ëMeaningful workí: what it is and why itís growing

The Work Foundation today publishes a new essay that asks what is ëmeaningful workí, why more people seem to be seeking it, and what employers can do to make work more meaningful?

The paper argues that while thinkers and writers have long wondered at the value of work to human beings beyond providing a living, the notion of ëmeaningful workí is a relatively new phenomenon that would have made little sense to our forbears of a couple of centuries ago.

Author Stephen Overell says: ëThe way people talk about ëfulfilling their potentialí in a job could only happen in the modern world of work ñ it is simply not something that would have been said a few generations ago. Meaningful work rests on the rise of individualism and identity as pressing concerns for large numbers of people. It speaks of huge and perhaps excessive expectations of working life ñ the historically unusual sense that fulfilment occurs, or should occur, in the everyday, ordinary business of going to work.

ëPeople are very different - what is meaningful to one person may not be meaningful to another, and what someone finds meaningful at the age of 23 may not be how they feel at 43. Nevertheless, meaning is unmistakably in the air of the 21st century culture of work; this essay marks an attempt to describe what is going on. The raising and dashing of hopes around meaning has become one of the major psychological forces within working life. What goes on inside workersí hearts and minds about work has become profoundly important to what they produce and how they do it.í

The essay argues that the discovery of meaning in work relies on balancing three sets of motives. They are moral motives ñ the idea that the ëendsí of work are worthwhile; compensation motives ñ including money, but also including status, authority, responsibility and the appropriate use of skills and abilities; and craft motives ñ the desire to do a good job for its own sake.

Meanwhile, the work that people do today has changed in such ways as to prompt more questions about meaning, fulfilment and rewarding work ñ relatively well-paying, highly skilled professional and managerial jobs now account for over a third of all jobs in many advanced democracies. Work is more about intellectual problem-solving and how people communicate and relate to each other than it used to be. This does not make work more meaningful, but it helps create the conditions in which issues of meaning and identity arise.

The paper argues:

Employers have a role in enabling the search for meaningful work by providing high quality jobs for people ñ jobs with autonomy, security, variety, a reasonable balance between effort and reward, and between skill level and demand. But employers cannot create meaning and should not try to. It is up to individuals to find work that is meaningful for them. However, employers are capable of destroying meaning through exploitation, disrespect, and poor organisation of work.

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Social values that affect work have changed: a basic psychological orientation towards maximising income and status is today being balanced by a stress upon self-expression, diversity of view, aesthetic concerns and issues of self-fulfilment.

Meaning, identity and individualism at work have risen at the same time as traditional collective institutions such as trade unions, communities and corporate hierarchies are seen has having declined.

Doing excellent work for no other reason than its own sake is intrinsic to the notion of meaningful work. However, increasing bureaucracy and market forces may undermine the search for meaning.

Having a sense of vocation is very similar to the idea of doing meaningful work. The difference is that meaning is more self-conscious than vocation: the service of others as a personal experience rather than a ëcallingí.