What is meaningful work?

1:20pm Monday 9th June 2008

The Work Foundation has published a report asking what is meaningful work', why more people seem to be seeking it, and what employers can do to make work more meaningful?

The paper argues that while thinkers and writers have long wondered at the value of work to human beings beyond providing a living, the notion of meaningful work' is a relatively new phenomenon which would have made little sense to our forbears of a couple of centuries ago.

Author Stephen Overell said: "The way people talk about fulfilling their potential' in a job could only happen in the modern world of work - it is simply not something that would have been said a few generations ago.

"Meaningful work rests on the rise of individualism and identity as pressing concerns for large numbers of people.

"It speaks of huge and perhaps excessive expectations of working life - the historically unusual sense that fulfilment occurs, or should occur, in the everyday, ordinary business of going to work.

"People are very different. What is meaningful to one person may not be meaningful to another, and what someone finds meaningful at the age of 23 may not be how they feel at 43.

"Nevertheless, meaning is unmistakably in the air of the 21st century culture of work," he said.

"This report marks an attempt to describe what is going on. The raising and dashing of hopes around meaning has become one of the major psychological forces within working life.

"What goes on inside workers' hearts and minds about work has become profoundly important to what they produce and how they do it."

The report argues that the discovery of meaning in work relies on balancing three sets of motives.

They are moral motives - the idea that the ends' of work are worthwhile; compensation motives - including money, but also including status, authority, responsibility and the appropriate use of skills and abilities; and craft motives - the desire to do a good job for its own sake.

Meanwhile, the work that people do today prompts more questions about meaning, fulfilment and rewarding work - relatively well-paying, highly skilled professional and managerial jobs now account for over a third of all jobs in many advanced democracies. Work is more about intellectual problem-solving and how people communicate and relate to each other than it used to be.