7 Ways People Find Work Meaningful and 7 Ways Organisations Destroy it
What makes work meaningful? We might also ask what makes for a meaningful life? These can seem like two quite different questions at first, but research suggests they overlap in important ways.
A 2019 meta-analysis found that meaningful work is a strong predictor of engagement, commitment, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, life meaning and general health. In other words, people that find their work meaningful tend to not only feel better but actually work better.
I first became interested in these questions as a teenager, after noticing a lot of people that had well paid jobs seemed unhappy. My initial thoughts were that working on important societal problems would be the best way of pursuing meaningful work. When I finished school, I thought that climate change was the best candidate here, and so I enrolled in a degree to study economics, philosophy and environmental science with a view to working on climate policy in the future. I enjoyed studying, but found purely focussing on a long term future goal left some things missing in the present - creativity, self-expression and the sense of accomplishment that comes from improving at a craft. I also missed the feeling that comes from creating something together with other people. I had played piano since I was a child, and I thought the experiences I had playing music with others did seem to provide many of these missing elements – craft, creativity, self-expression, connection. I eventually left study and worked as a musician for over a decade. I did find many of these missing aspects in music, at least temporarily, but working in the arts brings its own array of challenges.
Years later, I spent a lot of time asking people about where they find meaning in work during my PhD, especially people that had resigned from well-paying jobs to start businesses and spend time in Coworking spaces. As it turns out, there’s many decades of research on this topic that points to some clear patterns, although the story is a little more complicated than locating a single, universally applicable source of meaning through work.
Given the sources of meaningful work can vary between people, it’s helpful to identify the common threads amongst them and how they can lead to meaning. A 2010 paper by Brent Rosso, Kathryn Dekas and Amy Wrzesniewski does just that. Their review identified seven mechanisms that make work meaningful.
1. Authenticity: relates to the coherence between our outward behaviour and inner experience, and identity at work. It’s difficult to find work meaningful if we feel pressure to put on an act or avoid saying what we really think.
2. Self-Efficacy: or the feeling that one has the power to act and make a difference at work. A sense of self-efficacy tends to emerge from a combination of autonomy or control over work processes, competence at tasks and visibly seeing one’s efforts translate into impact.
3. Self-Esteem: or an assessment of self-worth through work. Self-esteem tends to require self-efficacy, but also be more dependent on the feedback and social acknowledgement of one’s contribution to a project or group.
4. Purpose: or a sense that one’s work is guided by an intentional direction or serves a greater goal. This one has received a lot of attention over the past decade and is sometimes proposed as a single panacea to meaningless work. It is certainly important, but also operates in relationship with these other mechanisms.
5. Transcendence: or the experience of superseding the ego through connecting with something greater than the self. Just as self-efficacy is closely related to self-esteem, the experience of self-transcendence through work is usually closely connected to work being driven by a sense of purpose.
6. Belongingness: or the sense of interpersonal connection with others formed through enduring and significant relationships. This isn’t limited to one’s immediate colleagues but can extend to the relationships formed over a working lifetime. However, there is something distinct and important in the feeling of shared interests or a common fate with colleagues.
7. Cultural and Personal Sensemaking: this final mechanism acknowledges that the way we interpret meaning through work is partly the product of the personal and cultural stories to which we are exposed. Our families, social networks and the cultures we’re embedded in can all shape the way we think about and experience meaning through work.
Four Pathways Towards Meaning at Work
You might have noticed that some of these mechanisms of meaning are oriented around the self, such as experiences of competence, autonomy, self-esteem and authenticity through work. Other mechanisms are oriented around others, through experiences of significance and impact of one’s work, self-transcendence and sense of identification, connection and belonging with colleagues and groups. The paper then overlays a further two fundamental psychological drives that shape the way we interact with the world. The first is differentiation (they use the term agency), or the drive to separate and pursue goals; and the second is integration (they use the term communion), or the drive to connect, attach and unite. The authors then locate these seven mechanisms with this model, and identify four pathways towards meaningful work:It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Individuation: or actions that create a sense of identity that is competent, independent and worthy.
Contribution: or actions that contribute towards a purpose greater than the self.
Self-Connection: or actions that help us experience a greater sense of alignment and coherence in how we see ourselves.
