Meaningful Work
All of us want our work to be meaningful. Though significantly related, meaningful work is more than job satisfaction and engagement. Meaningful work is purposeful and significant. Since most of us spend most of our lives at work, it is only natural to include it in one's sense of self. In the 2013 research article A Good Living Versus A God Life, Neal Chalofsky and Liz Cavallaro suggest the sense of self and work overlap to help determine life's meaning. And Viktor Frankl tells us that even in the direst of circumstances, "The primary motivation for living is to find meaning." It is not to say that all work must be meaningful all the time. There are likely long stretches of tedium, but if people cannot connect with their work and find meaning at some level, they will see the work as meaningless.
Unfortunately, meaningful work is not the norm for many. We can see this in the Gallup findings I mentioned earlier. A report by the leadership development firm BetterUp says that employees find their work, on average, half as meaningful as it could be. That's unfortunate because the same report implies that employees whose work is meaningful will work for less pay, stay with an organization longer, work longer hours, and are absent less. What are the organizational conditions that challenge employees' ability to find meaning in their work? Of course, there are many, but some are more impactful than others that I feel we can associate with leadership.
Separating Personal Values From Work
One condition comes about when organizations separate personal values from work. Usually, this comes about when an organization values the bottom line more than a worker's focus on work quality. When employees cannot connect their work and the values they hold, they will not find substantial meaning in work.
Taking Employees for Granted
Another condition exists when organizations take employees for granted. When employees feel unrecognized and unappreciated, they not likely to find their work meaningful. I once worked with an organization with an extraordinarily high turnover rate. Upon interviewing ex-employees, they noted that supervisors and managers did not know or use employee names. Employees were only known by the number printed on their hard hats.
Assign Pointless Work
Pointless work is work that does not match an individual's sense of what her job should entail. And pointless work is, by nature, not meaningful. In his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber describes pointless work as so "…unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is the case."
Pointless work seems especially prevalent in the knowledge-work sector. According to The Anatomy of Work Index, Asana's in-depth study shows knowledge workers spend about 60% of their time on pointless work. 27% of their time goes to performing productive work; the remaining 13% is used for planning.
Pointless work comes about when organizations do not automate basic processes or fail to recognize a workday does not have to be the standard eight hours. Bosses don't want to see people idle, and they don't want to let them go home when the work is complete, so many fill up space with busy-work.
Treating People Unfairly
Extreme unfairness is present in harassment and discrimination, but there are subtler forms of unfairness in many organizations. Unfair treatment can include favoritism, office politics, cold-shouldering, nepotism, false accusations, and selective enforcement of policy and rules. It's safe to say that most employees experience unfair treatment at work at some time or another.
Labor laws are pretty clear about harassment and discrimination, but not so much unfair treatment. The problem is the law often allows coworkers and bosses to be unfair and even jerks. Attorney Shemia Fagan puts it this way, "In plain English, your boss can be a jerk, as long as she's an equal opportunity jerk."
Employees want to know they are treated fairly at work, and unfair treatment is a stressor. The effects of stress at work are well studied.
Lack of Autonomy
In their self-determination theory, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan identify three core needs people must fulfill to facilitate personal growth. These are competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Competence is the experience of mastery of a task or job and effectively dealing with the environment. Autonomy is the desire to have some level of control over what one does. And relatedness is the need to belong and feel connected to others.
In collaboration with Happiness Works, Robert Half conducted a survey. 55% of the over 12,000 US participants reported having "little or no control" over their work. The results of a recent study, researchers Erik Gonzalez-Mulé and Bethany Cockburn, find that lack of autonomy and workload and the cognitive ability to handle it can lead to serious health problems. "We examined how job control — or the amount of autonomy employees have at work — and cognitive ability — or people's ability to learn and solve problems — influence how work-stressors such as time pressure or workload affect mental and physical health and, ultimately, death," the authors continue, "We found that work stressors are more likely to cause depression and death as a result of jobs in which workers have little control or for people with lower cognitive ability." It's a simple equation; if an employee feels she has no control over her work, she will not find it meaningful.
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