If we stay in the day-to-day grind without making space to reflect on what we're experiencing, ... [+]
Most of us want more from work than just a paycheck. We want a sense of belonging, identity, and purpose - the key components of meaning in life.
“Over the past 30 years, Americans have identified meaningful work as the most important aspect of a job—ahead of income, job security, and the number of hours worked,” reports McKinsey & Company. For 70% of people, they found, sense of purpose comes solely from work.
Purpose and meaning offer a host of health benefits, both physical and mental, and is essential to work performance and commitment. Given this, meaningful work is a “need to have,” not a “nice to have.”
Unfortunately, only 50% of workers say they have meaningful work, McKinsey reports.
This is a shame because “any job can have meaning” according to the BBC and a host of research articles. There are factors that make a job more likely to feel meaningful - most notably strong relationships - but what makes a job “meaningful” is totally subjective. In fact, in one study researchers Jing Hu and Jacob Hirsch found that “55% of the jobs that were listed as meaningless by one participant were listed as meaningful by someone else.”
So what’s the most common missing piece in the meaningful work puzzle?
Us making time and space to reflect on the work we’re currently doing.
Reflection Matters for Meaningful Work
Meaningful work isn’t something that we typically feel as we’re experiencing it, according to a 2016 study by business professors Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden.
“Meaningfulness was rarely experienced in the moment,” they wrote, “but rather in retrospect and on reflection when people were able to see their completed work and make connections between their achievements and a wider sense of life meaning.”
Meaning hinges on a broad sense of coherence and connection, including a narrative about our identities and an awareness of how our actions impact others. Those are abstract thoughts to be having while juggling series of meetings, preparing presentations, interacting with customers and colleagues, fighting with the inbox, and the myriad other tasks that are a part of the typical work day.
“You are unlikely to witness someone talking about how meaningful they find their job during their working day,” wrote Bailey and Madden. “For most of the people we spoke to, the discussions we had about meaningful work were the first time they had ever talked about these experiences.”
In other words, reflection is essential to experiencing meaningful work, yet we don’t typically get the time, space, or opportunity to do the reflection we need to experience meaning at work.
Work feels much more meaningful when we have the time, space, and structure to reflect on it.
How To Incorporate Reflection Into The Workplace To Facilitate Meaningful Work
Creating space to reflect should be a habit in any company, according to research from McKinsey & Company. “When employees have a chance to reflect on their own sense of purpose, and how it connects to the company’s purpose, good things happen. Survey respondents who have such opportunities are nearly three times more likely than others to feel their purpose is fulfilled at work.”
They note that while opportunities like storytelling forums and leadership workshops can help with reflection, support for reflection must be present in an ongoing way within the structure of the workplace culture itself, including:
- Managers who share their sense of purpose regularly, openly and with vulnerability
- A culture of compassionate leadership
- Psychological safety at all levels of the organization
They found that when managers didn’t provide employees with purpose-focused reflective opportunities the employees “stood just a 7 percent chance of fulfilling their purpose at work.” Psychological safety was even more important, with only 0.5% of survey participants able to feel purpose at work when safety wasn’t present.
How To Create Reflection About Meaningful Work For Yourself
If your workplace isn’t providing structured opportunities for reflecting on meaning at work you still can create the space needed to have meaningful work.
Set up repeating, scheduled opportunities to reflect on your sense of meaning at work. While it may be tempting to want to do this by ourselves - especially for introverts like myself! - the reality is that we’re more likely to actually do the reflective act if it involves commitment to someone else. Otherwise “reflection” is likely to get squeezed off the schedule by something more urgent, but likely far less important.
For instance, set up lunchtime discussion groups with co-workers, fellow alumni, or other peers on a monthly basis, in which you discuss what you’re getting out of work and/or books on the topic of meaningful work and meaning in life.
You could also schedule sessions with a career coach like me who uses session time to reflect upon, enhance, and enact meaningful work and/or with a meaning-focused clinician of any training background.
Whatever the forum, some questions to guide your reflection might include:
- Who or what benefits from my work - even if it’s far down the line from my direct contributions? Think expansively on this question, brainstorming fully and keeping in mind direct reports, colleagues, family members, and others who benefit beyond the “direct impact” of the work product itself.
- How often do I get to interact with the benefiting entities (e.g., a person, population, organization, or the environment)? Would I like to set up more interactions so that could see my/my organization’s impact and what I’m working for?
- To what extent do I feel like I’m a part of a community at work? What could be done to enhance that experience further?
- To what extent do I feel that my contribution at work is unique and significant? In what ways could I lean into my specific strengths and preferences to do this work in a way that’s more “me”?
- What does my work enable that is meaningful to me? In other words, what important experiences and interactions happen because I work (e.g., thanks to my paycheck, during commuting, within meetings, through invitations that occur because of my job)? Are there ways to amplify these important experiences?
Whatever specific questions you ask yourself, the key is keep in mind that you may have meaningful work at hand, but simply haven’t had the space to fully recognize it yet.
As Bailey and Madden say, “The experience of meaningfulness is often a thoughtful, retrospective act rather than just a spontaneous emotional response in the moment, although people may be aware of a rush of good feelings at the time.”
