If a person feels their work is meaningful, they will perform better. Effective performance management must acknowledge this and incorporate measurement of meaningfulness into regular performance assessments.
Historically, performance management focused heavily on output, metrics, and quantitative targets. However, modern workplace research shows that measuring meaningfulness, purpose, motivation, and the impact of efforts yields much stronger long-term results.
Key Takeaways
- Employees do better work if they feel their job is meaningful, which means that it aligns with their values and has a purpose.
- Meaningful work, according to McKinsey, is work that helps a broader cause, contributes to a shared vision, makes people’s lives better, is performed within a healthy team environment, and leads to individual career growth.
- Meaningful work should also meet certain psychological needs, including ownership of one’s work, a certain mastery of one’s role, a sense of connection with others, and a sense that one is having a positive impact.
- Managers can assess whether employees find their work meaningful by asking targeted questions about their workplace experience.
- These questions include: asking what people value and how their work reflects those values, asking about employees’ sense of commitment to their team, asking how they perceive the value of their work, asking whether they have meaningful professional interactions, understanding what matters most employees in terms of job design, asking about personal growth and professional development, and assessing the nature of the workplace culture.
- Performance management tools provide the support managers need to ask the right questions and analyse the answers to gain actionable insights.
Table of Contents
1. Why Measure Meaning at Work?
2. What Makes Work Meaningful: Two Frameworks
3. What to Measure When Assessing What’s Meaningful
4. 7 Tips for Measuring Meaningful Work
5. Performance Management Tools for Measuring Meaningful Work
Why Measure Meaning at Work?
Meaningful work is work that a person feels is significant, aligns with their values, and serves a valuable, broader purpose. It is not defined by a specific job title. It’s shaped by an employee’s personal assessment and perceptions.
McKinsey research indicates that when employees find their work meaningful, their performance improves by 33%, they are 75% more committed to their organization, and they are 49% less likely to leave.
In addition, Google searches in the U.S. for “meaningful work” have climbed 615% in the past decade, and are now at all-time highs.
It is clear that meaningful work is a priority for today’s employees, so measuring it can help managers understand what’s keeping their teams engaged and committed.
What Makes Work Meaningful: Two Frameworks
In order to measure meaningfulness at work, you need to understand what makes work meaningful. With a solid grasp of the values and traits associated with meaningful work, managers can incorporate questions and evaluations of these elements into the performance review and performance management processes, and effectively measure whether meaningfulness is impacting engagement, motivation and overall performance.
Let’s take a look at two frameworks for defining meaningfulness at work:
1. The Five Sources of Meaning
McKinsey outlines a 5-part framework that shows where people actually derive meaning from their work.
There is no mention of salary or work-life balance in this list. Rather, the focus is entirely on purpose.
- Society: Helping a broader cause, the community, or the environment.
- Company: Contributing to the organization’s industry leadership or shared vision.
- Customers: Directly making the end-user’s life better, safer, or easier.
- Team: Fostering high-performing, psychologically safe, and supportive peer groups.
- Personal Success: Autonomy, learning and development, and individual career growth.
2. The Four Basic Psychological Needs That Meaningful Work Should Meet
Meaningful work also meets innate psychological needs, according to Frank Martela and coauthors in The Journal of Vocational Behavior. They describe these four psychological pathways to meaningful work:
- Autonomy: Degree of ownership over one’s work and control over how it is done.
- Competence: Level of mastery of job responsibilities.
- Relatedness: Sense of connection with others, along with the feeling that one’s manager and coworkers care about their wellbeing.
- Beneficence: The sense that one is positively influencing the lives of others.
Further, meaningful work aligns with employee values and aspirations. Autonomy and competence within their role will allow employees to be their authentic selves and move toward their career goals. As a result, they’ll truly thrive.
What to Measure When Assessing What’s Meaningful
To evaluate whether employees find their work meaningful in a performance cycle, organizations are moving away from one-shot annual surveys and moving toward active dialogue and targeted metrics, a continuous performance management approach that keeps the conversation alive all year long.
Using surveys, one-on-one meetings and regular real-time feedback, it’s possible to ask the kind of questions that are related to how meaningful a person is finding their work, and take real action as needed.
9 Questions to ask employees about meaningfulness
Questions about meaningfulness at work can be hard to formulate. Take a look at this list to start off on the right track. Ask employees to respond using a Likert Scale, with 1 being the lowest rating and 5 being the highest. Then discuss the results together in your next one-on-one meeting.
Ask your employees: Do you …
- Believe that your contributions are valuable to the company?
- Feel that the company is pursuing an important mission?
- Believe you are positively affecting others through your work?
- Have the opportunity to help design your own workload?
- Feel able to choose how you carry out tasks?
- Have the opportunity to design your own career path and pursue relevant developmental opportunities?
- Integrate these trainings and opportunities into your weekly work?
- Collaborate and interact with colleagues on a daily basis?
- Have strong relationships with your team and manager?
Equipped with the answers to these questions, you will better understand what motivates and engages your employees and you will be primed to find ways to make work more meaningful.
7 Tips for Measuring Meaningful Work
Here are seven ways to get the actionable insights you need when assessing whether employees find their work meaningful.
1. Try to Connect Work with Values
To feel meaningful, work needs to connect to employees’ values.
Ask about what each individual values most and how they see their values reflected in their work. For instance, values could include taking smart risks, promoting equity, driving innovation, striving to learn from each day, or prioritizing environmental responsibility.
