The Struggle to Find Meaning at Work: Find Meaning in the Struggle
Company values, mission statements, vision statements, long term goals, marketing doublespeak — what’s the difference?
You’ve likely come across blown-up motivational posters on office walls featuring company values trying to awaken employees to a greater sense of purpose and meaning that aligns with the company. These businesses don’t realize that sometimes demotivational posters ring more true.
At the risk of sounding overly fixated on motivational posters, I’d like to share some interesting research on the subject. Researchers at the University of Sydney found that in a work setting where employees could choose between an elevator or stairs, “motivational and directional signs to promote stair use showed small or nil effects.”
If that’s the case for something as ubiquitous a value as physical health and behaviour as straightforward as walking up stairs, imagine inspiring behavioural change regarding abstract principles like integrity or compassion with motivational posters. Postering as a solution to meaning is not even a pain killer for the problem, it’s a placebo. That said, motivational posters can be part of an effective meaning and purpose strategy by an organization.
Purpose and meaning in the workplace is a well-studied part of employee engagement and is one of the key variables identified by my company, Jalapeño Employee Engagement.
Why is it important to have meaning and purpose in the workplace?
Enough isn’t being done to engage employees. Worldwide and in North America, the level of employee engagement holds steady year after year at a very low percentage. Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workforce reports that,
“Only one-third of U.S. employees are engaged in their work and workplace. And only about one in five say their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.” — Gallup, 2017
Also, “unfortunately, leaders often overlook their employer brand (including their employee value proposition) or devote few resources to developing and growing it. This strategy is not sustainable… Organizations that ignore the need for employer branding could miss their chance to keep talented staff onboard and therefore reduce turnover and maintain productivity.”
Having a brand as an employer means to have a genuine purpose and meaning associated with the organization in the workplace, not just the marketplace. Gallup’s findings represent a massive productivity loss due to inefficient work, high turnover rates and absenteeism.
Fortunately, though, it also means there’s a substantial opportunity for untapped productivity, profits and shareholder value. Tapping into meaning and purpose is a way to increase employee engagement and as a result build work culture into a competitive advantage, driver of innovation and a force against economic downturns.
Having a brand as an employer means to have a genuine purpose and meaning associated with the organization in the workplace, not just the marketplace.
More directly, in his book, Make it Matter, Scott Mautz says, “research clearly supports that work that promotes a sense of purpose nets meaning and fulfilment and correlates with heightened performance.”
Where does workplace meaning come from?
We have two factors to consider: individual characteristics and contextual factors.
Many studies focus on the contextual factors including interpersonal leadership and employee-organization culture-fit but I will delve deeper into the details of how meaning manifests in the individual employee.
In her 2015 textbook, Understanding Employee Engagement, Zinta Byrne consolidated studies on employee engagement:
“Research to date suggests employees become engaged with,
(a) the right amount of resources;
(b) an ability to manage work stressors;
(c) trust to feel safe to fully invest themselves in the work task;
(d) an interpersonal leader creating connection and a meaningful vision;
(e) ability to create and find meaning in the work;
(f) support and connection with others at work, allowing them to focus on the job and align themselves with the organization’s values; and
(g) job- and person-organization fit”
Notice that (d) suggests a leader in an organization creates a vision and connects it to others while in (e) employees require the ability to create and find meaning in work. Point (e) not only puts meaning in the domain of the individual, it puts the responsibility of meaning on the employee. Point (g) is a third variable relating to meaning, claiming that job-organization and person-organization fit engages employees. All these sources of meaning appear because workplace meaning and employee engagement are complicated and this tells us there are a number of contributing factors.
How does workplace meaning and purpose relate to the individual employee?
Engagement is a measurement that varies between individuals even when they’re in the same environment so we know contextual factors are relevant. Amazingly, it turns out that almost half of employee engagement comes solely from individual personality traits!
How does this relate to meaning? The more you embody the following traits, the greater your ability to create and find meaning in work.
