Can you produce an effective workplace culture through a number? KPIs, for example, offer benchmarks of success, giving employees numeric goals to meet and leaders a way to measure their effectiveness. When an organization hits the target metrics, it’s tempting to assume the culture is healthy. Numbers don’t lie, right?

Numbers are unambiguous. You either reach a sales goal, or you don’t. You either shorten the hold time for customers, or you don’t. You either get an 80 percent response rate on your engagement surveys, or you don’t. Assessing data with numeric accuracy is critical to finding opportunities for improvement.

Problems emerge, however, when organizations rely exclusively on quantitative methods in shaping their cultures. Success requires more than numbers. A sales goal is meaningless to an employee without an explanation of the goal’s significance. I have found that a compelling narrative can do more to galvanize a workforce than even a monetary reward like a bonus or commission. If leaders share the thought process behind a target’s importance, people can more easily and meaningfully invest themselves in pursuing a numeric goal. When a number has a story—and when a group shares that story—members feel more bonded in the mission.

Numbers signal success after the fact, but they are rarely an engine of success. One of my favorite stories of KPIs gone awry is the leadership coach who advised his client to thank her reports a dozen times a day in order to improve engagement. It must have been a relief for the leader to finally have a simple formula for leading her teams! She dutifully followed the prescription, even tracking her progress on her phone, as if each thank-you were a footstep being counted on an app.

As you might guess, the thank-you routine quickly became rote. If she was behind by the afternoon, she would thank a manager multiple times for something inconsequential. Rather than being grateful for her turbocharged gratitude, her reports began to read her appreciation as fake and, at times, even a bit strange. The problem all began when she decided to let a number, rather than a meaningful narrative, drive her behavior. One thank-you with a genuine reason behind it—articulated clearly—would have improved engagement better than four dozen insincere gestures.

So, for the KPI-addicted among us, the bad news is that there is no set-it-and-forget-it formula for leaders to build healthy, prosperous, enthusiastic workplace cultures. The good news, however, is that there is a more authentic alternative, and it’s actually easier to implement because it flows from our human need for stories. The story-based approach can infuse virtually any task with a greater sense of purpose.

Express your mission clearly, compellingly, and consistently. Satisfy the natural curiosity of your workforce and answer the question “Why are we here?” No one works for money alone.

As a leader, you believe in the mission and vision more than anyone, which makes it easier for you to communicate about them. You might lack confidence that employees want to hear what you have to say, but I find that inclusion in the narrative—feeling like a character in the overarching story—energizes people. From the moment they apply for a job, they should have a sense of the fascinating tale being written through the work of your organization and understand exactly how they’ll play a part in the action.