Do Good At Work

How Simple Acts of Social Purpose Drive Success and Wellbeing

Bea Boccalandro

• Éditeur: Morgan James Publishing
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642797534
• Sujet: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Sous-sujet: Persönlicher Erfolg

A delightful do-it-yourself guide to igniting meaning in any job.

II. JOB PURPOSING:
DO GOOD AT WORK TO DO GREAT IN LIFE

Chapter 4

WHAT JOB PURPOSING IS

“I love my work because I get to slay dragons!” says Dawn.

Dawn is not a hero in a fantasy novel. She’s a Florida FedEx driver not much taller than a parking meter. By “dragons,” Dawn means Burmese pythons. Many pet pythons, a species not native to Florida, have slithered into the wilderness, bred with each other and spawned an environmental calamity. Tens of thousands of wild pythons eat unsuspecting native creatures and threaten entire species of birds. In response, organizations like the Nature Conservancy and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission train people to travel wilderness roads, identify pythons, contact the local authorities and help remove these invasive snakes. This is where Dawn comes in. She serves as a trained python patroller as she crisscrosses the state delivering FedEx packages.

Like my father adding a pedestrian bridge for low-income families to a road blueprint, Dawn adjusted her job in a way that allows her to do good at work. Below are others who have done the same.

• •A parking attendant named Leroy inspects tires and, if the tread is bald, alerts the car’s owner. Leroy combats highway fatalities with every car he parks.
• •A manufacturing-plant manager, Mike, donates ten dollars from his department’s budget to a local food pantry every day his team has no safety violations. Mike’s team members fight hunger every time they strap on a hardhat or hold a ladder for a colleague.
• •A work-at-home employee at a professional-services business who competes in triathlons emails weekly tips to interested colleagues on how to adopt healthy behaviors. She’s helping people be healthier on a weekly basis.
• •The administrative assistant to the marketing director at a regional bank orders catering only from restaurants that support organic local farmers. Her meeting planning supports sustainable family farming.
• •Having learned the storage facility where she works is closing for the foreseeable future due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the attendant spends her last workday calling every elderly customer to offer free delivery of anything they need to ride out the crisis. She delivered disaster relief on her commute home.

Even celebrities slant their labor toward social purpose. Oprah Winfrey discussed meaningful societal issues on her television program, like addiction and domestic violence, when other talk-show hosts broadcast sensationalism. Later, she added a book club to promote adult literacy.

By doing good from work, my father, Dawn, Leroy, Mike, Oprah and the other workers listed above have done what I’ve termed “job purposing.”⁵⁸ Job purposing is any meaningful contribution to others or to a societal cause done as part of our work experience. Put another way, job purposing is a work-related action that, from the point of view of the individual performing it, furthers social purpose. More simply, job purposing is the application of the advice I give in speeches: If your job doesn’t improve the world, improve your job.

The research presented in chapters one through three suggests that job purposing has likely raised the work motivation, satisfaction and performance—as well as the personal wellbeing—of the above workers. They certainly see it this way. While Dawn had always liked her job, she credits job purposing with her newfound eagerness to get to work. Leroy, the parking attendant, was thrilled his colleagues expanded the tire inspection to a formal five-point safety check (including taillights, headlights, etc.) and believes being the originator of this program helped him get promoted to garage manager. The work-at-home service employee said that helping coworkers get healthier refreshed her work just when it was beginning to get unbearably dull. The administrative assistant who supports sustainable agriculture told me, “It’s hard to feel significant around executives who make decisions involving millions of dollars. Leaving my own positive imprint makes me feel like I’m also important.” Yet, Oprah’s story of social purpose driving runaway success might be the most telling.

Oprah was born to unwed teenage parents in rural Mississippi, grew up in poverty, suffered from child abuse and is obviously a woman and a minority. Despite such underprivileged beginnings, she has built one of the most successful television careers of all time and amassed a $2.5 billion personal fortune.⁵⁹ Does she credit some of this success to her focus on social purpose? So much so that she advises, “The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but on significance.”⁶⁰

To be clear, job purposing cannot fix every workplace issue. It won’t remedy dangerous or hostile working conditions, poor management, exploitation, harassment or corruption. Job purposing remedies one specific and relatively high-order deficiency: work that doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the world. While it’s true that remedying this deficiency cascades into colossal positive impacts on our success and wellbeing, it still doesn’t address any separate and distinct workplace problems like those listed above. Furthermore, some of these other issues are graver and more urgent than job purposing and should, thus, be prioritized.

When Studs Terkel, from chapter one, discovered that many saw work as a “sort of dying,” he also discovered that the opposite is possible. His full quote is, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”⁶¹ Job purposing is the way to unlock the rewarding, meaningful and astonishing life that work can offer.

How to Know If We’ve Successfully Job Purposed

Most of us intuitively know if our jobs are purposed. In fact, that’s the definition of job purposing: feeling confident that, as part of our workweek, we’ve made a meaningful contribution to others or to a cause.

It doesn’t take altruistic heroics to have a positive impact and to feel like we have. For example, Verena Rentrop knew beyond a doubt that she made a meaningful contribution at her technology job at Nokia. Yet, her job purposing couldn’t have been simpler. She filled a box with tasty treats and spent lunchtime walking from desk to desk offering a smile, a snack and a few seconds of undivided attention, what she calls “micro-moments of love.” My first conversation with Verena convinced me that she must have a purposed job. She’s the poster child for the benefits of pursuing social purpose. She’s energetic, cheerful, seemingly healthy and as delightful as the flower pattern on her dress. I wanted my talk with her never to end.

