The Map of Meaningful Work (2e)

A Practical Guide to Sustaining our Humanity

Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, Lani Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351252041
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book introduces the Map of Meaning which provides a clear, simple and profound framework of the dimensions and process of living and working meaningfully. The Map of Meaning is based on over 20 years' research into the insights and practice of ordinary people as they search for, lose and find meaning. Incorporating the ideas of philosophers, psychologists and sociologists, this book describes how human beings wrestle with, and answer, questions such as, "What gives my life and work meaning?", "How can I balance inspiration and reality and maintain positive momentum?" and "How do we integrate meaningfulness into our workplaces?". Innate human knowledge is captured in a practical model that makes understanding and working with issues of meaning clear and accessible to everyone. At an individual level this book helps people to define and stay in contact with what is most important to them as they grapple with the real problems of daily life. It shows how they can stay in charge of keeping the human search for meaning alive, especially in the face of the challenges that exist in organizational life. Because the dimensions of meaning are shared, the second half of the book focuses on how we can bring an awareness of what creates meaningful work into our thinking about the practice and design of organisations. The authors recognize that in the current economic context a simple, yet profound guide for humanity is essential, precisely because organizational life has become so intensely directed towards a singular economic goal. They argue that it is vital that people have an easy, powerful way to reclaim the significance of meaning in their working lives both individually and at a whole of organization level.

Updated with new chapter material and case studies, this second edition offers profound insights for anyone who is interested in creating more meaning and purpose in work and organizations – from a CEO to a blue-collar worker or consultant. It is for those searching for ways to re-energize their roles or change their careers. It is for anyone who firmly believes that it must be possible to align our deeper life purposes with our daily actions in the workplace. It is for anyone who is committed to creating workplaces that support and enable the experience of work that feels worth doing.

1
Introduction and overview

To be human is to search for meaning. Without a sense of meaning, we lose purpose, drive, focus and direction. We notice this when we say, ‘I just don’t know why I bother: why I bother coming to work, why I bother to live. I just don’t see the point’.

Until now we have not had a guide to clearly show what makes work and life meaningful. Now we do.

In this book we introduce you to new knowledge, the Map of Meaning™. This gives you a simple, rigorously researched framework, and processes to help you to take charge of the factors that human beings have agreed make work and life meaningful. We show you how to increase meaningfulness in your life by harnessing this framework for yourself, whatever your current situation; and how to use it practically to make immediate changes in your organisation, no matter what your position.

Because organisations have such power to influence what happens in the world, it is increasingly important that how they are designed, and who influences this design, is radically rethought. The Map of Meaning is central to this because it provides a practical way to connect the individual to the whole of the organisation, and the whole of the organisation to each individual member, in a meaningful way. It allows us all to participate in the creation of our workplaces.

Human beings want lives and work worthy of their effort and gifts. We want it for ourselves, and we need it collectively. To constantly deny what is most constructive in human beings is to cripple vital talents and energy. Loss of meaning is not just an economic issue, it destroys dignity and destabilises society. Whether in work, looking for work or working in all the ways people do without pay, the longing for meaningful work is both a personal drive, and a socio-political quest.

In the remainder of this chapter we explain why meaningful work is so significant and briefly introduce the research on which the Map of Meaning is based.

In Chapter 2 we break down the rather amorphous term of meaning into workable dimensions, with useful questions for you about meaningful work and life.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 help you work through the key benefits of having the Map, which are being able to:

• speak powerfully about feelings to do with meaning and its loss;
• make decisions that increase meaningfulness;
• take action to construct a more meaningful life.

In the second part of the book we show how these benefits can be used just as powerfully to transform the world of work.

We conclude by sharing our vision of what having a Map of Meaning can offer our world today, and in the future.

But first, we begin with a brief overview of the context in which meaningful work is gaining so much prominence, and in which our work has so much to offer.

Why meaningful work now?

