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Key points
- Meaningful work is so important to the vast majority of people that they would pay a financial price for the opportunity.
- Managing these needs by encouraging mindful moments in the meditation room is insufficient if workers are expected to return "business-like."
- The shift from “team players” to “positive energizers” illustrates a more human-centric corporate practice.
- When work is meaningful, it is also responsibly cooperative.
Many of us have been socialized into believing that the things we do when in “work” mode have little connection to the meaning-making activities that fill our lives with purpose.
And yet, a recent study, undertaken just before the start of the global COVID pandemic, found that 9 out of 10 people were willing to earn less money in exchange for more meaningful work. I imagine you would hear much the same today, as a lot of people are re-evaluating their relationships to the corporate lives that once consumed them. Businesses are facing unprecedented challenges, including the Great Resignation where millions of folks are choosing to quit unfulfilling jobs.
What are employees asking for when they demand “meaning” in their work?
Business-like or Human-like?
At its core, the challenge of managing with meaning is a call to think strategically about how business can be more human-centric.
Over the past decade, a growing number of companies started embracing mindfulness as a solution to this problem. But managing the emotional needs of employees by encouraging them to have a mindful moment in the meditation room is insufficient if they are then expected to return to the office space and be “business-like.”
This spiritual bypass to the challenge of meaningful work is counterproductive so long as meaning-making is perceived as an inward and private process, while the “real” task of business demands a homogenizing outward display of corporate branding and alignment.
The truth is that it no longer makes business sense to demand workers detach from their emotional, ethical, or spiritual faculties while on the clock. Especially since we are so connected to our communicative technologies that it is often unclear to many of us if we’ve ever actually left work. Consequently, our drive to create meaning is now forced to work overtime as well.
From “Team Players” to “Positive Energizers”
A good way to illustrate the shift from the old approach to corporate life to a more human-centric present is in the rapid decline of the “team player.”
Biz speak used to celebrate team players, the reliable drones that sacrificed their personal reputations, ambitions, or senses of self to achieve corporate goals. But a narrative of personal sacrifice in isolation from a larger sense of meaning is no longer compelling today.
Instead, Professors Robert Quinn and Anjan Thakorunleash have coined a new term for the business lexicon: unleashing positive energizers. Their research finds that positive energy is a rare and valuable resource that too often goes untapped.
Companies already know to look out for the smartest or most innovative amongst their membership. But mature, purpose-driven people with optimistic orientations who inspire others and take initiative create exponential value for their organizations, especially during periods of change. Those motivated by meaning can do far more for a company than those prepared to sit on the bench to collect their paycheck.
The Responsibility in Doing With Others
The call for meaning at work will challenge those who are used to understanding meaning-making efforts as inward reflections and not outward creative, cooperative, and assertive initiatives. Enacting meaning within our work requires us to link our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual faculties.
In seeking meaning at work, we hone our ability to react, especially in extraordinarily disruptive competitive environments. Instead of being passively non-judgmental, we must find ways to inspire the entire constellation of stakeholders who can contribute to or hinder our workplace success.
But we must first accept the specific moral responsibility of knowing that when we act in our work, even if shielded by a corporate identity or limited legal liability, we are connecting ourselves to those who may be impacted by our actions.
When work is meaningful, it is also cooperative. It is doing with others.
Managing with meaning starts with thinking about how we can tell the best possible story of what we do every day at work. We need to explain how it is a meaning-making activity, rooted in responsibility and fostering connection. And if our work today is not yet a meaning-making activity, we need it to become one.
