Everyone Wants Meaningful Work. But What Does That Look Like, Really? More people than ever are searching for work that has meaning. But nobody can agree on how to find it, provide it, or even define it. So we set out to try.

Lincoln is the chief talent officer for Kelly Services, a global staffing firm, and she's been in the recruitment business for 22 years. Over that time, she's witnessed an evolution in ­attitudes — with candidates talking less about money, and more about things like mission, purpose, and bringing their whole self to work. But then came 2020, an exceptional year on an exceptional number of levels, and Lincoln was granted a front-row seat to a seismic shift that may have forever altered the relationship between Americans and work.

"I remember I told my manager, "I have been on more calls with people crying than ever before in my entire career,' " Lincoln says. People were fed up, overwhelmed, different. "They became very introspective around what's important. What matters? What's sacred to me? What impact do I want to have? What do I want my legacy to be? Am I prioritizing the right things in my life?"

The candidates coming across Lincoln's desk were interested in not only securing jobs, or good jobs, but Good Jobs. Good Jobs that helped them live better lives. Good Jobs that helped them become more realized versions of themselves. Good Jobs at companies that were helping improve the world, or at least not actively poisoning children or cratering democracies.

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In other words, people became more interested in meaningful work. They wanted better answers to the question, Why am I doing this? America's hallowed pastime is dunking on the young for being unreasonably entitled, but younger workers aren't driving this change alone. Members of all generations have developed what philosophers call "a will to meaning" in their professional lives.

Evidence is everywhere. Millions have quit their jobs in the "Great Resignation." Nearly 3 percent of all American workers quit in August 2021 alone. That was a record that lasted until the next month, when even more quit. Millions of jobs languish unfilled as of this writing. But even workers who haven't quit aren't exactly thrilled. Depending on the poll, anywhere between 39% and 95% of people were thinking of quitting their jobs in 2021. According to a YouGov poll, 1 in 5 American workers considered their jobs meaningless, and a Harvard Business School study found that 9 out of 10 workers were willing to take less money for more meaningful work.

Employers have struggled to catch up — a 2021 Kelly Services study report found that 27% confess to having no idea what workers want anymore — but they're not the only ones trying to understand what's happening. Catherine Bailey, a professor at King's College London who studies meaningful work, has seen this firsthand. "There's been an absolute avalanche of interest," she says. "I get calls all the time from journalists and different professional bodies all wanting to talk about meaningful work in the context of the type of work that they do."

Being a journalist myself, I had sent Bailey a list of questions in the hope of gaining a better understanding of what meaningful work is. The answer, it turns out, is complicated. In 2018, Bailey and four colleagues reviewed 71 studies to try to arrive at a more solid understanding of meaningful work. They found that between these 71 studies there were 28 different scales for determining meaning. "There was no consensus over the definition of meaningful work across all the papers we reviewed," the authors wrote. I asked her if they had made any progress since.

"We're still working on it," she laughed. "We still haven't answered any of your questions."

What we do know is this: Meaningful work — or at least work that people perceive as meaningful — is a powerful thing. A growing number of researchers have been studying it since the mid-1970s, and they have found an array of benefits. "When folks engage in meaningful work, they're more productive," says Michael Steger, a psychology professor at Colorado State University who studies meaning. "They get better supervisor ratings, they are rated as better team members, they're happy to put in discretionary work hours, and they tend to act as better brand ambassadors for their organizations. They're the ones who put the paper back in the copier after they've taken the last sheet." They are also more engaged in the work, more likely to be proactive about developing their skills, and less likely to call in sick, burn out, or quit.

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Naturally, these findings have caused many an HR professional to salivate at the prospect of somehow making their employees find their work more meaningful, and many a previously ­bottom-line obsessed corporation to start issuing lofty purpose statements to attract meaning-seeking employees. "I'm going to strand myself on a desert island if I hear that Bain is doing "meaningful work,' " quips Steger. But this isn't just another untapped resource for companies to mine en route to drive revenue. Meaningful work carries benefits for workers, too. "From a personal standpoint," says Steger, when you have meaningful work, "you're happier. You're more motivated. You're there for the right reasons, you're enriching your home life with your work life. Your life feels more meaningful and less depressing." Meaningful work can also lead to lower levels of stress and serve as a powerful source of identity, belonging, and purpose — fundamental things that humans need to thrive.