The quest for meaningful work is not new. Over the centuries there have been many different ways of thinking about the meaning of work, many of which have to some degree, influenced the design of the contemporary workplace. From Marx, Weber and Hawthorne: work as alienation, as salvation, and intrinsic motivation at work, through to modern concerns about employee engagement and human flourishing, ideas influence how we think about work. However, these currently emerge against a background of increasing disengagement, disempowerment and an ever-accelerating pace of work and life, all expressions of meaninglessness.

The interest in the purpose and practice of work is also driven by recent research showing that meaningful work has a significant impact on work outcomes. Numerous studies show conclusively that meaningful work, or its absence, influences outcomes in organisational life such as: work motivation, absenteeism, work behaviour, engagement, job satisfaction, empowerment, stress, performance and personal well-being (Rosso et al. 2010).

However, the quest for meaningful work is much more than an individualised quest for self-realisation, or an organisational quest for employee engagement. It is a socio-political project, concerned with sustaining and enriching our humanity and therefore our capacity to respond to the local and global challenges which face us and the planet. Because the world’s direction and future are created through organisations, be they commercial, community, not for profit, local or global, how we design organisations is vital. It shapes who we become as human beings, inside and outside of work; and who we are and what we do in organisations shapes our individual and collective future.

To redesign work requires the courage and humility to question fundamental ways of thinking about organising, and about who decides how we organise. To lift the human quest for meaningful work to the strategic level, where it can influence our thinking and the design of organisations, we must:

• claim the language that enables us to speak about meaning;
• work from a constructive view of humanity in which we acknowledge that the drive for meaning is a profound human motivation;
• ensure that every human being knows what is and is not meaningful and therefore needs to be part of how the workplace and society are constructed.

In the following section we show how the Map of Meaning offers us a practical way to recreate work and organisations.

Finding the language to speak about what matters most

The words we use create and shape our reality. Thus, to make meaningfulness an ongoing part of the way we work, it is essential to find and claim the language that enables us to speak about meaning. This helps us raise human concerns in the day-to-day experience of work amidst a language of effectiveness, efficiency and accountability. It is only when the language of meaning is claimed, and used, that it can impact organisational decision making, strategy, culture, structure and purpose.

Words direct our attention, get translated in practices and priorities and ultimately reproduce what is and is not legitimate to talk about in organisations. For example, categorising management into ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ is not just an innocent labelling of management practices. The ‘hard’ is interpreted as the management that makes plans, sets up structures and monitors performance. The ‘soft’ is concerned with day-to-day experience and motivation of employees. In using words that separate these and that are not neutral (who wants to be soft?), a common currency is created. Some currencies (hard) are valued higher than others (soft). The ‘hard’ dominates, yet the ‘soft’ determines who, collectively, we become as human beings. Do we become more skilled, more energised and proactive, more thoughtful and better equipped as citizens? Or do we become disheartened, hardened, cynical and alienated from ourselves and others? We do not assert that reclaiming meaningful conversations will, alone, change long-established organisational patterns. We do argue and show that using the Map of Meaning can legitimise and enable meaningful conversations involving everyone in the organisation. This is at the very foundation of creating fundamental and lasting change.

Claiming our constructive Self

Talking about meaning is, in itself, not enough to reclaim our human concerns at work. While we found that people talk about meaning every day, most of these conversations are negative, focusing on the absence of meaning; for example – ‘what is the point of this?’ (policy, practice, change initiative). As a result, conversations about meaning tend to reinforce people’s experience of themselves as powerless, which increases meaninglessness. The Map of Meaning provides a way for people to claim their positive longing to do work worthy of their talents and energy.

There are many obstacles to meaningful work, and removing them is no mean feat. Precisely because of this, it is important that each individual in an organisation works from a place of strength and dignity. Each person needs to be able to recognise that when they say, ‘I don’t see the point of this’, they are not complaining but articulating their frustrated need for meaning. In the same way that our body is not satisfied by just recognising that we need to eat; our hunger for meaning requires action. Recognising this, we can change conversations of passive lament into conversations of hope and energy.

