Businesses are just beginning to feel the real impact of the past 15 months on employee mindset, stamina and mental fitness. What is being called a ‘Turnover Tsunami’ [source: Forbes] is bearing down due in large part to employee burnout and the desire for a more comfortable work-life balance. However, there is a way to protect and motivate your teams, while sheltering your company from the storm. It’s time to unleash your purpose.
Hit Play On Your Purpose
When was the last time you communicated your company purpose — and no, email and PowerPoint don’t count. We mean really communicate it, through daily actions and programming. A company’s purpose is its lifeblood. It’s the reason employees get out of bed in the morning. It’s your reason for existing — your why.
With ‘75% of employees say[ing] they’ve faced burnout at work’ [source: Human Resource Executive], your people need to feel valued more than ever. They need to be reminded regularly of their unique contributions to your purpose and rewarded for it. Even the simplest of solutions (e.g. weekly check-ins to highlight contributions, flexible work hours, encouraged use of PTO) can be highly effective in making your people feel valued and connected to your purpose. Activating your purpose in this way becomes second nature the more you communicate it, and doing so helps retain your top talent.
But, how best to communicate it? Music remains one of the more underestimated, yet highly effective methods for instilling complex ideas and reaching people at an emotional level.
Sound Advice
Ever watch a movie without the sound? How did it make you feel? Chances are that you felt less absorbed and less emotionally connected to the story. This is because music adds to the experience of a film by elevating emotional expression [source: Cohen].
What’s that got to do with a company’s purpose? Everything, potentially. If your goal is to communicate why your company exists and why people should want to work for you, leaving the communication to visuals and dialogue alone just won’t do. Music makes the visual content more meaningful. Not only that, it is proven to influence long-term memory and retrieval of information [source: Eschrich, Münte, & Altenmüller], so the information you share not only stays with your people longer, but can be built upon to strengthen the message.
Communicating through music can be anything from highlighting your messaging with a thoughtful playlist, to authoring an original song with your team, to having some fun with an all-out songwriting competition focused on aspects of your company purpose. With the right partner, no musical experience is required of your team, and the result can drastically improve engagement and retention.
SongDivision has been uniting companies around their purpose using music for nearly two decades. From interactive Team Anthems to celebratory Rockin’ Receptions, virtual to in-person, we’ve helped Fortune 500s in over 30 countries reduce turnover rates by meaningfully communicating using music.
Find out how you can avoid the turnover tsunami using music.