When Ørsted surveyed their staff in late 2025, fewer than 10% said they were dissatisfied with their jobs, yet under 30% were positive about where the company was going.
Those are two numbers you’d assume are positively correlated, but Ørsted shows that’s not always the case. Engagement scores, Glassdoor ratings and attrition all tell you whether people like working for you. None of them tells you whether they believe in where you’re taking them. Plenty of people are happy at work without caring much where the company's going, and if all you want is to keep them, that might be good enough. If you want to be a powerful force in your industry, it isn’t. You want the energy felt everywhere, in the way people talk about you to customers and friends.
Political scientists call the surge of support a country gives its leaders in a crisis the ‘rally around the flag’ effect. Your people can rally around your company in the same way, but you don’t want to wait for a crisis to set it off (although get this wrong, and one is usually on its way). What you need instead is a story your people believe. Our CEO, Dominic Walters, wrote in his book Harnessing the Power at Your Fingertips that it can go one of two ways: employees can be ‘a passionate and powerful army of advocates’, or ‘a thorn in your side when morale is low and trust in your leadership is fading.’ Perks and autonomy keep people happy. Only the story makes them advocates.
From foot-dragging to flag-waving
In 2008, Ørsted got 85% of their heat and power from coal. They planted their flag with a goal of flipping that ratio to 85% renewable by 2040, but getting people to rally around it was another matter. A lot of people inside wanted the company to stay exactly as it was. For three decades they had been a fossil-fuel business, proud of the work and sure they were the best in the world at running coal-fired plants.
What turned resistance into acceptance was trouble. Around 2012, a flood of cheap American coal into Europe hit the company’s finances, which ‘made it easier for people to accept the new focus’. The crisis opened the door, but people only rally behind a flag if the company backs it with action.
Ørsted did. Oil and gas staff were offered the chance to move into the growing wind business, which called for similar skills. Ennova, who worked with Ørsted, said the engagement programme ‘empowered their leaders to connect meaningfully with their teams’. The company sold the oil and gas business itself, committed to stop burning coal, and in 2017 swapped a name that stood for Danish Oil and Natural Gas (DONG) for that of a 19th-century physicist. By 2019 their generation was 86% renewable, 21 years ahead of their own deadline!
Volunteers, not conscripts
Backing the flag with action gets people to follow it, but the real prize is people who follow because they want to. A 2015 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, covering more than 36,000 employees, found that the more strongly people identified with their organisation, the more they did beyond their job description, like helping a struggling colleague or speaking well of the company.
Employees with a strong sense of purpose at work were 5.6 times as likely to be engaged as those with little.
Gallup and Stand Together, The Power of Purpose, 2025
Rules and rewards won’t get you there on their own. A Journal of Marketing study found that managers who lived their brand’s values and set out a vision got more of that voluntary effort from their employees, including speaking well of the company off the job, while those who leaned heavily on standards, rewards and monitoring got less.
That matters because outsiders listen to the people who work for you.
52% of the informed public rated a regular employee as an extremely or very credible source of information about a company, against 43% for its CEO.
Edelman Trust Barometer, 2014
All of this means every one of your people becomes a recruiter, and soon everyone wants to be part of your team. Ørsted shows what it looks like at scale: in 2022, Danish engineering and science students ranked them the sixth most attractive employer in the country. That kind of reputation comes from their staff carrying the flag into thousands of conversations everywhere, from online to the pub to conferences.
Happy is only the start
Perks and autonomy still matter, but happiness alone won’t take you all the way. With fewer than 10% dissatisfied, Ørsted’s satisfaction score by itself would have shown nothing was wrong. The number that would have caught it is the share of your people who are positive about where the company is going.
You might reasonably say that a story is only as strong as the results behind it, and Ørsted’s became credible because the 86% happened. But the story came first, in 2008, long before there were results to point to. That's an asset in its own right, and it needs a measure of its own.
In B2B, what your people believe reaches the customer directly: your engineers are in the room on every technical call and your account team is the brand at every renewal. That’s why you should treat your internal story as the first test of your external one. The upstream work, deciding what your company is and where it’s going, has to land with your own people first. Give your people a flag worth rallying around and they become the most powerful tool in your arsenal.