Finding more meaning in work

Hello and welcome to Working It.

I’m Bethan, the FT’s deputy work and careers editor, standing in today for Isabel.

Today is Spring Statement day, which means great excitement at the FT. We gather around newsroom TVs broadcasting the big speech, pore over documents to discover hidden details from the announcement, and file feverishly to the live blog. Sandwiches and coffee are brought to the desks of those unable to tear themselves away from their computers.

As for the content of the statement, Rachel Reeves is upping defence and capital spending, but there will also be welfare and departmental cuts to the tune of £7bn by 2030.

The FT’s coverage has all you need to know. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about how to create meaning at work, and wondering whether we might find it in the places we’re not looking.

Thoughts? I’d love to hear them — drop me a line on bethan.staton@ft.com

What do you mean?

Years ago, when my friends and I were considering what to do with our lives, many of us hoped for more than the corporate grind. We wanted jobs that served a greater good, engaged with intellectual issues, or allowed us to express our creativity. Our work, we hoped, would be meaningful. 

Fast forward a decade or so, and we look quite a bit older and quite a lot more jaded. Some have found real fulfilment in roles at charities, public service and academia but others are grappling with day-to-day dysfunction. Opportunities for growth are scarce, perhaps there is discrimination or bullying. Hours can be long and poorly paid. In some cases, the day-to-day reality of a supposed purpose-driven job doesn’t feel so worthwhile, after all. 

I got to thinking about this yesterday, after a conversation with Tamara Myles and Wes Adams, whose new book Meaningful Work is out next month. It aims to help leaders “ignite passion and performance in every employee” by creating environments where people find value in what they do — regardless of the field they are in.

The authors were inspired to write the book, in part, by their first jobs. Myles started her career in advertising. She “experienced work as deeply meaningful and also as not meaningful at all” depending on the agency — even though she was doing the same work. Adams, meanwhile, was pleasantly surprised by the value he found in hospitality roles.

“We’d get asked, isn’t meaningful work about non-profits? Doesn’t it have to be purpose driven?” he says. He concluded that meaning was not just found in jobs that were ostensibly all about making the world a better place or enacting particular values or passions. “It’s not the case. You can have moments of meaning in jobs every day, if you know where to look for them.”

Myles and Adams’ book is guided by this principle. It serves as a playbook for how leaders — and it argues leadership is one of the most powerful mechanisms for motivating and engaging — can help create meaning for their teams.

The starting point, they say, lies in three Cs: community, or feeling belonging and connected to those around you; contribution, or understanding you are making an impact; and challenge, or being able to learn and grow. “Community says I matter here, contribution says what I do matters, challenge says my growth matters,” Myles explains.

In the book, she explores how employers at workplaces from Chick-fil-A to HubSpot have created these factors for staff. Approaches include creating psychological safety, hosting social events and offering funding for training, as well as creating supportive cultures through value-driven hiring, for example. 

One thing that struck me about Myles and Adams’ book is the focus on small-scale value as well as how we do things, rather than grander propositions about the purpose of our jobs. This can seem somewhat counterintuitive, especially to people who (like me) were brought up hoping to find work they were interested in, or even passionate about.

When Steve Jobs implored Stanford’s 2005 graduates to “find what you love”, he captured a sentiment that was widely shared at the time, especially among middle-class, educated young people in the US and Europe. Work should express our interests, make a positive impact and be part of our identity — it should not only be a job, but a purpose. 

That’s not unreasonable. But as some of my friends and contacts have discovered, purpose doesn’t guarantee meaning, and it can have a dark side. Purpose-driven work can be bad, characterised by punishing hours, low pay and toxic bosses. It may even be *more* likely to feature such failings. According to sociologist Erin Cech, the “passion principle” — or the focus on fulfilment in our careers — can be a cover for exploitation, legitimising bad work practices because meaning is rewarding enough. 

This observation has become a big talking point among many once-idealistic jobseekers. When day-to-day frictions, miseries and stresses become a dominant feature in ostensibly meaningful jobs, they can make them feel pretty meaningless. Despite this, those with purpose-driven jobs often plough on. They hope that the big picture values that originally drove their careers can alone give their work value.

