According to Michael Steger of CSU, there are three core components of meaningful work:
So what? Well, there are significant business benefits when employees feel their work is meaningful. It’s good for them AND very good for the business.
Here’s just a small sampling of the research that affirms the value of making work meaningful:
Higher levels of employee engagement, people willing to work for less money, higher retention rates, AND improved performance! What business wouldn’t benefit from all of that?
To download additional stats on employee engagement, check out this comprehensive resource from Access Perks.
Meaningfulness is, on one hand, a personal matter. What’s meaningful to one person may be less so to another. At the same time, people gravitate to work that has personal meaning to them and to companies that do work they see as important and noble.
The best way to find out if your employees see their work as meaningful is to ask them. Individual employees will tell you what inspires them and is intrinsically motivating. Then you’ll know what to feature in conversations with each employee so you infuse their work with relevant meaning.
You may also wish to ask people what gets in the way of their work feeling meaningful. Often, it’s repetitive tasks that have lost meaning because they’ve become rote. Mundane work takes away from employee engagement.
To restore meaning in any type of work, you’ll need to provide context. Remind employees WHY the work they’re doing matters in the bigger picture.
Research indicates that there are some easy steps you can take to make work more meaningful. Try these for starters:
It’s all about connecting the dots. Linking work to its higher purpose through recognition, for example, or personalizing the meaning of work by ennobling the individual employee and their contributions.
These are not difficult, expensive, sophisticated, or time-consuming shifts. At most, they require just a little bit of management training and practice. By linking work tasks to something bigger, managers will be showing the employees the WHY of work. That’s all it takes, really, to infuse work with meaning.