In a recent inter-university meta-study combining 144 studies, four American researchers found that “personality accounts for 48.10% of the variance in engagement.” Here are the top four contributing personality traits:
- Positive Affectivity is the disposition to experience positive emotions as a consequence of interaction with others and with their surroundings. It’s the strongest trait, responsible for 31.10% of the effect of personality on engagement.
- Proactivity refers to anticipatory, change-oriented and self-initiated behaviour in situations. It involves anticipating the future and acting in advance instead of reacting to events. They are at the cause not the effect of their environment. It has a 19.60% relative contribution to engagement.
- Conscientiousness. Individuals that are conscientious “are self‐disciplined, deliberative, achievement seeking, and motivated by their sense of duty and responsibility.” Their moral perspective is intimately related to action since they have a stronger sense of how they ought to behave and how the world around them ought to be. It has a 14.10% relative contribution.
- Extroversion is the fourth strongest personality traits at 12.10% relative weight. The researchers describe it as “an energetic approach toward the social and material world”.
The more you embody these traits, the greater your ability to create and find meaning in work.
The researcher’s explanation for the strong effect of positive affectivity is that “it allows an individual to replenish energy resources more easily when they are depleted and increases the efficacy through which energy is directed to the job role.” Positive affectivity is similar to optimism and associated with general enthusiasm, energeticness, confidence and being active and alert. They see problems as challenges.
As for the four traits as a whole, the researchers explain that these traits are “most effective for regulating and directing energy into the work role.” Note that, surprisingly, ‘openness to experience’ and ‘agreeableness’ traits only have small positive effects on engagement with an 8.3% and 5.2% relative strength, respectively.
While the researchers emphasize the relationship between these traits and energy as the cause of engagement, it’s worth noting that these traits are deeply rooted in meaning generation.
Consider someone with all of these traits.
They have the ability to identify workplace problems at all (conscientiousness), to foresee their effects (proactivity), yet to see those problems as challenges in a self-reinforcing positive frame (positive affectivity), to see oneself as an agent with the responsibility to act on creating one of the ideal outcomes they foresee (conscientiousness), to actually face the challenge energetically (proactivity) and increasingly energetically when in a team environment (extroversion).
Now imagine someone with negative affectivity as a personality trait.
They are a pessimist with a self-reinforcing negative outlook or they could be diagnosed with depression. How could they be engaged? Well, if negative affectivity doesn’t overly exhaust them, imagine they are strong in proactivity, conscientiousness and extroversion. This is someone who sees all the tragedy of the world and yet still sees an ideal potential future they should work towards. They see themselves as noble agents of action in chaotic situations. This could be someone who dislikes their responsibilities but does their duty nonetheless. They start a project and finish it on principle.
The role of positive affectivity might be best explained by energetics but, together, proactivity and conscientiousness create an individual with the willingness to face challenges out of sheer will despite anxiety, fear, negativity and pessimism. It speaks to human nature as beings of action.
History is marked by a nearly ubiquitous, constant struggle against famine, dehydration, harsh weather, predators, war and plague. Human beings are able to find meaning in continuing the struggle of life despite these forces. In our modern world, struggles can be harsh or they can be smaller incremental challenges leading in a positive direction. New Year’s resolutions are often described as struggles although they are clearly not as painful as famine or plague. It’s not surprising that the traits that foster the ability to find meaning in hard work lead to engagement in the workplace.
Work is a potential source of incremental improvement towards a better future and thus is a source of meaning. The contextual factor that determines if a job is something you might be particularly able to find meaning in is a person-organization culture fit. That said, the resilience of human beings is such that almost no work is de-meaning in the literal sense. Any action can be symbolic of a more abstract cause and become a worthy challenge.
Should HR only hire people with high positive affectivity?
While these results make a strong case for hiring employees on very narrow personality-based criteria, a case can be made to want diversity of personality in a workforce. In more than just creative industries, a fresh perspective is valuable and different personalities see the world through different lenses. More specifically, while the researchers suggest that a “personality‐based personnel selection system appears to be a viable approach to improving engagement,” they also note that “personnel selection should ideally be based on traits that are performance related.” They suggest that no matter the ingrained characteristics of an individual that their experience and track record is a better indication of their future potential.
