How to Make Your Job Feel More Meaningful (Even When You Don't Love Your Job)

Most professionals want to do meaningful work, but not everyone is excited about their job.

In 2018 The Harvard Business Review reported on research from BetterUp that indicated that 9 out of 10 American workers would be willing to earn less money to do to more meaningful work. Similarly, research by Mckinsey & Company showed that 82% of employees feel that it's important for their companies to have a purpose, and 72% believe that this purpose should be put ahead of profits. A study by Monster found that a majority of modern workers across all age groups indicated that they valued purpose over paychecks.

Yet we live in an era of record-breaking levels of job unhappiness. According to Gallup research, 60% of people reported being emotionally detached at work and 19% said they were miserable. In these conditions, is the fulfillment of our need for meaningful work out of reach? Despite these difficulties, there may be hope yet. Read on for thoughts on how to find meaning at work – even if you don't love your job.

How Are Happiness and Meaning Related?

The drives to seek happiness and meaning are both powerful, fundamental human motives. They're both of such clear importance that it can even become easy to conflate the two. Yet upon examination, they're related, but not necessarily synonymous. While summarizing some of the research done on the topic, Scientific American put it this way:

“It seems that happiness has more to do with having your needs satisfied, getting what you want, and feeling good, whereas meaning is more related to uniquely human activities such as developing a personal identity, expressing the self, and consciously integrating one’s past, present, and future experiences.” 

In other words, happiness is primarily about having our needs met and enjoying ourselves, whereas meaningfulness relates to the specific need to connect ourselves and our experiences to our sense of importance.

If you dislike your job but still hope to find meaning in it, this could be good news. This does nothing to absolve bad management from their responsibility to make work a better place (Gallup puts the blame for the unhappiness trend squarely in their laps). Nor should we embrace the toxic positivity of blaming or being dismissive of anyone suffering in a bad situation. But it could mean that workers aren't powerless in their pursuit of meaning in their jobs even when the chips are down.

What is Meaningful Work?

In 2016, the MIT Sloan Management Review conducted a study designed to help better understand the nature of meaningful work. Their findings are good examples of the themes identified in Scientific American.

They interviewed 135 people in 10 different occupations, asking about times that work felt meaningful and times that it felt pointless, then looked for commonalities in both sets of experiences.

Some of their findings they considered unsurprising. They found associations between meaningfulness and taking pride in a job well done, a sense of fulfilling potential, doing interesting work, and the receipt of praise. But they also found that these qualities didn't make work meaningful on their own.

Instead, they found five qualities of meaningful work which they described as both less obvious and more universal.

1. Self-Transcendent: Meaningful work was almost always characterized as work that went beyond oneself, affecting others in a positive way.
2. Poignant or Euphoric: While meaningful experiences could be found in moments that are intensely positive (euphoric), they were also often identified in the poignant. These touching or even sad experiences could involve grappling with difficult but important challenges, or helping others do the same.
3. Episodic: Rather than being a constant quality characterizing every moment of a meaningful job, the meaning was usually noticed in episodes, specific moments, or waves that come and go. Such currents arise naturally and aren't forced.
4. Reflective: People often were only able to see the meaningfulness of their work in retrospect as they reflected on it. This could be long-term consideration of a whole career, or something as simple as stepping back to get a good look at one's impact at the end of an afternoon's work.
5. Personal: The qualities that made work meaningful were personal, reflecting the values of the individual, and often involving connection with other individuals.

How Can We Make Work More Meaningful?

With a better understanding of what meaningful work looks like and how to see it, we may be able to use the same insights to seek to actively make our work more meaningful. Below are some suggestions to consider.

1. Care About the People Around You: Many of the universal qualities involved relationships with others. If that's the case, it could be a good idea to make it a point to actively care about those around you wherever you may find yourself. This could be co-workers, clients, or anyone else you encounter.
2. Keep Your Own Ends in Mind: Take some time to consider what's personally important to you, and how your job could relate. How can you use your work as a vehicle to further those ends? Even if not related to the job directly (maybe you need the money for an important life goal, use the position as a networking or stepping-stone opportunity, or simply hope that the experience might give you more insight into the world), it can still help support your overall sense of meaning.
3. Be Honest With Yourself: In terms of its meaningfulness, there's no need to pretend that your job is uniformly positive, put pressure on yourself to feel a certain way, or expect every moment to feel like a grand accomplishment. Being truthful with yourself about your feelings about your job (including those parts which are great and those which aren't so rosy) will help you engage with the reality of what's before you, take care of yourself, better connect with those around you, or even make positive changes. All these can help you put more of your energy into the things that matter most – and that's a welcome improvement no matter what our relationship with work is like.

Looking for a job? See who's hiring at CyberCoders.com.