| | | “Meaningful work is something that we all want,” said Adrian Madden of the Department of Management at the University of Huddersfield in the United Kingdom. But what makes a given job meaningful is an under-researched topic, and those who study it have found surprising answers. Through hundreds of interviews, Madden discovered that there are several ways in which people come to view their work as meaningful. Madden and co-researcher Catherine Bailey discovered that work experiences did not have to be positive or happy for workers to consider them meaningful, but rather that the impact of the work was a key determinant. People quite often were brought to tears when discussing why they found their work meaningful. As Madden told OZY, “Coping with challenging conditions led to a sense of meaningfulness far greater than they would have experienced dealing with straightforward, everyday situations.” A stark example of this came from nurses who described feeling “profound meaningfulness” in helping ease the suffering of terminally ill patients. | | Even if 'rock star' moments are rare, they shape the way we feel about our work.  | | Bailey and Madden’s research also revealed that the feeling of meaningfulness in work was not constant. Work is something that we do for long periods at a time, day after day, but workers only feel its significance periodically. One university professor described “the euphoric experience of feeling ‘like a rock star’ at the end of a successful lecture,” said Madden. “These peak experiences have a profound effect on individuals, are highly memorable, and become part of their life narratives.” Even if such moments are rare, they shape the way we feel about our work. It also matters to us how the people around us, and society at large, view our work. It matters so much, in fact, that it can shape our sense of identity. John Budd, Professor of Work and Organizations at the University of Minnesota, told OZY that, “When society values the work we do, it contributes to a positive identity and sense of self-worth.” Work can also foster a sense of collective identity and collaboration with others. Budd noted that work can help us “understand who we are and where we fit into the world.” As research has shown, unemployment can do quite the opposite, even impairing mental health in some cases. So work is good for us — right? |
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| | |  | | The idea that work is good for us is very old, dating back at least to the Roman poet Virgil, who wrote that Jupiter, head of the Roman gods, grew annoyed with human laziness and so set us to work. From the seventh deadly sin of sloth, to outgoing U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss’ leaked comments about the British workforce, many have suggested that people are lazy and that work is good for us. | | The notion that work is virtuous becomes a ploy to get people to work hard for someone else. - John Budd, Professor of Work and Organizations at the University of Minnesota | | Budd’s research, however, suggests that this idea has been cynically manipulated in our modern era. He explained that, “Corporate efforts to celebrate work as central to our lives (e.g., ‘find your purpose with us’) are really just self-interested strategies to manipulate workers’ identities in the service of the bottom line.” He pointed out that some businesses celebrate work as purposeful and essential to identify, while simultaneously declining to provide secure employment to workers or resisting their efforts to unionize. In these cases, he said, the notion that work is virtuous becomes “a ploy to get people to work hard for someone else.” |
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| | | | |  | | The COVID-19-related phenomenon known as the Great Resignation revealed that many people across the developed world were dissatisfied with their jobs. Did this confirm some of Karl Marx’s beliefs about labor? He famously hypothesized that work will feel meaningful only for people who own the products of their labor. If instead they produce things that are owned by someone else, wrote Marx, eventually they will feel a sense of alienation and unhappiness. | | Nurses whom they interviewed felt despair when “forced to send patients home before they were ready, in order to free up bed space. | | Madden and Bailey discovered through their research that “organizations and leaders can actively cause” their employees to feel a sense of meaninglessness. The workers they interviewed generally felt that the meaninglessness of work arose from “an organizational focus on the bottom line” at the expense of other priorities. One stonemason they interviewed said he found his company’s single-minded attention on cost “deeply depressing.” Academics said their administrators’ ongoing focus on avoiding litigation led to feelings of meaninglessness. Nurses whom they interviewed felt despair when “forced to send patients home before they were ready, in order to free up bed space.” Budd emphasized that, “If good work is important, then it must be the case that bad work is harmful.” He added that a lot of evidence supports this, and that low-paid work in hazardous conditions is correlated with “higher rates of depression, excessive stress, anxiety, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence.” Historian Tony Judt argued back in the 1990s that the closure of industry and mines in the developed world would change the course of politics; in a sense, he forecast the future popularity of Donald Trump and Brexit — both of which resulted from working-class communities turning their backs on the Democratic and Labour parties, respectively. Judt believed that the loss of a working identity in industrial communities would result in frustration and a sense of emptiness. He foresaw that people who might have previously voted for left-wing parties would turn to the right, where a sense of anger — at unemployment, rising immigration, crime and other issues — would fuel support for nationalist policies. According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo, workers must not be taken for granted. Duflo has disputed the traditional capitalist view that workers are simply mobile, able to move seamlessly from one region to another to follow economic opportunity. In her words, this view suggests that, “You’ve lost your job, making furniture in North Carolina. Why don’t you go to New York? And you can be a security guard in a furniture shop.” Duflo has pointed out that, in this situation, people must give up on their community, friends and way of life in order to pursue gainful employment. And that means they are, she said, “losing everything that makes life worth living.” In such cases, it is far from clear that work is simply good for us. |
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| | |  | What makes your work good — or bad? | | |
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