We’ve all heard the saying, often attributed to Confucius, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
But for many people, this is easier said than done, leaving workers searching for meaning in the tasks they perform each day. But new research paper co-authored by a Boston College professor suggests that those who don't think a job is significant and worth doing may not understand how to evaluate the work.
Michael Pratt discussed his research with Money magazine. Read the interview here.
“For some, the source of meaninglessness is clear, such as when you perform dull or repetitive tasks all day. But we found that many people whose jobs seem pretty good in that they are challenging and non-routine — professionals, bankers, lawyers, managers — are still not finding meaning in their work,” says co-author Michael Pratt, the O’Connor Family Professor of Management and Organization at BC's Carroll School of Management. “To them, jobs are not meaningful because they lack a standard for what makes work good and what makes work bad. This lack of standards among groups or societies is sometimes is referred to as 'anomie.'”
Publication of the paper “Meaningful Work as Realization and Justification: Toward a Dual Conceptualization” — co-authored by Douglas A. Lepisto, an assistant professor of management at Western Michigan University who earned his doctorate at the Carroll School — is forthcoming in Organizational Psychology Review.
“I think the biggest surprise for us was the number of people who found their work meaningless despite the fact they had pretty good jobs,” says Pratt. “They had jobs that by many metrics should have been really meaningful. They had high task significance, their work was important to people, they had high job complexity, they got to do a lot of different things, they had autonomy, they got feedback about their work, and they got to do whole tasks. In theory, all of these people should be quite happy about the work that they’ve done. Meaningfulness should not be a problem.”
But it is, largely because of the intangibles.
“When you look at very hands on work, like making chairs or tables where you are producing something tangible, it’s easier to figure whether you had a good work day because you made something,” says Pratt. But many people, he said, reach the day's end and ask themselves "What did I do? Did I have a good day?" and have a hard time answering because there are now fewer standards for defining what is good work versus not good work. "So we’re finding a lot of people — millennials and older — asking, what jobs are worth doing? What makes work meaningful?”
Pratt and Lepisto note that there are two main barriers to meaningfulness at work. The first is “alienation”; people feel separated from the work that they do. This is frequently the problem with assembly line work.
“We know a lot about solving this problem,” says Pratt. “It involves either redesigning people’s work, or allowing them to craft it in a way that makes it more interesting.”
When that strategy is successful, workers have more of their personal needs met. Thinking about meaningful work in this way provides a “realization perspective.”
However, when the barrier is anomie — that is, when people lack standards for evaluating their work — then redesigning work is not the answer. Instead, meanings around the work itself have to change, which the researchers refer to as a “justification perspective.”
“The justification perspective is much more about the kind of stories that we as a society share with each other about what makes work worth doing,” says Pratt. “The focus is on helping people find their story and find a rationale for why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Think about a burger flipper, " he said. "One way to create meaningfulness is to allow him or her to open the store and interact with customers. That is, change the job itself — the realization perspective. The justification perspective would focus on why the burger flipper is doing the job, perhaps to help feed others."
It's also helpful to not focus solely on money. If bricklayers are asked what why they are doing the job, the answers "earning a wage" versus "building a cathedral" are two very different stories about the same job, said Pratt.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, "good work" was tied to making as much money as possible; the Gordon Gekko mantra of "greed is good," said Pratt. Now when people talk about work, especially in relation to millennials, "the dominant cultural narrative is that meaningful work serves a higher purpose," he said. "It helps the environment, helps other people, or has some kind of greater good. The stories we tell ourselves about what makes work meaningful have changed over time. They also may vary by geographic location and economic circumstances."
Pratt says one thing organizations can do is to find out what stories workers are already telling themselves about why the work is worth doing, and align messages with that. For example, if a worker believes work is worth doing if it helps others, then point out ways in which the job does — or could — contribute to society.
Linking the work with a purpose or mission is a good start, says Pratt. “But this has to be done with good intentions. If purpose and mission purposes and missions doesn’t come from the core of the organization and isn’t seen as authentic, then it’s likely to fail miserably. You have to go in really wanting to help people find meaning in their work and not use it in a manipulative way. People tend to see through that, which is why these kinds of interventions can backfire.”
—Sean Hennessey | News & Public Affairs