What do you think?
Rate this book
Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being
What makes for a flourishing workplace?
Many organizations find themselves spinning their wheels in work cultures filled with toxicity, dysfunction, conflict, and fear. Unengaged employees drag down productivity, and ineffective management undermines morale. How can we create workplaces where people don't just struggle to get through the day, but actually thrive and love what they do and where they work?
Al Lopus, cofounder and CEO of the Best Christian Workplaces Institute, has studied hundreds of organizations to discover eight key drivers in companies with healthy culture and engaged employees. He gathers best practices from across a range of companies and ministries to demonstrate how people at all levels can work together to accomplish work that matters. Principles and real-life examples provide concrete ways that organizations can flourish by building fantastic teams, cultivating life-giving work, attracting and retaining outstanding talent, and much more.
With compelling case studies, behind-the-curtain revelations, and enlightening personal anecdotes, Road to Flourishing will motivate leaders, managers, and their teams to reimagine, reassess, and renew their commitment to building healthy work cultures where everyone can flourish.
Many organizations find themselves spinning their wheels in work cultures filled with toxicity, dysfunction, conflict, and fear. Unengaged employees drag down productivity, and ineffective management undermines morale. How can we create workplaces where people don't just struggle to get through the day, but actually thrive and love what they do and where they work?
Al Lopus, cofounder and CEO of the Best Christian Workplaces Institute, has studied hundreds of organizations to discover eight key drivers in companies with healthy culture and engaged employees. He gathers best practices from across a range of companies and ministries to demonstrate how people at all levels can work together to accomplish work that matters. Principles and real-life examples provide concrete ways that organizations can flourish by building fantastic teams, cultivating life-giving work, attracting and retaining outstanding talent, and much more.
With compelling case studies, behind-the-curtain revelations, and enlightening personal anecdotes, Road to Flourishing will motivate leaders, managers, and their teams to reimagine, reassess, and renew their commitment to building healthy work cultures where everyone can flourish.
194 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 19, 2022
21 people are currently reading
112 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 10, 2022
The ideas and strategies in this book seem wonderful. But...
I have to say that this seems so unrealistic. People feel the need to protect themselves and the job. No one that I've known feels comfortable critiquing leaders or the workplace in general. I feel uncomfortable even writing this.
Then, if I say I feel uncomfortable and my employers saw that, would I get in "trouble?" What a shame.
Since this was "assigned" reading from the president of my organization, I feel a little hope. We'll see. And yes, I'm a tenured professor.
I have to say that this seems so unrealistic. People feel the need to protect themselves and the job. No one that I've known feels comfortable critiquing leaders or the workplace in general. I feel uncomfortable even writing this.
Then, if I say I feel uncomfortable and my employers saw that, would I get in "trouble?" What a shame.
Since this was "assigned" reading from the president of my organization, I feel a little hope. We'll see. And yes, I'm a tenured professor.
June 8, 2023
This book was really interesting to me. I also learned a lot from it! But I bet there are many books like this on organizational health and organizational flourishing that say similar things. The appendices after each chapter were invaluable. Highly recommend for church leaders that want to begin a journey of studying Church/Para-church organizational health!
December 28, 2024
Easily accessible & excellent content with simple applications. Will refer back to the keys in this book often when considering employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
December 19, 2022
Summary: Based on the study of hundreds of organizations, identifies eight factors that contribute to healthy organizational cultures and high employee engagement.
Workplaces are in the midst of a radical sea change. The pandemic has upended patterns of work and what workers value. Technology is changing how we work. And a generational shift is leading to changed expectations as boomers retire, millenials move into leadership, and Gen-Z workers enter the workplace. Al Lopus believes this is a critical time to be paying close attention to workplace culture, which may quickly turn from flourishing to troubled to toxic, or the other way around. He should know. He has spent over twenty years in human resource consulting before taking what he learned to assist Christian ministries to apply what he learned as CEO of Best Christian Workplaces Institute. Out of studies of hundreds of organizations, he has identified eight key practices that distinguish flourishing workplaces, whether Christian or not. The practices are not peculiar to Christian organizations but it is his passion to see Christian organizations embrace with excellence the practices that define the best workplaces in the marketplace, secular or religious. In fact he uses the acronym FLOURISH to summarize these practices. They are, along with some of my takeaways:
Fantastic Teams. They are cohesive and communicate well and their work output is more than just the sum of the individuals.
