Purpose is easy to put into a statement. It is harder to make employees feel it in their everyday work.
For Jaya Suri, CHRO, Kimbal, the connection becomes much more tangible when employees can see the people whose lives their work affects.
Speaking at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Suri described how Kimbal, which operates in electricity, smart metering and battery power systems, tries to connect employees with the larger significance of what they do.
Electricity, after all, is more than infrastructure. Its arrival can change how a family lives, works and learns.
Suri recalled the story of a Class 10 student who had been unable to study properly until electricity reached his home. For an employee installing meters, the task may appear operational. But when the same employee sees what that meter enables at the other end, the meaning of the work changes.
That is the connection Kimbal has tried to bring into its cultural initiatives by asking employees a deceptively simple question: how is your work making a difference in somebody’s life?
For Suri, stories such as these can help employees connect with the organisation because purpose stops being something articulated by leadership and becomes something they can see in the consequences of their own work.
“In whichever functions we’ve been able to put that purpose behind, I think everything just followed after that,” she said.
Her observation also raises a broader question for organisations. Purpose is often communicated from the top through values, statements and campaigns. But perhaps its real power lies in travelling in the opposite direction: from the outcome of an employee’s work back to the employee who made it possible.
At the HRKatha Inner Circle on the Culture–Performance Equation, Suri’s example offered a reminder that culture is not shaped only by what organisations tell people they stand for. It can also be shaped by helping people understand why their own work matters.
Watch Jaya Suri explain how making impact visible can turn organisational purpose into something employees actually experience.