But meaning at work requires more that just a purpose. It needs supportive work relationships, being able to achieve tangible results and opportunities to stretch ourselves, for example. In other words, the community, contribution and challenge ideals Myles and Adams identify in their book. 

Recognising this doesn’t mean abandoning the idea that our work should have valuable outcomes. It’s important we feel we can get behind what our organisation does. And a core part of the authors’ argument is that properly connecting with the value of work makes it meaningful — and leaders should make it more explicit.

But Myles and Adams’ book remind us that big ideas about purpose are not enough to give our work meaning over a long-term period. We need to put effort into the smaller details, personally and for the teams we work with — the things that shape day-to-day work, and our broader understanding of what we do. How we work creates meaning as well as what we do.

US workplace insights: Workplace parallels to the 1980s

This week, Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief of Charter, the future-of-work media and research company, shared takeaways from his exploration of the parallels between the current landscape and that of the 1980s for workers in the US.

The starting point for this comparison is the Trump administration’s sweeping lay-offs of federal workers and undermining of workplace regulations, which calls to mind president Ronald Reagan’s hardline approach to public-sector unions in the early 1980s — especially his firing of striking air traffic controllers. 

As Kevin writes, Reagan’s aggressive tone emboldened private-sector employers such as Phelps Dodge, International Paper and Hormel to become more anti-union and contributed to the decline of organised labour in the US. So the question now is whether the Trump’s White House relative unfriendliness to workers will similarly spill over into the private sector. 

Kevin spoke with Kim Phillips-Fein, a Columbia University professor specialised in the history of labour and capitalism, who said: “I do think that Trump’s actions will embolden employers.” But Phillips-Fein noted that the White House’s approach is “much more in line with employers today”, than Reagan’s was. “Private-sector employers already have a very hardline stance towards unions in many cases and situations,” she said. 

The percentage of US workers who are unionised declined to a record low of 9.9 per cent last year, compared to 20.1 per cent in 1983. But Phillips-Fein observed that unions have grown stronger at times when, similar to now, there is among workers “a sense of popular anger and discontent and an absence of channels for that in the political electoral process”. So there’s a chance that could potentially lead to increased worker organisation.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Welfare cuts to push 250,000 people into poverty The government’s welfare reforms will see many people, including 50,000 children, pushed into poverty, according to its own assessment. Ministers say the cuts are designed to get people into work.

2. Side hustles, Zoom waves and the Great Casualisation: how Covid shaped new ways to work It’s been five years since we were all ordered to stay inside. The pandemic and associated lockdowns changed a lot — not least in how we work. Our top journalists and experts dug into what has changed.

3. A white-collar world without juniors? What happens to entry-level roles when AI does entry-level work? It’s a problem I’ve been preoccupied with for a while. Here work columnist Sarah O’Connor examines how skills might evolve in the future, including a chat with Matt Beane, author of The Skills Code.

4. The madness of the £100,000 childcare tax trap Thanks to a long-standing tax cliff-edge, UK households face losing most government support for childcare if one parent’s net income surpasses £100,000. This deep dive into the families sparked a lot of debate in the comments section (and in my house, where we were divided in our sympathies for the country’s highest earners).

5. The amateurism of the Trump White House This week’s wildest news story involved a journalist being mistakenly invited to a highly sensitive government group chat. Part of the story is about professionalism and chaos in what is ultimately a workplace — albeit one with higher stakes than for most of us.

One more thing . . .

This evening I’m going to see the theatre adaptation of The Years by Annie Ernaux. I’m especially looking forward to it because yesterday my reading group discussed the same book. It gave me loads to think about and makes the book and play feel like a collective experience — appropriately, for a “collective memoir” that narrates personal and political experience as “we” rather than “I”. We (!) struggled to think of other examples of books that do this: if any Working It readers have recommendations, send them my way.

For thoughts on this, or other tips about the world of work, drop me a line on bethan.staton@ft.com