Life-Giving Work. People have a sense that their work is meaningful and significant and each person in the organization clearly understands the part they play and how they may use their gifts and skills toward the organization’s purpose.
Outstanding Talent. Organizations not only recruit highly competent people, through well-crafted role descriptions that clearly define the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for success, they also reward, retain, and promote that talent, thinking in terms of lattices instead of ladders.
Uplifting Growth. Employee development occurs through stretching assignments on the job, feedback and modeling from leaders working near them and taking them with them, as well as through off the job structured education opportunities.
Rewarding Compensation. The key here is “rewarding.” Increasing compensation without addressing other aspects of healthy organizational culture will not lead to organizational health–it may lead to complacency. Likewise, organizations otherwise healthy but with inadequate compensation, or inadequately communicated compensation policies will struggle to keep engaged employees. Good organizations effectively communicate their total compensation package to all employees and recruits.
Inspirational Leadership. Both character and competence matter. Inspirational leaders pursue and embrace truth, even when it is bad news. They listen to their people and act on what they hear. They establish core values and invest in the leaders around them.
Sustainable Strategy. They have a “deliberate, effective plan to serve their constituents.” Lopus recommends these five steps: Investigate reality, Inquire of God, Invent a plan, Implement priorities, and Inspect results. He also cites Doug Mazza’s four questions for new ideas: Does this idea directly serve the vision and mission? How does it work? Is it cost-effective? and, Can you multiply it by a thousand? (a very good question!).
Healthy Communication. Perhaps the key takeaway here is that good communication centers around listening to your employees and then communicating what has been learned and acting on it.
What struck me about this book is that, far from making one miserable at how short one falls of achieving the leadership Lopus describes, he offers hope, telling story after story of how organizations scoring low in one or more areas, when they took on board the truth and acted on what they learned, were able to turn around employee engagement. Likewise, the book discourages complacency, particularly if organizations score well. Organizational performance, and what is worse, employee engagement can slip. Continuous assessment is vital because of how much is changing in the workplace.
Each chapter also offers reflection questions, resources from the Best Christian Workplaces Institute, and other resources. He also offers in an appendix a workplace culture pulse survey that offers a good basic assessment of workplace health, if those who do the survey are honest in their responses. I can’t think of situation in a Christian organization where reading of this kind of assessment as well as study of the eight keys to flourishing would not be helpful. The practices it encourages are clear and concrete, the stories in each chapter offer encouragement for the transforming of organizational culture, and throughout is a vision of engaged people working together with great passion and joy toward purposes that are deeply shared and consequential. Isn’t that what we all long for in our workplaces?
____________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.
Workplaces are in the midst of a radical sea change. The pandemic has upended patterns of work and what workers value. Technology is changing how we work. And a generational shift is leading to changed expectations as boomers retire, millenials move into leadership, and Gen-Z workers enter the workplace. Al Lopus believes this is a critical time to be paying close attention to workplace culture, which may quickly turn from flourishing to troubled to toxic, or the other way around. He should know. He has spent over twenty years in human resource consulting before taking what he learned to assist Christian ministries to apply what he learned as CEO of Best Christian Workplaces Institute. Out of studies of hundreds of organizations, he has identified eight key practices that distinguish flourishing workplaces, whether Christian or not. The practices are not peculiar to Christian organizations but it is his passion to see Christian organizations embrace with excellence the practices that define the best workplaces in the marketplace, secular or religious. In fact he uses the acronym FLOURISH to summarize these practices. They are, along with some of my takeaways:
Fantastic Teams. They are cohesive and communicate well and their work output is more than just the sum of the individuals.
