Not Every Employee Wants to Be Transformed (And That’s Fine)
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People strategy has developed a bit of a messiah complex, and I say that with love, because I’ve absolutely contributed to it.
Somewhere between the culture decks and the purpose workshops, we collectively decided that every employee should feel called to their work. That anything less is a failure of leadership, or worse, a failure of our People programmes. It’s well-intentioned. It’s also, if I’m honest, not how most people actually experience work, and designing as though it is is caused more than a few People Teams to build programmes that serve an imaginary workforce rather than the real one.
Two researchers helped me think about this clearly. The first is Joe Pine, who along with James Gilmore wrote The Experience Economy in 1999 and mapped out a competitive spectrum that has evolved incredibly well and is a foundation of an analogy I use for building purposeful People Programmes.
For all products, there is a spectrum of competitive position and pricing capacity, which starts at Commodities (undifferentiated, low pricing) and stretches upwards…Commodities become goods. Goods become services. Services become experiences. And experiences (at the top of the graph) become transformations. The idea is that the most economically valuable thing you can offer someone isn’t a product or even an experience; it’s a change in them. You’re not selling a gym membership, you’re selling a stronger body. You’re not selling an MBA, you’re selling a different way of thinking. The customer doesn’t just consume the thing: they become someone different because of it.
In Built for People, I argued that the employee experience is a product (a subscription product) and that People Teams are the product managers building it. Which means, if that framing holds, your employees are “buying” something. The question is: what are they actually in the market for?
Okay… now meet Amy Wrzesniewski, a Yale organisational psychologist whose research categorises how people relate to their work. Not by industry or seniority, but by orientation. You can see your work as a job (a transaction: time for money, no more), a career (a vehicle for progression and status), or a calling (work inseparable from identity, intrinsically meaningful). Crucially, the orientation isn’t fixed to the role. Hospital cleaners who saw their work as central to patient recovery described it as a calling. Lawyers who felt trapped described it as a job. Same hours, very different relationship with what those hours mean.
Here’s the part that feels easy to move over: all three are completely legitimate.
According to the research I did for Purpose and Work, a significant portion of your workforce is likely career-oriented. They want development, fair progression, recognition, a fulfilling experience in their work. They are not, to be blunt, looking to be transformed: they’re looking to be supported and given a reasonable shot at moving forward with a high quality of life offered by their career. That’s a rational relationship with work, and for many folks, it’s exactly the right one. Your People programmes should be genuinely excellent at serving it, and for most teams, the experience layer (the onboarding portals, the offsites, the wellbeing benefits, the culture comms) exists primarily for this cohort. Don’t underestimate them either; they are very often the backbone of your organisation.
But some of your employees are oriented toward calling. For them, a good experience isn’t enough. They’re asking a different question altogether: not “is this a pleasant place to work?” but “am I becoming someone better here?” In Pine’s language, they’re in the market for a transformation. If your programmes only deliver experiences, that group goes underserved. And they tend to be, in my experience, some of the people you’d most like to retain.
So the real question isn’t how do you make everyone feel called to their work. It’s: do your programmes have the range to serve more than one orientation?
A few places to look:
Your performance framework: a career-oriented employee wants clarity, fairness, and a credible path forward. A calling-oriented employee wants to see their own growth named and taken seriously. A well-designed performance process can do both; most don’t really try.
Your manager enablement work: managers are the single biggest variable in which orientation someone settles into. A manager who connects work to purpose and names growth when it’s happening creates the conditions for calling. A manager who only assigns tasks and reviews output caps the experience at career, at best. Training managers to do the former isn’t complicated. Not doing it is expensive.
One honest caveat, and it’s worth keeping close: Wrzesniewski’s research is clear that calling orientation can’t be manufactured. Any organisation that tries tends to produce something that feels more like a religion than a company. What you can do is remove the conditions that actively prevent it, like unclear expectations, bad management, work that feels pointless, no visible progression. Fixing those isn’t revolutionary, it’s just competent.
PERMA
One framework that makes this a bit more concrete (and which I find genuinely useful as a diagnostic) is Seligman’s PERMA model, borrowed (again) from a field that has nothing to do with HR. PERMA maps the five elements of wellbeing: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. On its own it’s a reasonable wellbeing framework. But mapped across Pine’s spectrum, it becomes something more useful: a way to see exactly which layer your current programmes are operating at.
Take Relationships (the R). At the service level, you’re offering community service initiatives and family-friendly scheduling, decent, functional, ticking a box. At the experience level, you’ve got social committees and cross-functional collaboration… people are connecting, it feels good. At the transformation level, you’re building mission-aligned team bonds: relationships formed around shared purpose, not just proximity. Same element, three very different levels of investment and return.
The same logic runs through all five. Achievement at service level is pay transparency and quality metrics. At experience level, promotion cycles and mentorship. At transformation level, employees have genuine clarity on their personal contribution to change. Meaning at service level is customer impact stories and (my personal favourite entry in this table) explicitly avoiding purpose-washing. Which, yes, absolutely counts as a People programme.
What I find useful about using PERMA as a lens here is that it stops the conversation being abstract. You can take each element, look at what you’re actually doing, and place it honestly on the spectrum. Most People Teams, if they’re truthful, are operating at service level on three or four of the five and patting themselves on the back for the one experience-level initiative they shipped last quarter. That’s not a criticism (capacity is real) but it’s worth knowing where you actually are before you decide where to go next.
The point isn’t to chase a workforce of true believers. It’s to stop accidentally capping everyone at the same level of engagement because it was easier to design for one type of person.
Know your cohorts. Design for the range. The experience layer is the floor. For some of your people, there’s considerably more ceiling available… if you build for it.