The Five 'Must Haves' of Meaningful Work

[Paul Fairlie]

I'm very glad I found this network. I'm kicking off my involvement with the contribution of an article I recently wrote for Canadian HR Reporter.

In my Ph.D. research on over 800 Canadians, I found five workplace factors that were drivers of every employee outcome measured, including depression, burnout, overall satisfaction, commitment and turnover thoughts. They were variety, control, clear feedback, recognition, and having a significant impact on people and things greater than one's self. These are the five ‘must haves’ of meaningful work. The opposite is the ‘Sisyphus Effect’. These five things have strong historical links to existential meaning.

These things are not new, but employers need to see them correlating more strongly with more outcomes than pay, benefits, etc. Meaningful work is my angle on engagement. Essentially, the presence of meaningful work may lead to engagement states.

[Jason Scott]

Paul,

Excellent. You may be interested to know how this type of thinking plays out in a warehouse environment where the work can be seen as repetitive and somewhat Sisyphian. At Prestwick House, each month everyone establishes goals. Those goals should be a mix of "transactional" and "transformational." The transactional are what you would expect for a warehouse. (Eg. We are going to ship 100% of the orders that arrive by 1:00pm.) The transformational goals deal with thinking creatively to improve the warehouse process. (Eg. We have found that there are picking erros due to the location of the following SKU. This month we are going to relocate these SKUs in order to reduce picking errors.)

The employees are highly engaged because there job is not to simply pick orders, but to help create a better and better company by identifying problems and fixing them.

This concept of transactional and transformation goal setting is covered in a book I've co-written with Dr. Patricia Buhler,due out in November.

[Paul Fairlie]

Thanks Jason. Some of the best examples come from labour or blue-collar work. Assuming that employees value that type of job, the work could be especially engaging when these additional features are present. You've got meaningful work (i.e., control, significance, etc.), plus, the results of your work are 'at the end of your hands', so to speak. Some white collar employees are far removed from the products of their labour (no...I won't bring Marx into this). Good luck with the book!

[S. Max Brown]

Thank you for sharing Paul! It is always good to see new research that reinforces what managers need to know.

[Adam Hibbert]

We've been using Peak Learning's "Real Deal" cards to ask our employees to register the five things that matter most to them at work, plus a "deal breaker".

On seeing what emerges, I think I'd argue there's a slightly wider range to engagement than the basic five outlined here (though, boy, do they matter!). For example, "fun" comes up quite a lot, and though you could argue that 'recognition' covers it, there's also a lot of appetite for a real sense of "team" and the kinds of sporting metaphors that hang around that value.

I like Peak Learning's tool. We ended up buying one pack for every six employees ... it has had a small but noticeable impact on teams' mutual understanding and appreciation of each other, and the conversations you have around them explaining why you picked a particular card have unearthed commonalities and human connection among peers and employees/managers that were never suspected before, contributing to their sense of recognition and engagement.

So now I sound like a stooge for Dr. Paul. I'll get my coat.

[Paul Fairlie]

Thanks Adam. The five must haves are not definitive, by any stretch. There were numerous significant drivers. However, these five had 1) the highest correlations, 2) with the most outcomes. Strong and consistent. These five also tend to show up more often in published research (especially control). The other reason for the narrow focus was the 800-1,000 word limit for the article (!).

The Real Deal sounds like a very engaging and collaborative way to get at individual differences in employee needs and values. That highlights a limitation of the kind of cross-sectional research that I do. I can easily identify ‘average’ needs and values for a sample through driver-outcome linkages, which is very practical for top-down efforts. However, it's not going to fully capture the uniqueness of individual needs and values. That’s something that individual managers should be aware of with respect to their direct reports. Another difference between what you and I are doing is that you’re asking people more directly what they need and value. I’m inferring that from driver-outcome linkages. For example, job significance is highly-correlated with overall job satisfaction.

P.S. If you become my stooge, I’ll need two others before we have a comedy act. ;-)

[Kim Fabian]

Thanks Paul, very interesting piece. Has any of your work focused on the difference in what "meaningful work" means to folks in the U.S. vs. Canada? The five "must-haves" seem like they would translate to U.S. workers as well, but just curious . . .

[Paul Fairlie]

Thanks Kim. The five must haves have been a strong focus in the organizational psychology literature for many years. Most of that is based on U.S. samples, so yes, these seem to be critical for Americans as well. There are reasons to suspect that these five things are closely-tied to organismic needs regardless of nationality. I couldn’t go into detail in the article, but the five must haves, together, have been consistent themes in existential literature (e.g., Camus, Hesse, Dostoevsky). They've also emerged from the last 40 years of meaning-based psychology. These five things are, on some level, work-based manifestations of deep, fundamental human needs.

That being said, I know that there are American-Canadian differences in general values and work values (see the book ‘Fire and Ice’ by Michael Adams of Environics). Generally-speaking, there are likely rank-order differences in what American and Canadian workers find meaningful in the workplace.

[Cathy Missildine-Martin]

How do you recommend that companies handle managers that are defiicent in some of those 5 drivers? Can you assess managers on each and can the "fix" be customized to that paticulair manager?

[Paul Fairlie]

Good question. Like most organizational problems, the solution likely depends on how widespread the problem is. If it’s a few managers, perhaps the solution is targeted managerial development. If it’s widespread, perhaps there are systemic/strategic selection or culture/climate issues.

I’m still establishing myself as a meaning-based consultant, so I haven’t fully delineated the types and appropriateness of different interventions. We do know that levels of the five ‘must haves’, as job characteristics, typically fall under the purview of individual managers, so that’s likely the locus of intervention (although ‘significant impact’ is also a function of the vision, mission and values of the larger organization). To some extent, the five must haves (and other meaningful job factors) could be addressed by linking them, one-to-one, to specific content in well-known, generic, managerial competency models. If they’re not there, perhaps they should be added. These aspects could be weighted differently in assessment and development programs (e.g., 360-degree feedback). However, and more specifically, I also strongly believe that managerial development with respect to providing meaningful work should also have some meaning-based focus. I believe that the more that we consider what employees are trying to do at work as workplace manifestations of what all ‘human beings are trying to do in their lives’, the more these things will resonate among managers and direct reports, and hopefully, better drive individual and organizational development.