Why IS purpose important?
Exploring your purpose as a staff member can help you identify opportunities and experiences available to you that can help move you forward toward your goals and intentionally create meaningful opportunities in your life both personally and professionally. Purpose is a journey. It’s likely changed and evolved for you over time and will probably continue to do so. Purpose work can help you navigate those changes as they happen and help you create the impact you want to see on the world around you. Research shows that when we have a higher sense of purpose, we tend to have 10x higher overall wellbeing (Bates, Gallup 2018).
How can you collaborate with the Purpose Center?
There are a variety of ways for staff to collaborate with the Purpose Center. If you’re looking for personal or professional development, check out the one-on-one coaching opportunities or purpose and strengths workshops available for faculty and staff.
If you’re looking to incorporate purpose or strengths into the work you do with your students, reach out by emailing purpose@mail.wvu.edu and we can create a plan and materials that best serves the needs of you and your students.
If you’re an academic advisor looking to use purpose and strengths in your advising work, the Purpose Center has created a variety of resources and materials to help. To get access to these resources and associated trainings, reach out to Whitney Godwin at wgodwin@mail.wvu.edu.
Strengths for Staff and Staff Teams
Investing in our strengths helps us understand not only how we show up for ourselves but how we show up for others. Learning to appreciate our own strengths and the strengths of others can help us form stronger, more productive partnerships and teams. Consider signing up for a team session individualized to your team needs. Sign up for a group session to learn more about how the individual strengths of your team work together to build a strong community.
Organizations with strengths-based cultures succeed because:
- They engage their employees.
- They select managers who coach their employees to bring their best selves to work.
- They provide an exceptional employee experience.
- They experience higher employee engagement, retention, productivity and performance.
A study conducted by Gallup found that employees who use their strengths every day were six times more engaged in their jobs and three times more likely to have an excellent quality of life. Strengths codes are free of charge for staff.