Meaningful Work: Unlock your unique path to career fulfilment

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever thought about a world where people everywhere are engaged in meaningful work?

Where not only are you happy and committed in work, but where everyone around you is too?

A world where your job allows you psychological safety?

Where you are fully engaged?

Where you can create, collaborate and contribute?

Where what you do makes a difference, where what you do matters?

This is a world I think about all the time.

Unfortunately, this is not the world we inhabit today. We are facing a meaningful work crisis.

According to Gallup’s ‘State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report’, job unhappiness is at a staggering all-time high, along with worker disengagement. These levels of unhappiness and disengagement are coinciding with workplace changes the likes of which we have never seen before. The shifting demographics of our population mean there will be a continued talent shortage in key areas over the coming years. Artificial intelligence is also changing the nature of workplaces, and the types of skills we will need is evolving at an unprecedented pace.

You might be wondering what this means for you. You wouldn’t be alone. With the decline of many traditional forms of community, work has taken on greater significance for our identity, purpose and meaning, and how we tackle these big issues matters at a personal level.

It’s why we at Beaumont People commissioned our world-first research into meaningful work so we could truly understand the problem we were trying to solve. In reading this book you’ll learn the three key messages that will help you understand what meaningful work actually is, you’ll know the four factors of meaningful work, and you will have clarity on how the future of meaningful work is likely to unfold. You’ll be given the tools to unlock your own unique path to meaningful work and gain an understanding that it can change over time.

You’ll then be able to revisit those tools as often as you like so you can continue to tweak what meaningful work means for you as your circumstances change.

I hope you enjoy discovering the many ways in which work can become meaningful for you.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The very best way to use this book is to read it cover to cover, in order, with a pen and notepad at the ready, undistracted and giving it your full attention. (You’ll also find spaces throughout to take notes and respond to questions, but you’ll still need the notebook.) Now, I’m a realist and expect that, oh, about, say, 5 per cent of readers will actually do that. If you’re absolutely, definitely, never in a month of Sundays going to do that, jump to the next paragraph and I’ll share the cheats’ way of getting the best out of the book.

Here’s why you should read it in order (and ha! you fell for it didn’t you? If you want to cheat, you actually have to skip to the next paragraph). Finding and keeping meaningful work is a bit of a Holy Grail. It takes effort and persistence. The best chance you have is to arm yourself with as much information as possible, and the best way to do that is to read this book and understand the theory, be inspired by the real-life stories, do the exercises, and learn how work is likely to play out in the future. By actively participating in all four areas of the book you are more likely to see how they come together and therefore more likely to recognise how meaningful work affects you as an individual. You will notice when something has changed for you. You might pick up if there is a tension between two of the different factors for you and understand that only you can resolve that tension. You’ll see work in an entirely different way and have a lot more influence on how you make it meaningful in the future.

However, if you struggle to read a book from start to finish, and I know plenty of people do, then absolutely use the book to help you in the way that will make it most meaningful for you. As a minimum, ensure you understand the three key messages and the four factors of meaningful work.

Outside of that, if you find real-life stories inspiring, go ahead and enjoy them. They have been hand-selected to provide you with a diverse range of people from different backgrounds, with different experiences of meaningful work. Some of them knew from a young age how they found meaning, others took a more winding route. My hope is that, no matter your personality or background, you might find someone who will inspire you within the stories. As you learn about the theory of meaningful work, you’ll start to see how it has unfolded within these stories. You might then see parallels between some of their experiences and some of the challenges you have faced, even if their circumstances are different from your own. Each, in their own way, shows that there is a path to meaningful work, even when it may seem out of reach at times.

But if this isn’t your thing … feel free to skip them.

If you find the research boring, skip it! If my talk of demographics and artificial intelligence in the future puts you off, please don’t let that be the thing that stops you in your pursuit of meaningful work. Finally, if the exercises feel too much like being back at school, you can always just think about them rather than writing anything down.

In the end, it’s up to you.

Okay, shall we then?

PART I

UNLOCKING YOUR UNIQUE PATH TO MEANINGFUL WORK

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS MEANINGFUL WORK?

A quick Google search will provide you, in about half a second, with over a million links to pages referencing meaningful work. You’ve probably heard the term ‘meaningful work’ being bandied around … a lot. I have Google alerts set up to let me see any reference to the term that is being publicly shared, and I had to change the settings to only alert me once a day as it was constantly sending me notifications. It’s a term that is regularly seen in the news, and not just the business news. Yes, there are articles in Forbes, Fortune and Harvard Business Review, but there are also regular articles in national news outlets too – from Nine News to ABC in Australia, through to The Times of London, The Times of India and The New York Times, to name just a few.

The quest for meaningful work is human and it is universal.¹ And with the quest for meaningful work comes the trend of new terms used to help describe the things people do, or don’t do, to find meaningful work, such as ‘quiet quitting’, ‘hybrid working’ and ‘start with why’, or even, as an old boss once said to me, ‘win their wallets and their hearts will follow’.

At time of writing there is a shortage of critical talent. Unemployment in Australia is at record lows, and even though it will fluctuate with economic cycles, the long-term trend towards talent shortages will become more challenging, as we’ll see in later chapters.