People with meaningful work flourish. People without it suffer. "A lack of meaningful work has long been recognized as a primary source of alienation, anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and boredom in the modern era," write Jing Hu and Jacob Hirsch, psychologists at the University of Toronto. A perception that our work is ­meaningless, or even insufficiently meaningful, is a recipe for burnout, which is one of the key drivers behind the Great Resignation.

So it's settled then! We must have it! But . . . what is it? That's the problem. Meaningful work is by nature personal, subjective, elusive, and episodic. Like meaning itself, it's an animal that multiplies like a wet gremlin every time you get your hands on it. In October of last year, I got on the phone with Christopher Michaelson, a former management consultant who teaches business ethics at the University of St. Thomas and New York University. He's a leading thinker on meaningful work with a focus on the moral implications. I told him I was out to understand meaningful work, but there seemed to be about 8 million definitions in circulation.

"I'll go you one better," he said. "I'll say that there might be 8 billion definitions." One for every person in the world.

So where do we start? We start at the beginning.

What Was Meaningful Work?

To understand what makes work meaningful, we have to talk a little about what made so much of it meaningless to begin with. Or more to the point, what had to happen to human societies to even create the possibility of meaningless work. After all, no bird, snake, or hippopotamus would ever look up from its daily hunting or foraging and wonder, "Why the hell am I doing this?" It's pretty clear why they're doing it.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors may have thought similarly. I reached out to several leading anthropologists, and they pretty much agreed that the meaning of work to the hunter-gatherer societies they've studied would have been straightforward. You worked to keep yourself, your family, and your group alive. This reinforced social bonds with your community and maybe won you some admiration. Work was inextricable from life.

Fast-forward a few hundred thousand years — and I'm skipping a lot, I know, including obscenities like slavery and indentured servitude, which are fodder for something much more expansive than we have here. By the 16th century, we begin to see the emergence of what came to be known as the Protestant work ethic. The meaning of work then becomes more complicated, tied to worship and morality. The question Why am I doing this? has a new answer: I am doing it because God wants me to.

Then comes the Industrial Revolution. Now instead of, say, crafting a hammer from start to finish and selling it to someone, which an artisan would have done, many workers were made to tend to different small details of the hammer, over and over again for hours, days, years. This drove productivity and profit to staggering heights for a few, but the work was stripped of the intangible things that humans require to flourish, which had been present in hunting, gathering, farming, and artisan work.

According to the historian Richard Donkin, that's when we saw the first reports of "stress." Not fear, terror, or tiredness, but stress: resultant from performing the same mind-numbing, dehumanizing task under relentless pressure all day long for years. The obsession with extracting as much productivity out of workers, with few opportunities for personal growth, learning, or even socializing was "laying waste to human potential on a massive scale," writes Donkin. It was a "ghastly sublimation of the human spirit."

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Then what happens? The Protestant work ethic changes, and "meaningful" becomes even more difficult to discern. Whereas workers may well have believed they were serving God in some way by working in a factory, later generations swapped God out for the marketplace. That didn't alter the zealous belief that work is unto itself virtuous, that good people work very hard and bad people don't. It just proposed that the health of the market mattered above all else. (This continues. I read a story the other day about customers attacking service employees. The story was about terrible human behavior, but the headline focused on its implications for the market: "Unruly customers threaten economic recovery.")

Basically, the Protestant work ethic turns into what we now know as the meritocracy: the dominant narrative of life in America and the basis of the American Dream, which is itself a great wellspring of meaning for millions. Under the meritocracy, heaven has been replaced by success, fulfillment, belonging, and purpose. If you have faith and do enough work — even if it's pointless, dangerous, or degrading — you will gain your earthly reward. The idea is an impressively powerful piece of social technology. It built the United States in all its sins and graces, and many people who embody it — myself included — are indeed inspired to put in the long hours and endure hard conditions to scale great heights, launch successful businesses, make positive change in the world, and build the lives they want.

