Nearly unanimously, across every country, these were the attributes selected to describe the best job of a person’s life,” says Godin. “They were: that they surprised themselves with what they could accomplish; they could work independently; their team built something important; and people treated them with respect.”

The findings are good news for HR leaders, says Godin.

“What people value from work is that it matters, that ‘I matter.’ I say to everyone in HR, isn’t that a great motivation to excel in your job? To help create the conditions for people to say their work matters to them?”

As a virtual speaker at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition on 20-22 August, Godin will be sharing his insights and experience on how people leaders can bring forth those conditions.

“I’m not there to give tactics to help people recreate the workplace you used to run,” he says. 

“I’m there to encourage you to understand that the game we play is fundamentally different now.”

The need for meaningful work experiences

Godin has built his career upon disruptive business thinking. As an early dot-com pioneer, he launched interactive marketing agency Yoyodyne in 1995. Three years later, he sold the company to Yahoo! for nearly US$30 million, also becoming its Vice President of Direct Marketing. This success was matched with his founding of writing site Squidoo in 2006, which became one of the 500 most visited websites in the world before its sale to HubPages in 2014.

The New York native is also a prodigious author of more than 20 bestsellers. His books, such as Purple Cow, Tribes and The Dip, have set the agenda not just for the marketing industry, but business writ large. 

Godin’s latest title, The Song of Significance, is a 144-point manifesto for creating better workplaces that inspire people to produce their best work. The opening line of its first mini-essay states, “If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you already know: work isn’t working.” 

Throughout the book, Godin argues that rather than fostering cultures of meaning for employees, businesses have leaned too far into creating workplaces that prioritise productivity at all costs. 

“We’ve all been indoctrinated to believe it’s normal to go to the office, do what you’re told, stay until your shift is over, then go home,” he says. “We’re too hung up on quarterly results and stock prices.”

“AI is the biggest change in our culture since electricity. Its advent in the workplace has made clear that if all we do is follow instructions, then bosses can probably find a machine cheaper than us to do the work.” – Seth Godin, business thought leader

Godin says this focus on short-term results means it’s almost impossible for organisations to optimise for the longer term and create workplaces with deeper meaning. He believes it’s possible to establish true connections and huge productivity breakthroughs when HR leaders connect their organisations’ people to a greater purpose. 

“A byproduct of the COVID wake-up call was that much of our most productive work has nothing to do with following instructions. My last project, The Carbon Almanac, was organised among groups of online volunteers as we created a 90,000-word book in just five months,” he says. 

“We never met in person, only ever online, and communicated mostly asynchronously. In effect, it was an organisation that led without a leader, that was managed without a single manager – yet we still produced work that mattered.”

Godin cites volunteer fire departments: workers who are willing to risk their lives without being paid to do so.

“These are organisations with relatively little turnover, yet their teams race into burning buildings. Why? Because they’re working on something significant, that makes them feel better. 

“If people are willing to do that for free, it’s pretty clear we can enable that sort of feeling in workplaces that actually pay a salary.”

Challenging conventional ways of working

HR leaders are on the threshold of improving working environments, says Godin, enabling teams to produce significant work.

To get there, he suggests a roadmap that challenges conventional wisdom around the modern workplace.

“The concept of HR was popularised by Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor in the quest to treat people as machines in the 1920s. But we’ve left the industrial age behind. We make decisions for a living rather than ‘stuff’, yet there remains the legacy of our job being about outputs. 

“What we know is that the best results, and biggest insights and breakthroughs, come when people achieve more than they hoped, offer some emotional labour and improve – there’s no trick to greatness.

“It’s about creating the conditions that enable people to do work they’re proud of. That doesn’t mean the answer is free food or fewer working hours. It’s enabling people to demand the chance to do something challenging and fulfilling.”

In order to connect people to the organisation’s mission, Godin recommends, where possible, freeing up people’s schedules from the everyday minutiae so they’re able to be more strategic in outlook. 