If they do not answer positively when questioned, help employees see the connections between their work and their values. Talk about the organization’s mission and put an emphasis on the purpose of the work you’re doing together. Take note if the employee’s perceived sense of doing meaningful work improves following your discussion.
2. Assess Employees’ Perceived Sense of Community
Having supportive relationships and feeling a sense of team solidarity makes work feel more meaningful.
Ask employees if they feel a sense of commitment to their team.
Organizing specific events can also be a way to measure the perceived sense of community in your workplace. Do employees attend? Is the mood cheerful? A quick survey or casual chat can answer these questions and give you a clue as to whether your team-building efforts are working.
Here are a few ideas:
- Hold a volunteering day or another activity outside of work.
- Hold company or team retreats or mini-retreats.
- Meet up periodically for meals, even if you don’t work in the same location. Or hold “lunch and learn” sessions.
- Conduct group trainings with Q&A opportunities.
3. Assess the Perceived Value of Employees’ Work
To feel their work is meaningful, employees need to see the value they deliver in their work and how it shapes broader outcomes.
You can ask questions about how employees perceive the value of their work during one-on-one meetings or in formal reviews.
Once you have a sense of what they feel, there are several ways you can improve their perceived sense of the value of their efforts, such as by:
- Illustrating how their work led to the success of a project.
- Sharing how a client benefited from an employee’s efforts.
- Making sure managers are communicating gratitude for work done well.
- Asking senior leaders to thank people at all levels for their specific efforts.
Employee appreciation goes a long way to reinforcing the value of work done, and is proven to improve engagement and retention levels in organizations of all sizes.
4. Focus on Self-Awareness
Measuring self-awareness is one way to assess and improve levels of meaningfulness in workplace relationships. The more employees become aware of their own behaviors and interactions, the better they are equipped to build positive daily collaborations. Meaningful interactions are an important element of meaningful work as a whole.
Incorporating self-evaluations into your yearly or ongoing performance management strategy is an excellent way to encourage better awareness and more meaningful communication. While it may seem indirectly related to finding work meaningful, this exercise is key to developing positive outcomes in interpersonal relationships in the workplace, which directly impacts employee’s sense of purpose and well-being.
5. Engage in Job Design
Do your employees have any say in designing their own roles? Are you aware of their professional priorities? Do you know what matters most to them in their current job description?
Employee autonomy includes giving workers the power to participate in defining their professional roles, and directly impacts how meaningful they find their work.
During your assessment, ask questions about:
- Expanding or reducing the scope of a role to focus more on what an employee is most passionate about.
- Creating more variety in their work, assigning them to different tasks based on need, or reprioritizing requests.
- Increasing collaboration and social interaction.
- Adding educational opportunities as a daily priority.
- Increasing responsibilities, like training other employees, helping a manager with higher-level tasks, or leading a project.
- Offering opportunities to work more directly with clients or customers.
- Reframing how they perceive tasks (e.g., discovering how mundane tasks support a broader purpose). They may not enjoy every task equally, but they can connect to purpose within them nonetheless.
“Job design factors like job autonomy, skill variety, task significance, and feedback from the job are strongly related to experiencing meaning at work, ” according to the Quality Improvement Center for Workplace Development.
Job crafting can open the door to understanding what employees truly aim to accomplish, and improving the sense of their work being meaningful. If employees do not find any meaning in their work, they will have no ideas about how to make it even better.
6. Prioritize Personal Growth
Do your employees have opportunities for professional development? People find work more meaningful when it brings continuous opportunities for growth.
Each day then becomes an opportunity to learn or practice new skills. In turn, these competencies could serve as stepping stones to exciting career moves.
It’s important to check in and ask what employees need, want and expect in terms of professional development. During reviews, examine what types of initiatives they have taken on their own to improve their skills. A person who finds meaning in their work will be motivated to improve and learn more. Someone who is lacking drive may simply not see the why behind making an effort.
Stretch projects, mentorships, job shadowing, cross-functional training, online training modules, webinars, and conferences are different opportunities for growth that give work meaning. Find out what element of their work makes your employees feel they are doing something meaningful, either by observing which direction their own efforts are leading them or by asking outright, and offer developmental opportunities that align.
7. Address the Workplace Culture
A positive workplace culture helps foster a sense of purpose.
There are several ways to assess whether your workplace culture is contributing to employees’ finding their work meaningful. Ask about employee experience. Ask about people experience. Ask if people feel respected, and if they find the workplace inclusive and fair. Get a sense of whether the company culture supports employee well-being or if it is merely the extension of a purely corporate identity.
When organizations prioritize the employee experience, work shifts from being an obligation to being fulfilling.
Leadership plays a huge role in building company culture and therefore in helping employees see their work as meaningful. In fact, the Harvard Business School states that leaders are almost exclusively responsible for keeping everyone informed of and aligned with a company’s mission, purpose, and vision.
Performance Management Tools for Measuring Meaningful Work
“Meaningful work” may be a fairly recent concept, but the methods for measuring it build on traditional, tried-and-true performance management practices.
A professional performance management software suite like Primalogik contains all the tools you need to assess whether employees find their work meaningful:
- Goal-tracking software, since clear goals reflect a clear vision of what matters
- 360 feedback software, to uncover strengths and blind spots through multi-source feedback
- Employee feedback tools, so you can share real-time feedback including daily tips, insights, and praise
- Performance reviews software,to support meaningful performance conversations with employees
- Employee surveys for quick assessments on specific questions related to meaningful work
Our award-winning set of tools helps HR leaders, HR consultants and managers create and maintain a year-round, continuous performance management strategy. Book a free demo today!