But there are a couple of problems. First, the meritocracy narrative can be exploited very easily by employers to get people to work much harder than is fair or reasonable, for fear of being branded feckless or lazy. The writer Mark Slouka calls this the "Church of Work." To belong to it, you must sacrifice your other sources of meaning — family, friends, hobbies, moments of reflection — to the altar of work. "You must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good," he writes. "But even so, your soul will not be saved."

Second, while the meritocracy has rewarded many people, we know now that it is at least partially a false promise. Some workers will never crack the middle class, despite working three jobs. Others may have done well, but still don't feel secure, knowing that at any moment they could lose their livelihood because some born-rich shareholder got grumpy one day. Both groups have lost faith. The old story they told themselves in order to imbue their jobs with meaning has imploded. "I think workers feel more than ever that they're just treated as a way to get other people rich," says Michael Steger. "That begs the question: Is this all it is?" And the answer all too often has come back "yes."

A story may seem like a trifle, something untrue, something for kids. But the stories we tell ourselves about why we do what we do give our lives meaning, whether they're derived from a belief in God, patriotism, ideology, or the benevolence of our employers. When these stories break down, meaning breaks down with them, and the question "Why am I doing this?" rears its head with an absolute vengeance.

What Is Meaningful Work?

So what is meaningful work? I've read dozens of papers and talked to a lot of people to try to figure this out. The upshot is this: It isn't any one thing. Like meaning in life, there are a variety of potential sources that give work meaning. Sometimes one, or several, or all of them, are closed off to us. That's when work becomes meaningless. Sometimes only one source of meaning is available, but there's a lot of it, and that's enough. Meaningful work is basically a question of quality and quantity: The more sources of meaning you can fit into a job, the more meaningful the job will be.

On the most basic level, meaningful work must make sense. And it doesn't make sense if you're busting your ass doing it without gaining an ability to pay for food, clothing, shelter, and the other bare necessities of life. After we clear that hurdle, the thinking on meaningful work gets more complicated.

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In 1975, two organizational psychologists named J. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham developed what is known as the "Job Characteristics Model." This was the big bang for meaningful work studies. Hackman and Oldham found that when jobs had certain characteristics, workers were more engaged and more likely to find their work meaningful. These characteristics were basically the antithesis of what we saw during the Industrial Revolution. They were skill variety (meaning the work was varied and interesting), task significance (the work had a clear purpose in the company and/or in the world), task identity (workers could follow a whole task from start to finish), autonomy (workers had a say in how the work was done), and finally job feedback (meaning the boss let you know how you were doing). If your job has these characteristics, Hackman and Oldham found, you're likely to find work meaningful in some way, because it made sense and allowed you to be a human.

Then, in 1985, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues wrote an influential paper on "job orientations." The plot thickened. They wanted to understand how individual motivations might affect people's experience of meaning at work. They broke workers down into three different mindsets. The first group has a "job orientation." For these people, work largely serves to produce a paycheck that funds the more meaningful nonwork part of life. The next has a "career orientation," in which the meaning of work comes from opportunities to advance — in skills, titles, compensation, and status. And the third has a "calling orientation." People in this group favor work that "has meaning and value in itself," the authors wrote.

Since the 1990s, research on meaningful work ramped up, splintering in dozens of directions, but luckily not to the point where the whole thing became an impenetrable mess of spaghetti. Some studies focused on social aspects of work, how a big part of meaningful work seems to be belonging to a group, satisfying the basic human need for kinship and cooperation. Some focused on the role of jobs in helping forge our identities, linking the question Why am I doing this? with Who am I? Some looked at a need to feel that our work transcends ourselves, linking us to other people, a cause, or the world at large. Others focused on how "visionary leaders" can infuse workers' jobs with meaning, by selling workers on shared corporate values or how managers can make a staff feel more like a family.

But in the early years of the millennium, and especially over the last decade or so, something began to shift. Researchers moved away from a sort of à la carte approach to studying meaning, and into something deeper and more holistic. According to Christopher Michaelson at NYU, this was likely the result of two different things: 1) More researchers from more disciplines got involved, which took the research in new directions and 2) The subject shifted. "I think a lot of early work in management was primarily concerned with making the experience of powerless laborers less miserable and so more meaningful," Michaelson says. "However, a lot of interest today in meaningful work considers the perspective of economically privileged workers who have the potential power to choose meaningful work. The former focus is more on human rights, and the latter focus tends to be on human self-realization."

