Recent podcasts are regarding Louis Carter’s newest book, In Great Company: how to spark peak performance by creating an emotionally connected workplace. The book focuses on five elements that were found to most directly impact employee’s voluntary discretionary effort and retention inside of a company. These factors spell out the SPARK acronym in the book:  Systemic Collaboration, Positive future, alignment of values, Respect, and Killer Outcomes.  This model was developed from interviews and surveys of 1000s of employees throughout the globe, asking a simple question – what makes you love your workplace?

I became interested in research around organizational commitment and the three archetypes:  Normative Commitment (I should be here), Continuance Commitment (I have to/must be here because I don’t have other options – which gets worse with age), and Affective Commitment (I want to be here).  From this model, I knew I had to figure out how we can move people to the affective commitment archetype. This took a lot of work, a lot of interviewing, and coding of people’s statements. And, as it turns out there wasn’t much mystery about the answer – the trick though was in the daily practice of the answer of being vigilant about creating respectful, collaborative, results-driven relationships at work.

Watch and listen to these podcasts and vlogs on the research and books – what works well and what doesn’t work for organizations. I hope they bring you to a place where you too, can feel great about the change you can bring to your company and daily work life.