Do/Find More Meaningful Work

“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Studs Terkel, from his 1974 book, Working.

 I’ve had this quote on in my office for over 20 years. I’ve been blessed to always do work that is meaningful to me.

 Among those “happy few” who truly enjoyed their labors, Terkel noted a common attribute: They had “a meaning to their work over and beyond the reward of the paycheck.”

More than forty years later, meaningfulness in driving job selection has grown steadily. “Meaning is the new money, an HBR article argued in 2011. Why, then, haven’t more organizations taken concrete actions to focus their cultures on the creation of meaning?

We set out to answer these questions at BetterUp this past year. Our Meaning and Purpose at Work report, surveyed the experience of workplace meaning among 2,285 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.

The Dollars (and Sense) of Meaningful Work
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. Across age and salary groups, workers want meaningful work badly enough that they’re willing to pay for it.

The trillion dollar question, then, was just how much is meaning worth to the individual employee? If you could find a job that offered you consistent meaning, how much of your current salary would you be willing to forego to do it? On average, they said they’d be willing to forego 23% of their entire future lifetime earnings in order to have a job that was always meaningful. In another survey we found that nearly 80% of the respondents would rather have a boss who cared about them finding meaning and success in work than receive a 20% pay increase.

When asked, “How much is meaning worth to the organization?” Greater job satisfaction is known to correlate with increased productivity. We estimate that highly meaningful work will generate an additional $9,078 per worker, per year.

Bottom line results, we estimate that enterprise companies save an average of $6.43 million in annual turnover-related costs for every 10,000 workers, when all employees feel their work is highly meaningful.

A Challenge and an Opportunity
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. Top talent can demand what they want, including meaning, and will jump ship if they don’t get it. Employers must respond or lose talent and productivity. Building greater meaning in the workplace is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s an imperative.

Among the recommendations we offer in our report are these critical three:

1. Bolster Social Support Networks that Create Shared Meaning.
Employees who reported the highest levels of workplace social support also scored 47% higher on measures of workplace meaning than did employees who ranked their workplaces as having a culture of poor social support. For employees who experience both social support and a sense of shared purpose, average turnover risk reduces by 24%.

2. Make Every Worker a Knowledge Worker.
Our study found that knowledge workers experience greater meaning at work than others, and that such workers derive an especially strong sense of meaning from a feeling of active professional growth. Knowledge workers are also more likely to feel inspired by the vision their organizations are striving to achieve, and humbled by the opportunity to work in service to others.

Research shows that all work becomes knowledge work, when workers are given the chance to make it so. That’s good news for companies and employees. Because when workers experience work as knowledge work, work feels more meaningful.

As such, all workers can benefit from a greater emphasis on creativity in their roles. Offer employees opportunities to creatively engage in their work, share knowledge, and feel like they’re co-creating the process of how work gets done.

Often, the people “in the trenches” (retail floor clerks, assembly line workers) have valuable insights into how operations can be improved. Engaging employees by soliciting their feedback can have a huge impact on employees’ experience of meaning, and helps improve company processes. A case study of entry-level steel mill workers found that when management instituted policies to take advantage of workers’ specialized knowledge and creative operational solutions, production uptime increased by 3.5%, resulting in a $1.2M increase in annual operating profits.

Coaching and mentoring are valuable tools to help workers across all roles and levels find deeper inspiration in their work. Managers trained in coaching techniques that focus on fostering creativity and engagement can serve this role as well.

A broader principle worth highlighting here is that personal growth — the opportunity to reach for new creative heights, in this case above and beyond professional growth — fuels one’s sense of meaning at work. Work dominates our time and our mindshare, and in return we expect to find personal value from those efforts. Managers and organizations seeking to bolster meaning will need to proactively support their employees’ pursuit of personal growth and development alongside the more traditional professional development opportunities.

3. Putting Meaning to Work
The old labor contract between employer and employee — the simple exchange of money for labor — has expired; perhaps it was already expired in Terkel’s day. Taking its place is a new order in which people demand meaning from work, and in return give more deeply and freely to those organizations that provide it. They don’t merely hope for work to be meaningful, they expect it — and they’re willing to pay dearly to have it.

Meaningful work only has upsides. Employees work harder and quit less, and they gravitate to supportive work cultures that help them grow. The value of meaning to both individual employees, and to organizations, stands waiting, ready to be captured by organizations prepared to act.

Thanks for your Wisdom Shawn Achor

Listen to one of the most popular TED Talks by Shawn Achor. We believe we should work hard in order to be happy, but could we be thinking about things backwards? In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive.