Various research has indicated that people care more about whether their work is meaningful than they do about a number of other factors, including their pay, and that the extent to which work is perceived as meaningful can have a large impact on productivity and wellbeing. However, making your work meaningful is a very individual task which is significantly affected by personal reflections and connections made between work and other aspects of life, but, poor leadership can easily decrease meaningfulness for workers. Hence maintaining meaningfulness in the workplace is definitely a task for both individual employees and their employers.
There are a number of key characteristics of work that is perceived as meaningful, and also a number of factors likely to damage employees’ perceptions of meaning. These are:
Characteristics of meaningful work:
Self-transcendent: The employee feels that their work matters to other people, not only to them. Seeing or hearing how their efforts affect others helps employees to find their work meaningful.
Poignant: The work does not always just produce positive emotions, but mixed feelings or moving moments; the employee feels that they make a hard situation easier for someone, even though they cannot change it, or that they made a hard decision which was the right one. They experience challenges which they are able to overcome.
Episodic: Specific moments of high meaning occur that remind the individual why they do the work they do; these highs cannot be constantly maintained, but often arise when a significant task is completed or a visible difference is made.
Reflective: The significance of events that make an employee’s work meaningful is often only noticed by them when they think and talk about it later. Therefore, taking the time to reflect is important.
Personal: The person’s work makes sense in the context of the rest of their life and is connected to other aspects of their lives such as their family and people they know outside of work who benefit from what they do.
Factors damaging to perceptions of meaningfulness:
Disconnection from personal values: Employees want to feel that they are doing quality work and making a difference; meaningfulness suffers when they feel they are not able to because their employer is too focussed on other factors such as cost, profits, speed, fitting in more clients, or avoiding risks.
Lack of recognition or Appreciation: It may be difficult for employees to perceive their work as having a significant impact on others if their leaders take no notice of their successes or fail to let them know when their efforts are appreciated.
Pointless Tasks: Having to do tasks which they do not perceive as working towards their role’s main purpose or goal, such as paperwork or making changes they view as unnecessary, is likely to lead to employee’s viewing their work as less meaningful.
Unfairness: Unequal rewards for similar efforts, unexplained selection of others for promotion, bullying, or lack of extra reward for extra work.
Being overridden or disempowered when making a judgement: Employees take pride in finishing a product to a high standard, giving the most thorough service, and in being knowledgeable about the correct way to do their work; overriding their judgment to speed up completion of a product or demanding they do something a way they believe is incorrect devalues the employee’s skills and knowledge and can make their presence in their role seem unimportant.
Disconnection from supportive relationships: Relationships with co-workers and teams are often important to employees’ perceptions of meaningfulness. Forcing individuals to work in isolation is likely to reduce their perceptions of their work as meaningful.
Being at unnecessary risk: If individuals are at risk of any kind of harm; physical, emotional or psychological, which they are not expecting to be a part of their work, it is difficult for them to perceive their work as meaningful.
To assist employees to find meaning in their work, employers can:
- Avoid the seven key factors outlined above as damaging to meaningfulness
- Allow employees to understand the organisation’s wider purpose and their role in it (this is also cited as important to general employee wellbeing, leading to greater productivity
- Recognise when employees have made extra effort or achieved something
- When the organisation makes a difference, or is involved in something bigger, show employees the results; if there is an opportunity for employees to interact with those who have benefitted from their work, allow them to do so
- Make clear the purpose of potentially tedious or seemingly unimportant tasks in reaching organisation goals
- Allow time for employees to interact and give one another feedback
- Foster positive team interactions
You may perceive your work as more meaningful if you:
- Specifically take the time to reflect on how your work might affect others, both within your organisation and in the wider community
- Exchange feedback with a colleague
- Consider the connections between your work and other aspects of life