If you aim low enough you will find meaning at work
Lucy Kellaway | Saturday, 24 May 2008
AT a party recently a man who until recently was a government minister. We chatted about this and that, and he said how much he was enjoying his assortment of sinecures - non-executive directorships, speaking engagements and so on. He had both more money and more spare time than he used to have; in all, life was good. I asked him if he was missing the power. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton. Government ministers don't have any power, he said.
As an agony aunt, I am used to people telling me that their jobs are meaningless. In fact, this is the most popular problem that readers submit. Lawyers, bankers, fund managers and all sorts of people with grand jobs write in with the same complaint: the money may be good but where is the meaning? How can I make a difference, they wail.
I always tell them to stop looking for meaning at once. If they go out looking, they are most unlikely to find anything. It is the same thing with happiness: the more you search, the less you find.
No one takes the tiniest shred of notice of this excellent advice. The search for meaning at work not only goes on unabated but it also seems to be getting more urgent all the time. When government ministers join City professionals in fretting that their work doesn't amount to a row of beans, we are really in trouble.
This crisis of meaningless is a relatively new thing. A report from the Work Foundation published recently argues that looking for meaning at work would have seemed outlandish even a generation ago. But now, as a joint result of affluence and our general leaning towards introspection, it has become the norm. We all insist that our jobs should mean something.
The author of the report, Stephen Overell, points out that meaning is a subjective thing: what counts as meaningful work to one person won't to another. This means that companies, for all their insistence on "employee engagement programmes", can't create meaning and should not try. '
Instead they should concentrate on not destroying it - which many of them manage to do effortlessly enough through treating their employees badly.
There are two things that give work meaning. First is the satisfaction that come from the work itself. I am lucky in this way: I (mostly) enjoy putting one word in front of another, and that is meaning enough for me. Yet this sort of simple pleasure in the job is not open to most people: the majority of jobs are either boring or beastly or both.
The second strand is the more dangerous one. That meaningful work must be somehow worthwhile; that in doing it we must feel that we are making a difference. This way of thinking can only lead to despair. If you start asking if your job is worthwhile, you have to conclude it isn't. Viewed this way, all work is pretty meaningless, whether you are journalist, banker, busker or government minister.
In fact, whoever coined the phrase "making a difference" has made a difference, though not a positive one. The phrase gestures towards grandiose achievement that is out of reach for almost everybody. Most of us make very little difference at all -- which stands to reason if you think there are 30m workers in Britain alone, making it almost impossible that any of us will make a difference, except to the people we work directly with.
But what is the matter with that? Why isn't that enough? Indeed, according to a survey published recently by YouGov, having nice colleagues is as important as money in persuading employees to stay in their jobs. This means that simply by being liked by your colleagues you are making a difference, even if only a modest one.
In fact, as long as we set our sights low enough we all do make a difference at work. By performing the tasks we are supposed to perform, we are making a difference to our employers. If we weren't, they would have fired us long ago.
Yet many clever, decent managers don't find this enough. A friend who works for a large company that sells dog food said to me the other day that, if she didn't do something worthwhile at work soon, she was going to go mad. So she has come up with a charity for her company to sponsor in Africa, and suddenly claimed that the meaning was back in her job.
This strikes me as an upside-down way of looking at things. If we define meaning as helping people in faraway places, we implicitly subtract meaning from the actual work we are doing. Helping Africa is a good thing but, then, so is selling dog food. A dog has to eat, after all.
There is a tiny glimmer of hope that we will all soon start to be less unreasonable in demanding reason from work. And that glimmer comes, of all places, from the credit crunch. If my agony customers are anything to go by, the people who worry most are in grand City jobs. My hunch is that this is because they are paid so much more than they feel their efforts are really worth - a thought that tips them straight into the it's-all-meaningless abyss. But when these people feel that their pay may cease altogether as they join the other thousands who have just been fired, they may suddenly find that their jobs aren't quite so meaningless after all. Or, better still, they will finally stop asking themselves the question.
As an agony aunt, I am used to people telling me that their jobs are meaningless. In fact, this is the most popular problem that readers submit. Lawyers, bankers, fund managers and all sorts of people with grand jobs write in with the same complaint: the money may be good but where is the meaning? How can I make a difference, they wail.
I always tell them to stop looking for meaning at once. If they go out looking, they are most unlikely to find anything. It is the same thing with happiness: the more you search, the less you find.
No one takes the tiniest shred of notice of this excellent advice. The search for meaning at work not only goes on unabated but it also seems to be getting more urgent all the time. When government ministers join City professionals in fretting that their work doesn't amount to a row of beans, we are really in trouble.
This crisis of meaningless is a relatively new thing. A report from the Work Foundation published recently argues that looking for meaning at work would have seemed outlandish even a generation ago. But now, as a joint result of affluence and our general leaning towards introspection, it has become the norm. We all insist that our jobs should mean something.
The author of the report, Stephen Overell, points out that meaning is a subjective thing: what counts as meaningful work to one person won't to another. This means that companies, for all their insistence on "employee engagement programmes", can't create meaning and should not try. '
Instead they should concentrate on not destroying it - which many of them manage to do effortlessly enough through treating their employees badly.
There are two things that give work meaning. First is the satisfaction that come from the work itself. I am lucky in this way: I (mostly) enjoy putting one word in front of another, and that is meaning enough for me. Yet this sort of simple pleasure in the job is not open to most people: the majority of jobs are either boring or beastly or both.
The second strand is the more dangerous one. That meaningful work must be somehow worthwhile; that in doing it we must feel that we are making a difference. This way of thinking can only lead to despair. If you start asking if your job is worthwhile, you have to conclude it isn't. Viewed this way, all work is pretty meaningless, whether you are journalist, banker, busker or government minister.
In fact, whoever coined the phrase "making a difference" has made a difference, though not a positive one. The phrase gestures towards grandiose achievement that is out of reach for almost everybody. Most of us make very little difference at all -- which stands to reason if you think there are 30m workers in Britain alone, making it almost impossible that any of us will make a difference, except to the people we work directly with.
But what is the matter with that? Why isn't that enough? Indeed, according to a survey published recently by YouGov, having nice colleagues is as important as money in persuading employees to stay in their jobs. This means that simply by being liked by your colleagues you are making a difference, even if only a modest one.
In fact, as long as we set our sights low enough we all do make a difference at work. By performing the tasks we are supposed to perform, we are making a difference to our employers. If we weren't, they would have fired us long ago.
Yet many clever, decent managers don't find this enough. A friend who works for a large company that sells dog food said to me the other day that, if she didn't do something worthwhile at work soon, she was going to go mad. So she has come up with a charity for her company to sponsor in Africa, and suddenly claimed that the meaning was back in her job.
This strikes me as an upside-down way of looking at things. If we define meaning as helping people in faraway places, we implicitly subtract meaning from the actual work we are doing. Helping Africa is a good thing but, then, so is selling dog food. A dog has to eat, after all.
There is a tiny glimmer of hope that we will all soon start to be less unreasonable in demanding reason from work. And that glimmer comes, of all places, from the credit crunch. If my agony customers are anything to go by, the people who worry most are in grand City jobs. My hunch is that this is because they are paid so much more than they feel their efforts are really worth - a thought that tips them straight into the it's-all-meaningless abyss. But when these people feel that their pay may cease altogether as they join the other thousands who have just been fired, they may suddenly find that their jobs aren't quite so meaningless after all. Or, better still, they will finally stop asking themselves the question.