This isn't at all to say lower-paying jobs aren't meaningful, though. Research on zookeepers, who are notoriously underpaid, revealed that most considered their jobs extremely ­meaningful. Research on janitors in hospitals found that many took great pride in the important work they did, despite the poor wages and frequent mistreatment. In some cases, lower-­paid workers experience meaning differently than white-collar workers. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, a professor at the Auckland University of Technology, conducted a study that compared different types of workers' perceptions of the meaningfulness of their jobs. While the white-collar workers found meaning in the ability to express their full potential at work, blue-collar workers found meaning in the bonds they had with their coworkers, forged from the experience of doing dirty, thankless work together and bound in their shared identity as people who could do these hard jobs.

It's enormously frustrating that the research really only turned to matters of the soul when it trained its sights on the affluent — as if a desire to realize your potential is a luxury available only to people with a 401(k). Nevertheless, this is where things start to get interesting, because here is where the research began exposing the so-called "work-life balance" as a false and even harmful dichotomy.

Now, this is by no means a comprehensive summary of all the new research, but here are a few big ideas to help us along.

First, there's the "map of meaning," created in 1999 by researcher Marjolein Lips-Wiersma and later refined by others. Here, the pinnacle of meaningful work involves expressing one's full potential, developing and becoming oneself, having unity with others, and serving others. The trick is to keep them all in balance, which is difficult. "You gain one, you lose the other," says Lips-Wiersma. "We can do really well in our career achievement, but lose our integrity. We can do really well in unity, but lose our own unique voice and creativity. We're all lovey-dovey, and it's cool, but nobody does anything interesting." In this sense, "the search for meaning is always out of equilibrium." Getting it right is a matter of constant and deliberate calibration.

Another model, from Brent Rosso at the University of Michigan in 2010, proposed four pathways to meaningful work: A worker must feel personally valuable, share principles with those they work with, stay connected to their sense of self, and serve something greater than themselves. In 2012, Michael Steger, the psychology professor at Colorado State University whom we met earlier, added another model. He visualized meaningful work as a series of three concentric circles. The central circle is just the job itself. If it feels meaningful to the worker and has a clear point within an organization, then it provides a measure of meaning. The next circle represents harmony between a person's job and their personal life. And the outermost circle is the greater good, an opportunity to help others. When all three circles are reached, Steger argues, you have hit the meaningful work jackpot.

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In 2016, Catherine Bailey, whom we met earlier, and Adrian Madden boiled meaningful work down to five key characteristics based on dozens of interviews with workers. They found that meaningful work is self-transcendent: 1) It matters to others—not just to the worker themselves. 2) It inspires a wide range of emotions — not just happiness. 3) It is episodic, meaning it may not always feel meaningful. 4) It is retrospective, meaning it may not even register as meaningful until well after the fact. 5) And it is not confined to the workplace, but is entwined with a worker's own life, values, and experiences.

The research goes on with dozens of studies and models amounting to a much more nuanced idea of what makes work meaningful, and capturing the complexity and confusion of being a human: a creature that is both individualistic and social, and must express itself and belong to something larger to find itself. Increasingly, workers want that messy reality — what it means to be a flourishing, living human — built into their jobs, not kept separate from them.

"I haven't talked about "work-life balance' in at least a decade when I give presentations," Michael Steger says. "I always talk about "work-life harmony' as the goal. There isn't such a thing anymore as work-life balance, because it implies that if you have work over here, and life over here. But it's so blended. The case for meaningful work is that while you're working ,you're living in a positive way. You're not cannibalizing life. When I'm at work, I can be really, fully myself. I can be growing and learning and feeling good as a human. The ideal state is both are in harmony. As one grows, so grows the other — and not at the cost of the other."

Of course, the academics who study this have it easy, relatively speaking: They can identify what makes work meaningful, but they are not the managers, executives, and, yes, entrepreneurs out there trying to actually create meaningful jobs. So what can we tell them?