Verena’s example of sharing treats is a modest action that contributes to others or a societal cause. Other workers have job purposed by updating email signatures to bring attention to a neglected charitable cause, inviting colleagues to eliminate single-use plastics from their workday, showing interest in every person they speak with and otherwise doing small other-oriented acts.

After I present the above explanation of job purposing, people often ask me something like, “That’s it? How can such minor adjustments, often at the outer edges of our jobs, change how motivated, productive and satisfied we are with work? Are you delusional?” Okay, they don’t verbalize that last question, but their scrunched eyebrows give it away. I don’t blame them. At first, I didn’t believe the evidence either and some of it came from my own research.

A Little Purpose Goes a Long Way

I have job-purposing data from hundreds of thousands of workers across dozens of companies and countries. For 74 percent of respondents, five to thirty minutes of workplace social-purpose activity during the prior week is enough for them to report that their job is purposed. That is, they feel they make meaningful contributions to others or a societal cause as part of their workplace experience. As would be expected, the workers with purposed jobs are more motivated and satisfied with work than those without.

Others have corroborated my findings. One experiment asked workers to direct mini acts of job purposing toward coworkers for one month. These acts were as simple and small as buying a coworker a coffee or listening to their stories with more care. The study found that five of these small acts per month were enough to trigger higher levels of job satisfaction (compared to a control group).⁶² Similarly, other research finds that episodic and short-lived social purpose moments, such as redirecting plastic waste from a landfill to recycling or helping a colleague understand a work-related concept, are enough for workers to describe their work as making a meaningful contribution.⁶³ Remember that my Atlanta audience reported feeling less stressed after a five-minute act of social purpose.

In other words, although a minority of us have purposed jobs, it typically takes only a few minutes per week of social-purpose activity to give ourselves this gift and reap its associated professional and personal benefits. Even monthly or quarterly job purposing boosts our success and wellbeing, although less substantially than a weekly cadence does.

Of course, job purposing can be as ambitious as we choose to make it. For example, a handful of factory workers at a Unilever beauty-products factory in India started a cosmetology course in their village to help local women get a job while also selling Unilever products. Hundreds of women have graduated from their training center and most have secured jobs in the beauty industry.

A second example of ambitious job purposing comes from Alberto Vollmer, co-owner of the Santa Teresa rum distillery in Venezuela. Vollmer offered the gang that robbed his business and almost killed an employee an alternative to jail time. They could work at Santa Teresa and repay the damage they caused. The gang members chose employment. This started Santa Teresa on a job-purposing journey that, seventeen years later, has resulted in a comprehensive rehabilitation and jobs program. Santa Teresa now offers at-risk and incarcerated youth counseling, formal education, rugby, job apprenticeships and seemingly anything else they need to secure gainful employment at Santa Teresa or elsewhere. In other words, one of the world’s top-ten rum producers doubles as a workforce development center that has helped tens of thousands of underprivileged youth become legally employed.

In summary, job purposing is highly elastic. It can be a high-stakes effort applied across our company’s operations, as the Unilever team and Vollmer demonstrate. But it can also be a quick and comfortable action performed by one or two of us, as python-patrol Dawn and safety-check Leroy show. Both the grand and modest versions of job purposing—and everything in between—meaningfully contribute to others and ourselves. In other words, job purposing on any scale is worthwhile.

Chapter 5

WHAT JOB PURPOSING IS NOT

I’m sprawled on the living-room carpet as though I just landed an indoor belly flop. A magazine and drawing pad lay in front of me. I see Papi’s loafers just before he sits down. Once awkwardly seated next to me, he examines my crayon drawing and breaks into song. “Tengo una vaca lechera, no es una vaca cualquiera…” (Which translates to “I have a dairy cow, it’s not just any cow…”)

“Papi, help! My second cow looks like it’s kneeling.” I whine. He’s the right person to ask. Besides being able to do anything, in my eight-year-old judgment, I’ve seen him tilt his head to examine a photograph, put his felt-tip marker on paper and with a handful of strokes draw whatever was in the photograph—a woman getting out of a car, a man laughing, a monkey eating a mango. His drawing is always simpler, funnier and better than the photograph. I’m trying to do a “Papi drawing” of a photograph of cattle in a field.

“And what’s wrong with a kneeling cow? How else is it supposed to pray?” Papi responds.

“Paaaapi, I’m not kidding. Look how terrible it looks,” I counter.

“Hmmm. I see the problem. Your cow is naked! And praying? That’s blasphemous. Quick! Draw a skirt!” he says with mock seriousness.

I giggle.

Papi clears his throat. “Mi cielito lindo [my precious little sky], to delineate something it helps to look at what’s just outside of it,” he says. He points to the space behind the animal’s hard-to-draw front legs and under its belly. He then guides my hand to that place on the drawing and says, “Don’t focus on the cow. Pay attention to the neighboring shapes.” It does the trick. By drawing the contours of the area that abuts the cow with a bold line, I suddenly have a clearly defined and upright cow.

My dad’s tip is helpful in understanding job purposing. Job purposing becomes clear when we define two concepts that are next door to and often confused with it: our life’s purpose and our personal passion. Many people lament they can’t job purpose because they d...