The soul-coded employee
What companies measure, what they say they measure, and what they would have to measure to take souls seriously.
In most companies, the official metric is performance, the unofficial metric is loyalty, and the actual organising principle is fear. None of these touch the question of soul.
This is not a complaint. It is a research note. Souls are non-falsifiable. Companies, especially listed ones, cannot organise around the non-falsifiable. So they organise around its proxies — usually badly.
A short audit of proxies I have watched fail:
- Engagement surveys measure willingness to perform engagement.
- Wellbeing apps measure willingness to perform wellbeing.
- Culture decks measure leadership's willingness to perform a culture they have not yet built.
The proxies are not useless, but they are very lossy. The signal lost in the loss is, every time, the soul.
What I am researching: a small set of practices a manager can run weekly that do not measure soul, but do make room for it. Ritual entrances and exits. A monthly question that is not about output. A meeting agenda that explicitly has 10 minutes in the middle for nothing.
This is the next workshop I am building.