"I just do this job," you say, "for the money."
The Case of the Missing Meaning at Work
If you do your job for the money alone, does that give your work less meaning?
This question arose for me while thinking about a qualitative interview with a guy I’ll call Dirk, who told me he’d accidentally spent too many years working for Blue Cross Blue Shield. He looked tired during our interview—maybe because he’d been suffering communication breakdown with his team. “How many times are we gonna have the same conversation? Did we not just have this conversation a day ago? Two days ago?” Things were worse with his higher-ups. Confronted with something they had failed to do, they denied the omission. “We did that,” they insisted. “We totally did that.” In a voice of utter fatigue, Dirk said, “No, we did not.”
But maybe the most draining thing for Dirk was the company’s failure to acknowledge his work. He summed things up by saying, “[W]hen you're busting your hump, and you're not recognized for that value, mattering doesn't happen.”
What a phrase: mattering doesn’t happen.
It makes me think of a Sherlock Holmes story, in which an officer asks Mr. Holmes if there’s anything that stands out from the crime scene. The detective replies by pointing out “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Officer: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes: That was the curious incident.
Dirk might say as much about mattering at work. What mattering? There is no mattering at work. And that is the curious incident.
But not everybody cares about meaning at work in exactly the same way. My research among early career professionals over the past couple of years has turned up three postures towards work and meaning.
True Believers for Whom Work Means a Lot. Some people I talked to treated their jobs with an almost religious devotion. They were committed to the doctrine that hard work brings success, and that good work brings fulfillment.
In the broader culture, Donald Miller and Simon Sinek and Seth Godin suggest in much the same way that your professional life can be a source of great meaning. Godin, for example, suggests that even a seemingly self-interested job like marketing can be altruistic. How? Being a good marketer, he says, means caring for other people’s dreams. You really can do well and do good at the same time!
Job Skeptics for Whom Work Means Little. I’m not just talking the quiet quitters here. These folks might be working quite hard at their jobs and doing them perfectly well. But they sincerely doubt it will ever give them much meaning. They looked for their “mattering” after hours.
Lots of authors today make the case that, really, your job shouldn’t be that important to you. If it is, you might be serving the interests of your company more than yourself or your family. Carolyn Chen, for example, has a fascinating book called Work Pray Code, in which she critiques the spiritualizing of work among Silicon Valley types. (Derek Thompson, Anne Helen Peterson, and Malcom Harris make similar arguments.)
Vocational Nones for Whom Work Means Survival. Some people I spoke with didn’t seem to think about vocational meaning much at all. They were, at least temporarily, just trying to survive. Sociologists of religion today talk about nones—that is, people completely unaffiliated from organized faith. Similarly, the work-as-survival people are vocational nones. They’re not particularly concerned to be affiliated to a career or an institution. They just need to live.
You can find similar ideas in Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid, Tim Jackson’s Life after Capitalism, and David Graebner’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. These post-capitalists take seriously the fact that too many people struggle to get by. They remind us all that poverty is not a sustainable career path.
So, if those are three postures my research has turned up, which one is best? I think we need all three!
True believers keep us productive.
Job skeptics keep us honest.
Vocational nones keep us seeking a better world.
But all week, I’ve been wondering if there’s another posture, maybe one I wish to see among rising professionals. Taking a cue from my own faith tradition, what about relating to work as sacramental? A sacrament, on some accounts, doesn’t transform bread and wine into something else. It makes those things more truly what they are.
So, as managers and coworkers, why not do our sacramental best to make sure everybody’s work is more truly what it is and—dare I say it—what it’s meant to be?
And here’s some good news, not just from the marketing team at the Mode/Switch, but from you the readers….
Poverty Sucks: A Found Conversation
I’m on a text thread that’s always talking about workplace culture stuff. Yesterday, I stepped away from my phone to go to a meeting. While I was gone, two people in the thread started discussing their experience with jobs, passion, and fulfillment. It was more than amazing. When I got back, I asked permission to lightly edit, change the names, and publish their conversation. They said, yep. So, this week’s M/S has bonus content. Enjoy.
