Post-pandemic employees are searching for meaningful work

The modern worker’s search for meaning

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is lesson number 464. JR is the producer and he has uploaded the full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/464.

One theme of the post-pandemic world is employees’ search for meaning in their jobs. With the world falling apart all around me, so many of us cube-dwellers asked, why am I sitting here listening to pointless conference calls? A lot of people left their jobs to find something more “meaningful” to them. But what does it mean to have a meaningful job? That’s the topic of today’s lesson.

The English expression we’ll talk about is “day-to-day” and we have a quote of the week. Let’s get going.

Man’s search for (workplace) meaning

Before we try to define a “meaningful” job, let’s take a few examples of prototype workers who do successfully find meaning in their jobs. A scientist may find meaning because she’s researching cures for diseases; she may never see the cure in her lifetime, but she’s working to make the future world better. A safety inspector on an oil rig finds meaning because he wants to protect against an environmental disaster.

A teacher finds meaning by helping to educate the next generation. A therapist finds meaning by helping clients and, indirectly, the people in their clients’ lives. Homebuilders find meaning by creating homes for people who need them; they may also love the challenge of building a house and they may get satisfaction from driving by their handiwork on the street. A plumber finds meaning by using his talents to solve a crisis in a customer’s house.

So what does it mean, then, to have a “meaningful” job? It’s not about having an easy job; it’s not about having a prestigious job; and it’s not about having a fun job. When people talk about having a meaningful job, it means some combination of the following things: providing for their family, solving hard problems, helping customers, doing something enjoyable, working with good people, having a positive impact on the community, serving society today, or making the future better. Few jobs will be satisfying in all of those ways. But a lot of people find their jobs just don’t have enough of those things to motivate them anymore.

The quest for meaning in a job is a modern-day question. To see that, let’s go back in history to when humans were hunters and gatherers. Work, at that time, had tremendous meaning. If you didn’t hunt for food, or gather it from the countryside, your family didn’t eat. Most of us wouldn’t want to go back to that time, but the direct impact of everyone’s work was pretty clear.

Fast-forward to about the 1800s. By this time, many workers had specialized. A town may have had a butcher that provided meat; a cobbler that made shoes; a small newspaper that kept the town informed; and traders who bought and sold goods with the outside world. Many people were artisans; they had a craft and sold what they made. A professional army may have protected the town or the country. Many, many people worked on farms.

Work had become more specialized, but it was still easy to see the meaning and purpose of the work being done. The farmer’s purpose was the grow the food for the surrounding population—an essential job. A baker’s purpose was to turn it into bread people could eat. Sure, not every job was easy; not every job was fun. But for people who had paid work, it was often easy to see the purpose of it.

Then came electricity, the factory and then the office. And two things happened that caused jobs to seem less meaningful: we specialized and we started working for bigger organizations.

Let’s look at specialization. In the 1800s, for example, a town’s lawyer may have represented any person who needed to interact with the law. In a year, a lawyer could have defended someone accused of murder, settled a property dispute, collected debts, and argued civil lawsuits. It was easy to see the meaning of the work: a lawyer would have helped or represented any person who needed it.

There are still lawyers who take a variety of cases today. But far more common is for individual attorneys to specialize in one small part of the law, and for them to hire large teams of people to help them with the high volume of repetitive work. They get really good at one small thing, but it’s repetitive. That specialization probably made everyone wealthier, but it isn’t making everyone happier.

A related issue is the average size of an organization. The large company—even a large government agency or university—is a relatively modern thing. And in general, the larger an organization, the harder it is for individuals to connect how they contribute to the purpose of the organization.

Think about it. When you work for yourself, or with a small number of other people, it’s easy to see how your individual job contributes to society. If you own a truck, your job is to take something from place A to place B. You find someone who needs something moved, and you move it. If you work at the counter of a bakery, you can see that your job is to deliver fresh bread to your customers: you hand it to them personally.

But if you work for a large organization, the direct impact any one person has is a lot smaller. That’s because there’s a big bureaucracy. I mentioned before the mission of a truck driver is to take something from one place to another. But now picture a company that has a large fleet of trucks. That company has to repair all its own trucks. And it probably has a department dedicated to buying replacement parts. And it might have a person whose job is to make sure the company doesn’t pay too much for replacement parts.

That’s the type of worker that feels lost and purposeless today: they are people with highly specialized roles in large organizations that feel their day-to-day work and effort is disconnected from any real service to the world. And large companies are stuffed full of people collecting a paycheck, doing their jobs, but not finding any real meaning.

How to keep them motivated? The answer, large companies believe, is the mission statement. On Thursday, I’ll show you several examples of company mission statements—the good and the cringeworthy.

History of the office

We always think that the world we live in is the way things should be, or that things have always been like this. But this whole way of organizing our work lives—especially in huge companies like we have today—this is relatively new. I’m reading a great book now called “Cubed,” and it’s a history of the office. When did people start working in offices and how has that changed over the years? You might laugh, but there was a time where there was no such thing as an office where lots of people sat together at desks doing their jobs. And this book, “Cubed,” traces the office from the beginning up until right before the pandemic. It’s good—I’ll link to it in our Facebook group if you’re interested. Just go to PlainEnglish.com/Facebook and you’ll be able to join the group.