Employment report
The Work Foundation has published a new essay asking what is meant by ‘meaningful work’, why more people want it and what employers can do to meet this need.
The paper demonstrates that the idea of meaningful work is a new phenomenon. Different people have different needs according to the report and the world of work is changing with people undertaking various roles. The essay recommends that employers find ways of making work more meaningful, roles with autonomy, security, variety, a reasonable balance between effort and reward and between skill level and demand.
Author Stephen Overell says: ‘The way people talk about ‘fulfilling their potential’ in a job could only happen in the modern world of work – it is simply not something that would have been said a few generations ago. Meaningful work rests on the rise of individualism and identity as pressing concerns for large numbers of people. It speaks of huge and perhaps excessive expectations of working life – the historically unusual sense that fulfilment occurs, or should occur, in the everyday, ordinary business of going to work.
‘People are very different - what is meaningful to one person may not be meaningful to another, and what someone finds meaningful at the age of 23 may not be how they feel at 43. Nevertheless, meaning is unmistakably in the air of the 21st century culture of work; this essay marks an attempt to describe what is going on. The raising and dashing of hopes around meaning has become one of the major psychological forces within working life. What goes on inside workers’ hearts and minds about work has become profoundly important to what they produce and how they do it.’
