The One Thing We All Want From Work: Meaningfulness (Part One)

        Most working adults in the United States will work at least a 40 hour work week (A 40 hours which easily can become regular overtime). If we assume that they start working full-time at 25 and retire at 65, that’s 40 years of 40 hour work weeks. Applying that to 52 weeks, without counting vacation time, it comes to about 83,200 hours of work. Employees often enter the workforce full-time before the age of 25 and with the age of retirement rising, it’s likely they will work beyond 65. In short, you will spend a lot of time at work and, during some of those years we will inevitability spend more time working than with our family, friends, and engaging in recreational activities that bring us joy.

               However, if we’re spending all of that time at work, it makes sense that what we are doing is meaningful to us. In a previous blog on values, I discussed the importance of making sure that your personal values align with the work you’re doing in your career or business to help stay motivated, engaged, and satisfied in your job. However, it seems to be easier said than done as a Gallup study proved that less than 30% of employees believed their values aligned with their company’s values and even less employs felt that values their company claimed to have were or could be applied to their role. Gallup has released a number of workplace statistics that are relatively frightening. One of their most disappointing is on workplace engagement where they state that only 30% of the US workforce is engaged in their work. That’s still significantly higher than the 13% of engaged employees worldwide.

               Improving workplace engagement, which is not interchangeable but correlated to workplace satisfaction, is a daunting tasks for employers. There are several things employers can do in order to remedy issues with disengagement and dissatisfaction that including making major cultural shifts within the environment, creating more flexible work-options, improving their benefits options, and even implementing work processes to make the team tasks less redundant such as job rotation. However, there are also intrinsic aspects to engagement and satisfaction as well that the organization has not control over. One of those is how employees perceive the meaningfulness of their work.

               Meaningfulness is highly subjective. In fields like human services, healthcare, or education, meaningfulness might be defined and measured by the ability to help people achieve and outcome through the programming and care they provide them. In sales and finance, it might mean helping businesses run most efficiently at lower cost. In technology and manufacturing, it might be a matter innovating new products that make customers happy. It can also be a number of different things across each of those disciplines and every other industry as well. Ultimately, it is up to what the employees believes gives meaning to their job and how their work, especially their contribution to the bigger picture, creates a means for them to be able to add to the mission.

               An article from the American Psychology Association discusses how people who feel “called” to do a particular line of work, whether they are zookeepers or physicians, are typically more dedicated to their roles, are willing to make more sacrifices for their career, feel a deeper connection to their workplace, and have a harder time leaving their profession regardless of what they make. It appears that all the bases that HR tries to cover in order to retain employees actually truly comes from the employees themselves. Employees need to feel connected to their work and that it serves a purpose before the can get connected to the company.

               Indeed, if employees are giving so much time to their careers (probably over 83,200 hours as stated before) it only makes sense that they are spending that time doing something meaningful to them. Most of us want to live with purpose and, since work is a huge part of life most of us are unable to avoid, it only makes sense that we find some of that meaning within our work as well. However, because our careers can often be influenced by outside forces and can even become products of happenstance, it’s important that we create that meaning in our careers and business through truly becoming aware of ourselves, intentionally planning a career trajectory with options that aligning what’s important to us, and determining how we will measure the meaningfulness of our work early on.