Our Meaning and Purpose at Work report , released today, surveyed the experience of workplace meaning among 2, American professionals, across 26 industries and a range of pay levels, company sizes, and demographics. The height of the price tag that workers place on meaning surprised us all. Our first goal was to understand how widely held the belief is that meaningful work is of monetary value. More than 9 out of 10 employees, we found, are willing to trade a percentage of their lifetime earnings for greater meaning at work.
A second related question is: How much is meaning worth to the organization? Employees with very meaningful work, we found, spend one additional hour per week working, and take two fewer days of paid leave per year. In terms of sheer quantity of work hours, organizations will see more work time put in by employees who find greater meaning in that work. More importantly, though, employees who find work meaningful experience significantly greater job satisfaction, which is known to correlate with increased productivity.
Additional organizational value comes in the form of retained talent. Despite the bidirectional benefits of meaningful work, companies are falling short in providing it. Our study found that people today find their work only about half as meaningful as it could be. We also found that only 1 in 20 respondents rated their current jobs as providing the most meaningful work they could imagine having. This gap presents both a challenge and an opportunity for employers. Employers must respond or lose talent and productivity.
Employees who experience strong workplace social support find greater meaning at work. The sense of collective, shared purpose that emerges in the strongest company cultures adds an even greater boost to workplace meaning.
Simple tactics can amplify social connection and shared purpose. Explicitly sharing experiences of meaningful work is an important form of social support. Organizations can encourage managers to talk with their direct reports about what aspects of work they find meaningful, and get managers to share their perspectives with employees, too.
Adopting these habits may require some coaching of managers, as well as incentivizing these activities, but they can go a long way toward building collective purpose in and across teams. The trick is simply to move to stones that take you closer and closer to what is meaningful to you.
There is no single path — but rather, an infinite number of options that will lead to the sweet spot of fulfillment.
The order is important. This means being able to do things like volunteer on the side, go months at a time without getting a paycheck, or invest in unusual professional development opportunities. In my experience, people who are successful in finding — and maintaining — meaningful work approach their careers like a grand experiment. You can learn a ton about potential lines of work from reading online, having conversations, taking on side projects, and volunteering.
As such, it should be an adventure, with a healthy bit of magic and mystery along the way. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. With the right approach, almost any job can be meaningful. The participants compete to show skill in their work, and often do so with great passion.
Why is it that some people can be extraordinarily well-paid and work in pampered settings but feel empty, while others can work in the sewers of New York City and feel fulfilled? Part of the answer is purpose. As I noted recently in a recent article , for most people, purpose is built not found. Connect work to service. While everyone may not handle situations of life and death at work, we each do serve someone in what we do.
Teachers can see every day the young lives they are shaping — and visualize the lasting impact they may have on the young lives they touch. Corporate accountants can connect themselves mentally to the larger work of their organizations and take pride and purpose in the customers they help.
Who do you serve? Craft your work — and make work a craft. Yale Professor Amy Wrzesniewski once did an in-depth study of hospital custodial staff to determine what helped certain members of the custodial team excel. Her results recounted by David Zax were fascinating. They were pursuing excellence in service to others and would adapt their jobs to suit that purpose. They enhanced their assigned work to be meaningful to themselves and to those they serve.
Wrzesniewski and her colleagues have even begun to think more deeply about exercises that can help anyone focus on crafting their work into something that gives them purpose while still getting the core of their job done. This atmosphere of constant improvement in service of craft — so ably demonstrated by the sewage treatment workers of New York — in itself seems to fill professional pursuits with greater purpose.
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