Work trends are regularly written about and commented on. The latest published research by Gartner shares nine high-impact trends which they promise will ‘create an exciting opportunity for organisations to differentiate themselves as an employer of choice.’² In other words, an opportunity for organisations to create more meaningful work for their people.

As leaders we often struggle to attract, retain and develop quality employees. Yet, as workers ourselves, we also quietly wonder if our own role is meaningful. We question, if there is such a talent shortage out there, how could I find more meaning in my work?

These questions we ask ourselves are not unique. According to the McKinsey Quarterly Report 2022³, meaningfulness of work was a top factor driving retention, as shown in the following chart.

So, we knew we were onto something when we started thinking about meaningful work.

Employee experience factors driving attrition and retention, % of respondents

UNCOVERING THE IMPORTANCE OF MEANINGFUL WORK

The story of how we came to uncover the importance of meaningful work starts, as every story does, with a couple of key characters. Nikki Beaumont, founder and CEO of Beaumont People, opened the business in 2002, after coming to Australia to run a significant recruitment project for the Sydney Olympics. She had a vision for a recruitment organisation that cared about its people, both internally as well as those it was placing. She wanted to establish a business that thought beyond the start date of a placement. She wanted to know how the people Beaumont People were placing were really contributing to the organisations they were working in; and how they, in turn, were getting deep satisfaction from their work within those organisations.

Nikki and I crossed paths formally in 2015. I say formally because before this point we knew each other through the industry. We knew each other to wave to across a room at a networking function, and in fact I had bumped into her once at the local Aldi, and unbeknownst to us at the time, our kids went to the same school. But we’d never sat down and had a coffee. We had never had an in-depth conversation.

So, when she rang me out of the blue one Sunday afternoon wanting to know if I was interested in exploring working with her, I was somewhat surprised. Surprised she had my number, surprised she was calling me on a Sunday. Surprised she knew enough about me to be asking if I wanted to work with her. Knowing what I know now, none of that is surprising! What is surprising now is, I said no.

But I was intrigued to get to know Nikki better and over time, as we discussed more, I saw in her, and in Beaumont People, something I hadn’t seen in my career until that point. Something different. Nikki had always run the charity part of her recruitment business as a not-for-profit itself. By significantly reducing fees for the charity sector, she was giving back to those organisations so they could use their funds where they were most needed. Here was someone running a business in a completely different way.

This was incredibly inspiring to me. Since starting on this journey, I have learnt that, for me, meaningful work is about contributing to our communities and doing work that carries a higher purpose. I’d always felt that connection within my job roles, as there is something deeply satisfying about helping others find work. However, it was often missing at an organisational level. This doesn’t mean the organisations I had worked with previously weren’t providing meaningful work, in other ways they absolutely were, and I have them to thank for my experience and career development. But they weren’t providing work that was meaningful specifically to me. As you’ll learn later, everyone’s path to meaningful work is unique. There is no right or wrong.

I joined Beaumont People in 2015 and became a partner in the organisation a couple of years later. In the time that Nikki and I have worked together, we’ve been able to continue the journey she started, always thinking about how we could create more opportunities for meaningful work, both internally and externally. We were an industry first in launching a gender-neutral paid parental leave scheme in 2017, and we were one of the first organisations in Australia to implement a four-day work week, allowing our team to work four days while getting paid for five.

SO, WHAT IS MEANINGFUL WORK?

We define our purpose as:

We exist to connect people to meaningful work and to create more opportunities for meaningful work in Australia.

To be true to this purpose we first needed to understand what meaningful work was. But when we investigated it, we were astounded to discover that there was no universal definition of meaningful work; there had never been any research done into what meaningful work is specifically for Australians; and there was no research anywhere in the world that combined both the psychological and sociological aspects of meaningful work (more on that later).

How could we create opportunities for meaningful work if we couldn’t even describe how to attain it with any confidence? When I have asked people anecdotally about ‘meaningful work’ I tend to get responses to do with culture, or engagement, or perhaps leadership. When I dig deeper into why the person may think that, the answers tend to be vague or I get directed to studies that were specifically just about those topics in the first place. When a study is only looking at a limited number of factors of meaningful work it’s hard to see the full picture. So, we decided to truly get to the bottom of what meaningful work is.

In 2019 we began some world-first research into what makes work meaningful. This was an Australian first in being the only such research done specifically for Australians, and a world first in being the first study to combine the psychological and sociological aspects of meaningful work. We were really proud that this report, ‘Meaningful Work and the Development of a Meaningful Work Profiling Tool’, was published in 2019 and is available to download on our meaningful work website.⁴

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR YOU?

It was through this research that we came up with a definition of meaningful work:

Meaningful work is the importance an individual places on their work meeting their current personal beliefs, values, goals, expectations, and purpose in the context of their social and cultural environment.

In the next chapter, for those of you unlikely to read the academic paper (most of us, let’s be honest!), I will share the findings of the research in detail with some inspiring true stories to bring it to life. But before I do, I’d love you to undertake a little exercise. This is an exercise I get the audience and participants to do whenever I’m speaking on meaningful work, and it is a few simple questions:

1. What makes work meaningful to you?

2. What do you think are the three most popular