Life-Giving Work. People have a sense that their work is meaningful and significant and each person in the organization clearly understands the part they play and how they may use their gifts and skills toward the organization’s purpose.
Outstanding Talent. Organizations not only recruit highly competent people, through well-crafted role descriptions that clearly define the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for success, they also reward, retain, and promote that talent, thinking in terms of lattices instead of ladders.
Uplifting Growth. Employee development occurs through stretching assignments on the job, feedback and modeling from leaders working near them and taking them with them, as well as through off the job structured education opportunities.
Rewarding Compensation. The key here is “rewarding.” Increasing compensation without addressing other aspects of healthy organizational culture will not lead to organizational health–it may lead to complacency. Likewise, organizations otherwise healthy but with inadequate compensation, or inadequately communicated compensation policies will struggle to keep engaged employees. Good organizations effectively communicate their total compensation package to all employees and recruits.
Inspirational Leadership. Both character and competence matter. Inspirational leaders pursue and embrace truth, even when it is bad news. They listen to their people and act on what they hear. They establish core values and invest in the leaders around them.
Sustainable Strategy. They have a “deliberate, effective plan to serve their constituents.” Lopus recommends these five steps: Investigate reality, Inquire of God, Invent a plan, Implement priorities, and Inspect results. He also cites Doug Mazza’s four questions for new ideas: Does this idea directly serve the vision and mission? How does it work? Is it cost-effective? and, Can you multiply it by a thousand? (a very good question!).
Healthy Communication. Perhaps the key takeaway here is that good communication centers around listening to your employees and then communicating what has been learned and acting on it.
What struck me about this book is that, far from making one miserable at how short one falls of achieving the leadership Lopus describes, he offers hope, telling story after story of how organizations scoring low in one or more areas, when they took on board the truth and acted on what they learned, were able to turn around employee engagement. Likewise, the book discourages complacency, particularly if organizations score well. Organizational performance, and what is worse, employee engagement can slip. Continuous assessment is vital because of how much is changing in the workplace.
Each chapter also offers reflection questions, resources from the Best Christian Workplaces Institute, and other resources. He also offers in an appendix a workplace culture pulse survey that offers a good basic assessment of workplace health, if those who do the survey are honest in their responses. I can’t think of situation in a Christian organization where reading of this kind of assessment as well as study of the eight keys to flourishing would not be helpful. The practices it encourages are clear and concrete, the stories in each chapter offer encouragement for the transforming of organizational culture, and throughout is a vision of engaged people working together with great passion and joy toward purposes that are deeply shared and consequential. Isn’t that what we all long for in our workplaces?
____________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.
May 30, 2022
Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being by Al Lopus is a phenomenal book for leaders of Christian workplaces. It is a step by step guide to take your workplace to new levels where everyone is thriving as an individual and as a whole. What I loved most about this book is how the author uses stories and gives concrete examples. This book will guide you every step of the way. It is brilliantly written. I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher with no obligations. These opinions are entirely my own.
June 7, 2023
In response to lower ratings on our staff survey, this was required reading by the leadership of our organization-- we read it as a staff together and discussed 2 chapters a week. I found this book and the concepts in it to be insightful and helpful. I'm hopeful that the leadership of the organization is taking improving our staff culture very seriously and this book is one step & tool in the right direction.
April 4, 2024
Read for a work assignment. There were a lot of good thoughts here, although it's definitely meant more for those coming from a management perspective than a regular employee one. Would definitely recommend to executives at Christian organizations who are looking to make their workplace the best that it can be. :)
September 19, 2023
If you want a profitable and healthy organization, you need a healthy culture. If you want a healthy culture, you need healthy engagement from you staff. If you want healthy engagement from your staff, read this book!
December 28, 2023
Some insightful steps and actions but a bit too much fluff and storytelling for my liking. It would have been more streamlined to use one example company throughout the book, rather than bouncing around and using multiple organizations.
April 23, 2025
Lots of solid facts throughout. I usually rate books based on how entertaining they are, but this one gets a 5/5 for being a great read for anyone in leadership—or aiming to be.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews