Why an Appreciative Workplace stays with you

Author: Kathy Callahan

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what people actually take with them from a workplace.

After the traumatic events of last year, I experienced the loss of EnCompass with real grief. It was never just a job for me. Growing EnCompass was a mission. I believed deeply in our values, our vision, and the difference we were making, not only in the world, but in the way people experienced work every day. I believed in my colleagues and in what we were building together. Losing that, as so many of us did, was incredibly hard.

So I found myself asking a simple but important question: What did we take with us from that appreciative workplace?

In the months since, I’ve heard from so many EnCompass alumni. Emails, messages, conversations that start one place and always seem to circle back. And there’s a pattern in what people share. They talk about how it felt to work that way.

They describe being trusted to contribute from the beginning. They remember being encouraged to bring their whole selves, curiosity, creativity, and care for the work. They talk about a culture that truly lived its values, even as it grew. We were not perfect, but we stepped into appreciative practice, with intention, and breathed life into it, day after day, year after year.

And again and again, I hear something else: that the experience stayed with them.

Some have shared how skeptical they were at first about an appreciative approach, and how quickly it became second nature, something they still use today. Others say they find themselves comparing new workplaces to what they experienced, not out of nostalgia, but because they now know what’s possible.

Many speak with a kind of quiet pride, about being part of something meaningful, and deep gratitude for the opportunity to contribute in that kind of environment.

That, to me, is one of the clearest benefits of an appreciative workplace.

Yes, it supports strong performance. Yes, it builds engaged teams and helps organizations grow with intention. Those outcomes matter.

But there’s something more lasting. It creates an imprint.

People leave with a different internal standard for what work can feel like. They carry forward a way of leading, collaborating, and designing organizations that centers strengths, dignity, learning, and shared responsibility.

And wherever they go next, they bring pieces of it with them. In conversations. In how they manage teams. In how they approach challenges.

So the impact doesn’t end when they leave the organization. It continues, quietly, through the people who were shaped by it.

That’s what we took with us.

And in many ways, it’s still unfolding.