AI could be a good first step in enabling greater human connections, he says.

“AI is the biggest change in our culture since electricity. Its advent in the workplace has made clear that if all we do is follow instructions, then bosses can probably find a machine cheaper than us to do the work. 

“Yet it’s also underhyped – people use it in too shallow a way, not spending enough time asking hard questions. But if you have an always-on approach, it’s like a free coach that can transform your workday, akin to a co-worker writing your memos and emails – therefore expanding your quality of work for deeper thinking.”

It’s by asking deep questions that HR leaders can find insights that guide them and their people on the path towards more fulfilling workplaces, says Godin.

“We need to ask questions such as: ‘What’s the narrative of my workday and those of others?’, ‘What does engagement look like and how do we get there?’ and ‘Am I respecting colleagues’ time in the best way?’

“The goal is to enable workplaces in which everyone in the organisation becomes a decision-maker of sorts – they have autonomy, take responsibility and are given credit.” 

“You have the opportunity to lead people so they’re able to spend their 2000 hours at work next year doing something they believe truly matters.” – Seth Godin, business thought leader

HR as cultural leaders in the workplace

The best HR leaders change work cultures, instead of following them, says Godin.

He believes that HR practitioners in the past have been too often burdened with daily admin, stifling their ability to lead over the longer term. But today, HR practitioners are culture leaders; they build frameworks for employee motivation, shared values and ethical decision-making that drive engagement and lead to successful business outcomes.

“They’re [helping to] establish the culture – they come up with the strategy to get the right people to do the right work in the right way.”

A simple way to help employees achieve this, says Godin, is to remove false proxies.

“A big problem is not trusting people enough to do the work they’re capable of. Recently, we’ve too often seen that the most important metric to organisations is butts on seats, but presenteeism quickly becomes a surveillance state. 

“Yet, compared to yesteryear, we now have so many metrics available in fields related to happiness, engagement and loyalty. Today, we have the data to measure how two different people experience exactly the same setting. Why not leverage that? Ask the right questions: ‘Why are you here? What’s this work for? Who is it for?’”

Most employees aren’t at work to earn around $20 an hour, says Godin – it’s more important that they feel they’ve personally made a difference. He offers an anecdote of when he previously got it wrong.

“I had an important project, so I hired two freelancers on Upwork to work on it simultaneously. If one fell through, I had a back-up. Both did a great job, but I made the mistake of telling the second person that I didn’t actually need their work. They gave me a one-star review – and I deserved it. 

“I wasn’t buying the 100 lines of code or whatever it was. I was buying from them a sense that their work mattered, and I took that away from them.”

HR leaders help to connect employees to an organisation’s mission, but a sense of purpose must go deeper than slogans, says Godin.

“If I work at a company whose stated goal is to save the planet, I may go to work with a spring in my step. But if I arrive in the office and my boss is a jerk, and the main focus is on trivial issues like organising the coffee mugs, an overarching mission isn’t important. 

“There are plenty of organisations that aren’t saving humankind and are great places to work. We need staples and staplers. They won’t save the world, but you can build a stapler company where it’s a joy to work.”

The next 2000 hours

Godin deeply believes that work – through creating a sense of purpose, collaboration and mastery – can fulfil people at a deeper level. He’s also collected the data, surveying thousands of people around the world, to suggest that it’s an innate truth. This is why he issues a clarion call to HR practitioners to bring forth positive workplace changes.

“You have a seat at the table,” he says. “You have the opportunity to lead people so they’re able to spend their 2000 hours at work next year doing something they believe truly matters. I think everyone deserves that.”

A longer version of this article was originally published in the August-September 2024 edition of HRM Magazine.

Seth Godin will be speaking virtually on creating organisations of significance at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August. Sign up today to hear from Seth and other experts, including Ravin Jesuthasan, Dr Pippa Grange and more.