For many, meaningful work feels like a pipe dream. Over 80% of college-educated Americans aspire to have such work, according to a recent study by Bates College and Gallup, yet less than 50% actually attain it.
There are many reasons for this so-called “purpose gap,” but I’d argue that one of the biggest is that we misunderstand what meaningful work actually is and therefore believe we can’t have it – when it may actually be close at hand.
Myth 1: Meaningful work is simply “nice to have”
“It would be nice to have meaning in my work,” many a college student has said to me. “But I don’t need it.”
Gallup’s research on well-being, conducted in more than 150 countries around the world, begs to differ.
Most of us would agree that we need financial stability and physical health, and many of us desire strong relationships and a sense of community. Gallup found that those four aspects of well-being hinge on feeling purpose and meaning at work. In particular, individuals who used their strengths everyday and liked what they did everyday were twice as likely to fare well in all other areas of their lives.
We found a similar but amplified finding in the Bates-Gallup study of purposeful work: individuals who had high purpose in work were ten times more likely to experience overall well-being.
In other words, we do need meaningful work.
Myth 2: Only helping professions are meaningful
Meaningful work occurs when we perceive our work as being “worthwhile, important, or valuable,” according to psychologist Blake Allan and colleagues. Depending on our personal judgment of what’s important and worthwhile – a judgment largely driven by our values and worldview – our determination of what’s “meaningful work” varies widely.
That’s exactly what researchers Jing Hu and Jacob Hirsh found when they asked 245 participants to name a job or career they would be capable of doing that would give them a sense of meaning, and, conversely, a role that would fail to provide them with meaning. “44% of the jobs that were listed as being meaningful by one participant were listed by at least one other participant as lacking meaning,” Hu and Hirsh write. “Similarly, 55% of the jobs that were listed as meaningless by one participant were listed as meaningful by someone else. This substantial overlap between the two categories indicates that the extent to which a job is considered meaningful is largely a subjective judgment.” [emphasis added]
Furthermore, meaning can be constructed in any endeavor. In interviews with 135 workers in a variety of fields, Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden noted, “the vast majority of interviewees found their work meaningful, whether they were musicians, sales assistants, lawyers, or garbage collectors.”
While it may indeed be easier for individuals in helping professions to see the “why” behind their work, an individual in any industry can step back and realize their positive impact, even if it’s solely on co-workers, or, as in the case of garbage collectors in Bailey and Madden’s study, a future good: a cleaner earth for generations to come.
55% of the jobs that were listed as meaningless by one participant were listed as meaningful by someone else. This substantial overlap between the two categories indicates that the extent to which a job is considered meaningful is largely a subjective judgment.
Myth 3: Meaningful work is low paying
More than 9 out of 10 people would take a pay cut to get more meaning at work. In particular, they’d give up 23% of their lifetime future earnings in exchange for a sense of significance, according to research conducted by BetterUp.
This finding, and many like it, underscore our society’s assumption that there’s an inverse correlation between salary and meaningful work. In other words, when one rises, the other inevitably falls.
PayScale’s study of over 2 million workers calls that assumption sharply into question. There appears to be no relationship between salary and meaning in work when viewed by individual job title, and a slightly positive relationship when viewed by job function. That’s largely because three of the highest paid jobs in the survey – surgeons, anesthesiologists and psychiatrists – were also in the top ten professions for meaningful work, with over 91% of those individuals believing their work is valuable. Beyond the top ten, there is no clear association between pay and meaning.
Myth 4: Only high-status jobs are meaningful
Without a doubt, the professions that experience the highest meaning in work in Payscale’s study are those that require a sizable amount of education. It’s likely true, then, that it’s easier to find the value of our work when we’re in higher-status work backed by multiple levels of privilege. That said, it’s a myth to state that only people in high-status, privileged roles can experience meaningful work.
In fact, studies on job crafting conducted by many scholars, most notably Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, have provided evidence for deep levels of meaning in some workers in a variety of low-status professions, ranging from custodial staff to hairdressers to kitchen workers to road workers. The individuals who found meaning in these types of work had reframed their work as being in service of something important, such as the health of patients and care of families in the case of hospital custodial staff, or safety in the case of construction workers.
“I care about these people behind me and I keep them safe,” said one worker holding a sign at a construction site, according to psychologists Bryan Dik and Ryan Duffy. He continued, “I also keep you safe, and everyone else in all those cars behind you.”
Similarly, the retail assistants, stonemasons, and garbage collectors in Bailey and Madden’s research found a variety of ways to see the meaning of their work, including by taking on slight variations of their tasks in order to feel more impactful. For instance, some retail assistants reported talking to elderly customers for a long while in order to provide those customers with a social outlet.
Myth 5: You have to completely overhaul your career to find meaningful work
The job crafting research just mentioned also dispels this final myth. Any of us can make our existing work more meaningful if we make the effort. Researchers have focused on three methods of enhancing our sense of purpose and engagement in our work:
- Changing our thoughts (cognitive crafting)
- Changing our tasks (task crafting)
- Changing our relationships with co-workers, supervisors and/or clients/customers (relational crafting)
Cognitive change comes about by reflecting on the “why” behind our work. What is the greater significance, even if we play only a small role in the process of making that impact? For instance, when fundraisers were exposed to letters from beneficiaries of their efforts, they persisted longer at making tedious phone calls, organizational psychologist Adam Grant and colleagues found.
We can also alter our tasks or the manner in which we do them. For instance, some kitchen workers have been found to elevate their food preparation to an art far beyond the call of duty for their type of eating establishment.
Finally, since meaning seems to rest deeply on our connection to others, it makes sense that changing how we relate to others during our workday can make our job feel more meaningful. As Emily Esfahani Smith elucidates throughout her book The Power of Meaning, whether it’s simply asking a co-worker about her weekend or bringing a smile to customers in a coffee house, any act that makes us feel more connected to others also makes our work – and our lives – more meaningful.