Every employee in the organisation knows what is meaningful

Once we have constructive language, recognising where work is meaningful, where more meaning needs to be created, and where current meaning is in danger of being destroyed, we need to take action. At present, the values-based discussion in organisations (where it takes place at all) is almost entirely claimed by the focus on ‘leadership’, and where positive change is called for, we increasingly call for ‘more leadership’. Yet, recent research shows that no employee spontaneously mentions leadership when talking about meaningful work (Bailey and Madden 2016).

In contrast, the fundamental reality that this book claims is that everybody in the organisation knows what is, and is not, meaningful. Reclaiming meaning is a bottom-up task which needs to be facilitated, but not directed, by those who have formal power in organisations.

Since power corresponds with the human ability not just to act but to act together (Hannah Arendt), we need a collective discourse that answers the questions:

• What really matters to us as human beings?
• What do we and the organisations in which we work need to do to remove obstacles to meaningful work?
• How do we create opportunities to have more meaningful work?

These questions position the quest for meaningful work in the socio-political realm and remind us that we are the designers and creators of the organisations in which we work.

The economist and philosopher E. F. Schumacher (1978: 14) noted that without a map of what we ‘really care about’, human beings ‘hesitate, doubt, change their minds, run hither and thither, uncertain not simply of how to get what they want, but above all of what they want’. At present this seems to be a prevailing pattern in organisations. Change is inevitable, but often results in contradictory practices, the removal of practices that employees really care about, and increasing layers of complexity that disconnect individuals at all levels of the organisation from the end result of their work. The Map of Meaning helps us design organisations in ways that support the human need for meaning. Working with it leads to a simple and integrative way of assessing organisational practices and taking action. When we work with it, people say ‘I now know what really matters to me and to others. I know what needs to be done next’.

The Map of Meaning is research based

Like all reliable maps, the Map of Meaning has been carefully tested. It is based on over 17 years’ research into the insights and practice of ordinary people, published in high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journals.

The Map of Meaning was developed by Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, based on an in-depth collaborative process that answers the question of ‘when do I find my work meaningful?’ The research found that people have meaning in their work when they experience: ‘expressing full potential’; ‘unity with others’; ‘serving others’ and ‘integrity with self’ (referred to as ‘developing the inner self’ in the research) (Lips-Wiersma 2002; Lips-Wiersma and Wright 2012a, b).

This research showed that:

• Meaning is not so personal and subjective that it cannot be worked with in organisations.
• People have common experiences of what creates and diminishes meaningful work. As a result, most organisational practices that create meaningful work are applicable to all employees.
• Work is experienced in very similar ways across cultures. The words might be different. For example, an American person might really like ‘inspiration’, whereas while working in Japan, we found the Japanese preferred ‘hope’. Both cultures felt that articulating a vision of possible, positive futures was one part of what made work meaningful.

Further research (Lips-Wiersma, Soutter and Wright 2015) appears to confirm and also enhance many of the positive psychology findings, by showing that meaning creation requires a process, not just a desire to live meaningfully.

A further paper, (Lips-Wiersma, Wright and Dik 2016), highlights that it is not just privileged workers who search for meaningfulness in their work. Blue- and pink-collar workers also place enormous importance on meaning, although, not surprisingly, they experience less of certain meanings, particularly ‘expressing full potential’.

In 2017 a paper was published on how the different dimensions of meaningful work (unity with others, expressing full potential, integrity with self, and service to others) relate to each other. This shows that meaning is not a simple list of things to articulate or experience, but that it is an ongoing process of discovering and creating balance between the dimensions of meaning, so that, for example, ‘serving others’ is not expressed at the exclusion of ‘unity with others’ or ‘integrity with self’.

The Map captures these find...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and overview
• 2 Background and guide to the Map of Meaning
• Part 1: Taking personal responsibility for meaningful work
• Part 2: Where meaning meets organisation
• Appendices
• References
• About the authors
• Index