The researchers also suggest that hiring for positive affectivity would be more effective in certain industries. It “might be especially desirable for service industries, which rely on positive affect expression and other forms of emotional labour as an integral aspect of the job.” It’s also service industries such as retail and hospitality that already have much lower engagement than other industries! The service industry might be the strongest beneficiary of incorporating personality assessment into recruitment if they can afford to be picky.
How can job seekers be more employable?
These results seem to suggest job seekers should just hope their personality happens to align with these traits. Thankfully, contextual factors such as culture-fit, inspirational leadership, and self-definition through further life experience create a lot of possibility for people that aren’t very strong in those traits listed previously.
Could a person change their personality traits to maximize positive affectivity? Telling yourself to think positive is probably ineffective. Nonetheless, a Harvard Business Review article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues that it is possible with effort:
“In short, change requires self-critical insight, humble goals, and indefatigable persistence. It means going against our nature and demands extraordinary levels of willpower.” — Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Harvard Business Review 2013
He also points out that, “neurotic, introverted and insecure people are more likely to change, whereas highly adjusted and resilient individuals are less changeable.” It seems like the people that are predisposed to make personality changes are the people that need it the least and the people that could use change the most are the least likely to see it through. Willpower can be an indescribably powerful force and I have no doubt people can and do continuously change who they are to some degree.
Meaning and purpose in a workplace is a qualitative metric
Meaning and purpose involve more than just the predisposition of certain personalities to the challenges of the workplace. Personality traits account for half of employee engagement while the other half can be attributed to contextual factors such as inspirational leadership and employee-organization culture fit.
Perhaps a test for the strength of purpose and meaning in a workplace is whether or not it lingers when employees work from home. If the meaning of someone’s job is internalized, even remote workers should exhibit a boost in engagement and productivity. This challenges the reliance on superficial pleasantries to appease employees that only builds unsubstantial workplace culture.
If the values, mission statement and vision of a company aren’t acted out by employees organically then they are not internalized and they are not believed. Mission statements are useful for helping employees make on-the-ground logical decisions but it won’t permeate someone’s character in the way a mission should. Purpose and meaning reside in the minds of your employees, not motivational posters. The effective values, mission and vision of your employees is the sum average of how they behave now.
There’s strong evidence that workplace meaning comes especially from people strong in positive affectivity, proactivity, conscientiousness and extroversion personality traits either through “regulating and directing” energy into work or the willingness to face challenges as a means to better themselves and pursue a sense of the ideal future. Still, a diversity of personality would be ideal and is hard to avoid for most workplaces in the first place. Some industries including services could benefit more from workers with strong positive affectivity while it’s also suggested overstimulation from positive affectivity could lead to long term burnout.
There is something unique about Vancouver’s work culture
As a millennial closer to the Gen Z age cut-off, I personally feel like there’s an interesting culture to Vancouver. The combination of trendiness and a housing crisis creates an environment where people seem to have given up on owning a home and too often live paycheque to paycheque. Instead of saving up for a retirement of questionable comfort and length, Vancouverites indulge in the fruits of their labour and spend it now. For Vancouver’s army of small businesses, independent contractors, and a flourishing gig economy, work exists first to sustain a lifestyle, putting culture fit at the forefront of work if it has demanding hours or isn’t remote work in the first place. I’m not sure what the consequences of Vancouver’s culture are for employee engagement. Maybe the struggle we need is to find meaning and purpose in work.
Luc Briedé-Cooper is the Manager, Marketing and Business Development at Jalapeño Employee Engagement in Vancouver, BC, Canada. He has a BSc. in Physics from the University of British Columbia.Jalapeño is bringing their vision of a better workplace to life by developing a powerful platform paired with professional services to maximize employee engagement, experience and work culture.
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