How to Make Work Meaningful

A lot of employers really struggle with meaningfulness," Catherine Bailey of King's College London tells me. "They want to put an initiative in place and they want to measure it and they want to evaluate it, and then they want to tell people the ways in which they should be finding their work meaningful, because then they can manage it and control it. But meaningfulness isn't really like that. It's very personal."

Bailey has discovered a lot about meaningful work in her research. What she has not found is much evidence that such initiatives do anything. "Whereas our interviewees tended to find meaningfulness for themselves rather than it being mandated by their managers, we discovered that if employers want to destroy that sense of meaningfulness, that was far more easily achieved," she and Adrian Madden wrote in 2016. Among the enemies of meaning: loading workers with pointless jobs, mistreating them, disconnecting them from their relationships at work, and forcing them to go against their own values.

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If managers can't unilaterally create meaning, however, they can create an environment in which workers—of whatever class—can find it themselves. For this, Bailey and Madden devised what they call a "meaningfulness ecosystem." It includes four elements: 1) An employee needs to understand what a company's core business is, what its values are, what its objectives are, and how it goes about achieving them. 2) They need to understand what purpose their jobs play in a broader sense, be it the company or the world. 3) They need to understand why each specific task they do matters, even if it's tedious or seemingly pointless. 4) And they need to have supportive relationships with people they work with, or meaningful interactions with the beneficiaries of their work, or both. With those things together, workers can find their own meaning, depending on who they are and what they want.

Of course, to figure out who they are and what they want, managers have to actually talk to them. As equals. Not about their jobs, because they'll probably say what they think the boss wants to hear, but about their lives. Those conversations will give managers a sense of their people's motivation and values, and the things that make life meaningful to them. And managers have to listen, and be humble, and resist the intoxicating belief that they know the best answers to all of those questions. "None of us knows what meaning is any better than someone else, and nobody knows how to live a good, meaningful life better than anybody else," Lips-Wiersma says. "That whole idea that leaders know more about how to live a meaningful life is nonsense."

And that leads us to our final point. If you're a manager, you may not want to hear this, and it may seem unfathomable amid the great global yawp for meaningful work, but here it is: Some people don't actually need their work to be that meaningful. Blasphemy, I know. But as we draw closer to a fuller understanding of what meaningful work is, we see more and more that it is inextricable from what a meaningful life is. Each feeds the other; each compensates for what the other lacks.

"No workplace, or private life, is perfect," Lips-Wiersma tells me. "So if you're finding that you can't make much of a difference in your workplace, then it is good to withdraw some energy from it, and maybe make a difference in your community or your family. It's like if I'm a nurse: I get a lot of service in my workplace, but I don't get a lot of unity, because there's quite a bit of gossiping going on. I need to make sure I get that in other parts of my life, because I can't live without that meaning. It's essential to me."

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This fluidity, this toggling between professional life and personal life, picking up some meaning here to compensate for an absence of it on the other side, cuts to the very core of what meaningful work is. At its best, it is a well-functioning part of a larger system. And it holds that people who derive more meaning from their personal lives may not actually need to derive that much meaning from their jobs. That is the meaning of work for them. That doesn't mean they won't benefit from feedback, and autonomy, and fair treatment, and having a say, and performing tasks that engage them with people they like at a company that is not destroying the world. It just means that meaningful work to them is work that doesn't need to be meaningful. It just needs to play its part in the larger whole of life. And when we talk about meaningful work, that needs to be respected as much as someone who considers their job a higher calling.

While reporting this story, I had coffee with a corporate consultant who told me that the future of management will parallel the last two decades of customer service. No longer will companies be able to impose a one-size-fits-all approach, he predicted. Not if they want to compete. Instead, they'll need to customize the way they interact with their employees, just like they've learned to do with their customers. They'll have to listen, make a sincere effort to understand what motivates their workers as individuals, and then make a reasonable effort to accommodate them. They'll have to recognize the importance of meaningful work, while also grappling with the fact that everyone's sense of meaning is different. This won't be easy. It will not be something that an HR department can solve with a press release. It will require a complete rethinking of what it means to be a manager, what it means to be a company, and what it means to be an employee. It will require a total reckoning. And when it happens, it will be long overdue.

Image credit at top: Paul Pateman