Unification: or actions that bring us into harmony with our value systems and connect us with other people.
You might like to reflect on the situations through which you’ve found work meaningful. What were you doing? Where were you? Who were you with? Where would you place these experiences within these quadrants? Doing this can also help us understand those nagging feelings that something is missing, by identifying areas that might be overlooked and underserved.
An Ecosystem of Meaning at Work
As we’ve seen, there is no single source of meaningful work. Moreover, research suggests meaning at work is not experienced as a constant or steady flow, but varies episodically, and can be elicited through reflection and conversation. Because meaning is episodic, it is quite different from simply being happy at work. Sad or difficult experiences can become poignant moments through meaningful reflection, such as in the reflections of palliative care nurses caring for people toward the end of their life. So rather than simply asking whether work is meaningful or meaningless, it’s more helpful to consider how well the sources and mechanisms of meaning in our work lives are aligned. How do these mechanisms of self-efficacy and self-esteem, authenticity, purpose, transcendence and belonging find expression across the work tasks, roles, relationships and organisations with which we’re engaged? This is a dynamic ecosystem of interaction between elements that will be different for each of us, even if we belong to the same organisation. Organisations can’t simply make work meaningful, but they can provide time, space and support for workers to reflect on what makes their work meaningful, and what might be missing.
The Seven Deadly Management Sins that Make Work Meaningless
The process of finding meaning through work relies on reflection and integration with important experiences of life outside of work, and the pathway towards finding more meaning in our work will look different for each of us. Competence, self-understanding, perceived impact and a sense of belonging all take time to cultivate. However, like many valuable things in life, what takes time to cultivate can be destroyed relatively quickly. A 2016 article by long time meaningful work researchers Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden reviewed seven common ways organisations can make work feel meaningless.
1. Disconnect people from their values: Most jobs have a social purpose greater than simply making money. People want to feel their efforts contribute towards this purpose. But over emphasising costs savings, profitability or other instrumental concerns that disconnect people from their purpose can quickly cause despair. Teachers or nurses that perceive more concern with profit or managing risk rather than serving the best interests of students or patients can quickly lose faith in their work and organisations.
2. Give people pointless work to do: Most people have a strong sense of the parts of their job that create the most value and feel they should spend more of their time on these activities. Bureaucratic, compliance-driven or administrative processes that pull them away from focussing on what’s important can quickly erode a sense of meaning at work.
3. Override people’s better judgment: Just as people generally have a good sense of the high value creating activities of their work, they tend to have views on how to perform the tasks that deliver value. Demanding workers to do things that go against their better judgement, such as following flawed methods or adopting potentially harmful processes is a quick way to render work meaningless.
4. Take your employees for granted: When people find work meaningful, they tend to be intrinsically motivated to work hard. But feeling that their efforts are consistently unrecognised and unappreciated by leaders can cause people to question their priorities and the point of their work.
5. Treat people unfairly: Even when money isn’t the primary motivation that drives work, a sense of meaning can dissipate if people feel the returns on their efforts are not shared fairly, or when pathways for career progression are closed. The same goes for cases where workers are disrespected, belittled, or bullied.
6. Disconnect people from supportive relationships: An important dimension of meaning at work is found in the sense of connection and camaraderie with other people. The primary finding from the longest running adult development study, is that good relationships keep us both happier and healthier. In fact, research has found loneliness can pose a greater health risk than poor diet or insufficient exercise. So, shutting down ways workers can connect with each other and form supportive relationships tends to erode meaning at work.
7. Put people at risk of physical or emotional harm: Some roles come with an inevitable level risk, and employees generally accept this when they choose to enter such lines of work. Many of these roles, such as paramedics or police officers, can be highly rewarding professions. But when workers are exposed to avoidable or unnecessary risks, they tend to lose faith in the organisation and often their work.
Humanising Work
How we work is undergoing some extraordinary changes, especially given the impact of COVID-19 on work arrangements. While some have been swept up in the great resignation, for many it’s been more of a time of great reconsideration. Remember, people that find meaning in their work tend to be more engaged, committed and display lower rates of attrition. They not only have greater job satisfaction but also tend to find greater meaning in life. So organisations that support their employees to find meaning in their work will not only improve their chances of attracting and retaining talent, but also create the kind of workplaces where human beings flourish.
