KAKATIYA
UNIVERSITY, WARNAGAL
ENGLISH FOR CAREERS
UG CBCS- SEMESTER 6- TEXTS
UNIT2:
How work can be made
meaningful (prose)- Katie Bailey
Katie Bailey,
Professor of Work and Employment at King's College London, has authored several
articles, reports and books on meaningful work, employee engagement, and human
resource management. She has held positions of leadership four business schools,
and won several awards for her work. In addition to research, Bailey also
involved in coaching, consultancy, training, and development projects. She
presently works with the UK government on making post-Covid work environments
healthier and more sustainable.
ABOUT THE TEXT
During the course
of the everyday prosaic routine of one's working life, most people don't stop
to think about the greater purpose and impact of the work that they do.
However, very large portion of one's adult life is spent at one's workplace,
and hence the significance of one's work-to one's own life or to the lives of
others-is an important factor contributing to happiness in life. What is it
that makes work meaningful? Read on to find out.
TEXT
While most people
spend a good proportion of their life at work, few will ever stop to consider
whether their work is meaningful. "Meaningfulness' is not something that
tends to feature in our daily thoughts, preoccupied as we often are by more
mundane matters like rent, bills and lunch.
But when
conversation with friends turns to complaints about work, we might fantasise
giving it all up and living somewhere warm and sunny with no boss demanding
round the-clock attention. In fact, research often finds that when respondents
are asked what they'd do if they were to win the lottery, most would choose to
carry on working. Despite our tendency to grumble about it, clearly something
about work meets some of our basic human needs laid down by Maslow's famous
hierarchy of needs, notably for belonging achievement and, beyond this, for
purpose and meaning.
We have known for
many years that humans are driven by an innate desire to find or foster meaning
in what we do, even under the most extreme conditions. Given below central work
is to most people's lives, it is a key place to seek meaningfulness. In my
recent research with Adrian Madden we interviewed 135 people in a wide range of
jobs to discover what they considered meaningful work, how work can be made
meaningful, and how this sense of meaningfulness can be erased or destroyed.
The meaning in meaningfulness
What marks
meaningfulness out as distinctive from other attitudes such as feeling
satisfied or engaged? These and other positive attitudes are linked, but
meaningfulness is distinctive in several ways.
First, it is
almost invariably associated with other people-work tends to be found
meaningful if people can see it has a positive impact on others. These need not
necessarily be people the worker comes into contact with, such as clients or
customers. Some of our respondents were bin men, and they spoke of the benefits
their recycling work would bring to future generations in the form of a
cleaner, greener planet.
Second,
meaningfulness may not necessarily be a positive experience--meaningful moments
can be tinged with sadness, such as the priests who told us that they found
their work most meaningful when they were able to help and support people who
were ill or bereaved.
Third,
meaningfulness is associated with specific episodes or moments in time it is
not a continuous state but rather arises in peaks and troughs. People tend to
become aware that their work has a profound significance for them at unexpected
moments. One example from our study was an actor tasked to get inmates at a
high-security prison involved in the arts. Although terrified at the thought of
performing in front of prisoners she knew had committed violent crimes, she
managed to connect with them and draw them into the performance. She described
this experience as emotional, challenging and highly meaningful.
Fourth, people do
not generally tend to go home and announce, 'Hey, I found my work really
meaningful today!" The meaningfulness of work doesn't always make itself
known at the time at a conscious level. We need time to pause and think through
what happened.
And finally, a
key difference of meaningfulness is that it is not just related to work. Job
satisfaction is described in terms of the job. But the meaningfulness of work
is described through reflection on the link between individuals' jobs and their
personal lives. One entrepreneur told us that she had set up her bakery
business to make her grandfather proud.
Making and losing meaning
It's easy to
assume that only certain types of jobs, such as doctors or nurses, might offer
meaning to those that do them, but we actually found the overwhelming majority
of respondents found meaning in what they did-whether they worked as retail
assistants, bin men, priests, stonemasons, solicitors, or entrepreneurs. But no
one found their work meaningful all the time, and it seems unrealistic to suggest
that would be achievable, or desirable.
But while people
are adept at finding meaningfulness in what they do, managers are a skilled in
destroying this meaning through their actions. By failing to involve employees
in important decisions, not thanking or acknowledging them, using isolating or
bullying tactics, and failing to protect employees from physical or mental
harm, the worker's sense of meaningful work is croded. leaving only the feeling
of 'why do I bother? Meaningfulness is all too easily destroyed by bad
management for example through focusing on costs rather than quality. We found
that treatment by managers frequently came up in our study when our respondents
discussed times they felt their work lacked meaning.
If employers want
their staff to find their work meaningful, they need to tread carefully People
like to find their own meaning, by reference to what matters most to them as
individuals, and organisational efforts to force the issue can lead to
cynicism. However, organisations can nurture an environment that helps people
to find meaning in their work through adopting authentic values, ensuring
workers are in jobs that suit their skills and personalities, fostering a
positive and respectful working climate, and helping workers see how their work
has a positive effect on others.
Knowing that our
work has improved the life of someone, somewhere even just a little bit- makes
the job worthwhile.
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