What Makes Work Meaningful?
17th August 2024
Many people are willing to earn less money in order to do more meaningful work. But so far researchers haven't pinned down what meaningfulness is. Together with colleagues, Katie Bailey studied experiences of meaningful work among nurses, lawyers and creative artists. She writes that for work to be meaningful, people have to sense that they have made a valuable and important difference in some way.
Many people want more from their work than simply pay - they want to find a sense of meaning and purpose. After all, most of us spend more time at work than we do engaged in any other activity. What can be more demoralising than doing a job you find meaningless?
As many as nine out of ten people in the US are willing to earn less money in order to do more meaningful work. Research has shown that people who find their work meaningful tend to perform better, are less likely to quit, are more engaged and enjoy higher levels of wellbeing. It seems that meaningfulness is beneficial for both employers and employees.
Yet, a sense that our work matters and is meaningful is surprisingly hard to come by. While we can perhaps imagine that boring, repetitive work feels meaningless to the job holder, people doing what society might regard as valuable, interesting or creative jobs can equally struggle to experience an enduring sense of meaningfulness. So far, researchers haven't been able to pin down exactly what it is that makes work meaningful.
What people say
We were motivated to delve deeper into this puzzling finding in our own research into experiences of meaningful work among nurses, lawyers and creative artists (including actors, musicians and writers). These are just the kinds of jobs that society tends to regard as meaningful and significant, albeit in somewhat different ways: artistic work is associated with creativity, nursing with care and legal work with justice.
During our interviews, rather than focusing so much on what people said about their work, we looked instead at how they talked about it. There is a rich tradition of research into discourse and narrative within organisation and management research. We wanted to find out what this perspective could reveal about the presence or absence of meaningfulness to help us understand why it is that people in ostensibly "meaningful" jobs could still struggle to find a sense of meaning.
To do this, we examined personal stories that people told about meaningful and meaningless times at work, breaking these stories down into their constituent elements. We then asked ourselves: What is happening? Who features in the story and what do they contribute? What role does the storyteller themselves play? What is the plot line? What struggles or challenges are evident in the story?
Making a contribution
We confirmed a strong connection between making a worthwhile contribution and a sense of meaningfulness. In other words, for work to be meaningful, people have to sense that they have made a valuable and important difference in some way. Thus, the nurses' stories centred around their role in caring for patients, the lawyers talked about how they helped their clients win their legal cases, and the artists' stories focused on how their creative endeavours enriched their audiences. For example, Ron, an opera singer, explained how he could "open people's horizons, console people, help their emotional state" through his work.
Although all the stories showed that making a contribution was key, once we delved below the surface, it became clear that the notion of "making a worthwhile contribution" was not as clear-cut as it might appear at first sight. As Frank Martela remarks, contributions can range from "making a customer smile to serving humanity" (p. 814). This raises questions such as: What counts as a "contribution"? Who gets to decide? Do other people’s views on the contribution count more or less than your own? What happens if people disagree?
Our research revealed that someone’s sense of contribution can be undermined directly or indirectly by work colleagues, through wider depictions of their occupation in the media and society, and even by the people who are supposedly benefitting from the work.
As a result, the people we interviewed talked about the ongoing fight to secure a sense of meaningfulness.
Jane, a nurse, spoke of her frustration when she and her colleagues were shown on the news as “not caring”. Yet, they “battled” with doctors who did not properly understand patients’ needs and “those upstairs” who pressured them to discharge patients who were too unwell to return home. Despite these fights, some patients professed to “hate” nurses (Emily). These experiences left them wondering whether their work did in fact make a difference.
The lawyers talked of their ambivalence about being seen as “fat cats” (in Carol’s words) and questioned whether or not legal work did make a substantive difference to their clients and wider society. The fact that the outputs of their work were intangible meant it could be especially hard to discern what exactly they had contributed: “it’s difficult to be proud of something when you don’t produce”, commented Carol.
The creative artists were the most conflicted group. They struggled to reconcile their personal belief in the importance of the arts to society with the precarious nature of their work. Also, low pay and negative criticism of the arts prevail in the media and sometimes also in government discourse. Euan, a musician, said, “I ask myself lots of times, what’s the point of any of this, why do I bother, am I contributing anything to society?”.
Three criteria
Through analysing these stories, we found that in order for individuals to experience a sense that their work has made a worthwhile contribution, three criteria need to be met:
It’s not enough to make any kind of contribution. People should believe their work contributes to others in ways that matter to them. For example, the nurses needed to see that they were providing patient-centred advocacy and personal care that was important to patients, rather than medicine-led or efficiency-led treatment that arguably mattered more to doctors and hospital managers respectively.
This contribution should be acknowledged and upheld by significant others and wider society. In the absence of this, people engage in what has been termed challenging “justification work” in an effort to defend themselves against competing views ( 348). For example, the creative artists knew that they could theoretically participate in more popular and better-paid forms of art, but instead chose to pursue their own path, dismissing popular artists as “fakes” and “sell-outs”.
People should be able to make a contribution that they personally value. Given the many obstacles that they encounter, this often meant that stories featured tales of personal hardship and suffering as they engaged in a moral quest to “do good” while dealing with rejection, criticism or opposition.
Taking these three criteria together, it is possible to understand why feeling a sense of contribution and meaningfulness is so challenging. There are always competing notions of what matters and where the “true” worth of an endeavour lies.
Meaningful work aligns with people’s personal values and beliefs about what matters, equips them with the skills and resources needed to accomplish this and put them in contact with likeminded people with a similar value-set.
However, the realities of daily working life inevitably mean that workers will be exposed to counterclaims to worth, whether at a societal, organisational or inter-personal level that cause them to question the value of their contribution. As Christopher Michaelson notes, most jobs do not require us to “run toward danger” (p. 42) and so discerning how exactly we are making a difference will always remain challenging.
About the author
Katie Bailey is Professor of Work and Employment at King’s Business School and Professor of Leadership and HRM at the University of Northumbria. Her research centres around meaning, purpose and engagement. She is Co-Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work (Oxford University Press, 2019).
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