Stop Settling: Aligning Your Work To Your Core Values

By Justin Dauer , Designer, Author, Speaker & Principal Consultant at Vervint

It’s known by many buzzword-calibre titles: The Great Resignation. The Great Rethink. The Great ReShuffle. Whatever journalists call it, the common theme is that people have been—and still are—testing the market in droves, largely driven by a mindset of no longer settling. No longer settling for inflexible location-based work, or synchronous-only communication, or lack of fulfilment from either culture or creation. When what’s most important—values—don’t align between business and employee, disconnection is the result.

Values-aligned fulfilment occurs in how people create and how they can find the place where they’ll do their best work. Career fulfilment means connection: at the individual (designers to designers, designers to their work) and business (culture to ethics, culture to employee) levels.

Remote work and the Great Whatever-You’d-Like-to-Call-It have created an environment for talent to find almost any job they want—creating a fulfilling design practice and fostering connection in a remote world are more important than ever.

“Creating a fulfilling design practice and fostering connection in a remote world are more important than ever.”

So what do people really want from work?

Why is career fulfilment so important? Because it’s bigger than us: in creative jobs, when product, designers, researchers, and service designers are disconnected from their work, those on the receiving end of it can feel the biggest sting of all. When businesses aren’t demonstrating their values in action—or re-aligning them to remote or hybrid work environments—employees are just no longer settling. And in mass numbers.

In fact, according to a Pew Research study, via the pandemic and the shift to flexible work dynamics, 65% of workers still say they feel less...

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