Meaning and What’s Missing at Work

“Think about a meaningful experience you had in the last few weeks,” I said. I was leading a workshop on ways to have a greater personal impact in the world. “Now ask yourself why that was so meaningful. Ask yourself why again to that answer… and then keep asking why until your answer is a single word.” I adapted this exercise from Stanford professor Michael Ray’s book The Highest Goal. By repeatedly digging deeper into why an experience is meaningful, you can identify the essence of what really matters to you.

After the workshop, a woman came up to me and thanked me profusely. She had been so inspired by the word that came to her — giving — that she had decided to volunteer for the company’s community service committee. I left the office that day with a sense of pride and accomplishment — it feels very fulfilling to be able to help others uncover a piece of the answer to questions we all ask ourselves: “What is it that I really want? What contribution do I want to make to the world? What can I do that will feel truly meaningful? Why do I keep getting this feeling that there’s something more?”

Driving home, though, my sense of fulfillment began to fade. As much as I love helping people gain greater clarity into what matters to them, it feels like I’m never quite going deep enough — like there’s more I could be doing that would have an even greater impact. What really matters to me — and what I strongly believe we need to be able to talk about in order to really understand purpose and meaning — is spirituality.

It’s hard for me to talk about spirituality with anyone outside my close friends and family — even writing this post has been challenging for me. In some ways, it reminds me of how it felt to come out as gay when I was a freshman in college. It’s a huge part of my identity, and yet I have a ton of fear about what people will think when I share it with them. With my sexuality, I was afraid of not being accepted by society — with spirituality, the fear is more about not being taken seriously in business. Businesses are focused on delivering tangible, measurable results, and leaders may worry that discussions on sensitive, seemingly esoteric topics like spirituality could lead to conflict or distract from productivity. Plus, the last thing I want is to work in an organization where anyone feels it’s appropriate to force their own religious beliefs onto others. We have religious freedom and nondiscrimination laws for good reason. I don’t often talk about spirituality at work because I don’t want to be dismissed as someone who is not qualified to deal with the hard realities of business, and because I don’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable.

However, there’s more to it for me than just coming out as a spiritual person myself. I also believe that there are many ways spiritual approaches could be valuable for improving workplace culture and business outcomes. For example, there is ample evidence that meaningful work contributes to higher employee engagement and therefore better financial results. Meaningful work is one of the most important factors millennial employees look for in a job, and Generation Z values meaning even more highly. Sure, we can talk about meaning without talking about spirituality, but we could be preventing ourselves from potentially gaining deeper insight into questions of personal meaning and purpose that are actually inherently spiritual at their core.

I know that not everyone will agree that spirituality is an appropriate topic for work. Part of the challenge is that there are many different views of what spirituality entails, and people use many different words to describe what they consider spiritual. Some have specific religious traditions or beliefs in God, others would say that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Still others consider themselves humanist, agnostic, or atheist. Yet all of us can relate to the sense of deep, indescribable awe we feel when faced with something that moves us — a beautiful sunset, a baby’s smile, a hug from an old friend, a feeling of peace after a walk through the woods. This is what I mean when I talk about spirituality — whether you use words like spirit or soul or not, I believe that each of us has an inner life, a source of inspiration, a spark of something ineffable within. Acknowledging this part of ourselves is valuable for exploring what brings us a sense of meaning and purpose.

When I do the “highest goal” activity for myself, the word I always come down to that reflects what is most meaningful to me is joy. I have found so much joy in discovering and developing my own sense of spirituality — my deepest desire is to help others access that joy for themselves, in ways that feel right and appropriate to each person. And because we spend so much of our lives there, my hope is to make it safe to explore and talk about spirituality at work. Whether it’s implementing mindfulness programs, empowering leaders to have deeper conversations about meaning and purpose, or providing space for employees to share stories with each other about what truly matters to them, I believe that embracing elements of spirituality (or whatever you prefer to call it) could be key to creating an inclusive and meaningful next-generation workplace.