By Ken Ludwig and Reg Urbanowski
The relationship between individuals and their work in an organization is imperative.
Those concerned with building organizations have long recognized the primary place of meaning, usually expressed in terms of purpose, for organizational effectiveness. We have also come to appreciate the power of participative processes in building teams and organizations.
But there is a depth in exploring and mediating personal meaning in the organizational context that we have only hinted at in our approaches thus far (although directly suggested by some), but not tended to fully embrace. This has left our organization building efforts limited to more traditional thinking and approaches, which appear to be inadequate to address challenges facing organizations across the globe today.
The challenge
Recent research indicates that not only are we not fully engaging people in their organizations, but also that engagement has been decreasing at an alarming rate. A Gallup poll in 2011 stated that: “71 per cent of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive” (Gallup 2011). Both Aon/Hewitt (2011) and the Kenexa Institute (2011) reported that 2011 marked a low point in the level of employee engagement worldwide, and Hay Group (2013) reported that the level remained flat through the subsequent two years.
This means that individuals are feeling less connected to the organizations in which they work, resulting in loss of realization of value to both sides of that relationship. The top drivers cited as impacting upon the level of engagement are: career opportunities, brand alignment and recognition (Aon/Hewitt 2011). Usual approaches to address these and other drivers do not appear to be resolving the overall challenge, and a different approach seems to be needed.
The deeper appreciation for personal meaning and its power to drive engagement suggests different approaches to many organizational challenges and practices.
The essential linkage
Organization builders – leaders and consultants – require a deeper understanding of work that goes to the heart of the relationship between individuals and their participation in organizations. This deeper understanding needs to start with the concept of meaning, as has been reflected in the focus on “purpose” and “meaning” in organizational development literature over the years. Senge (1990) has suggested personal mastery [finding personal meaning] as a core discipline within an effective learning organization. Collins (2001) speaks to the need for organizations to have a clear understanding of their purpose in order to make work meaningful. Wheatley (2005) counsels leaders to keep meaning at the forefront in their practices.
Further and more directly, Amabile and Kramer (2012) suggest that people have an innate desire to find personal meaning in their work lives. We experience personal meaning through a sense of vocation or meaningful occupation – that which we are drawn to do or be the difference that we seek to make in the world. The purposiveness within personal meaning and its expression (reinforced by recognition) provide the basis for self-worth. Our sense of vocation or meaningful occupation further leads us to seek to engage with specific work and pursue career directions that produce or contribute some value.
This essential linkage of the desire for personal meaning through vocation to engagement with work does not function in isolation but rather is embedded in its environment. The relational nature of personal identity drives our impulse toward belonging (Weinreich & Saunderson 2003; Baumeister & Leary 1995). Our sense of vocation or meaningful occupation is contextual; we feel called to do something in the world.
And our application of that calling to work is situated in a work environment of some kind. Finally, our work activity is linked to the world in which we are embedded through our work contributions.
As organizational development literature has suggested (Collins 2001; Wheatley 2005), organizations will truly engage their people with the work that needs to be done, to the mutual benefit of organization and individual, only so far as leaders honour the personal sense of meaning that people strive to know and experience, and facilitate this to find expression in the work environment. This requires a deeper appreciation of this linkage than that which underpins much current management practice.
The implications for organizations
The deeper appreciation for personal meaning and its power to drive engagement suggests different approaches to many organizational challenges and practices.
For leadership, this means:
• Championing the building of common meaning in the organization through facilitating true participation in building strategic direction and vision (e.g., giving voice through emergent, bottom-up planning processes);
• Mediating meaning by helping others to connect and align individual purposiveness/vocation with organizational direction, goals and brand;
• Providing meaningful work and careers through opportunities and parameters for meaningful occupation;
• Ensuring enabling environments that allow individual expression in the organizational context, through structures and cultures that encourage access, networking and dialogue; and
• Appreciating the deep power of recognition to demonstrate to people that what they do matters, and in turn reinforce their self-worth and nourish their passion.
In other areas of organizational practice, this means new depth in:
• Working toward person-centred organizational design;
• Building culture from truly shared meaning;
• Using orientation to start the process of connecting and unleashing, rather than socializing/conditioning;
• Approaching succession management primarily as mediating the intersection of organizational needs and individual aspirations (i.e., meaningfully supporting career planning);
• Focusing performance management on nurturing engagement; and
• Taking a strengths-based approach to disability management to focus on what the individual can do, and affirming their sense of vocation.
Conclusion
A deeper search for mediated meaning between people and organization can, and should, drive innovative organizational practices to address current engagement challenges. Fostering the realization of meaning holds the potential to grow real passion in organizations, and to release our generative impulse to be expressed in discretionary effort, initiative and innovation in the workplace.
References
Amabile T. and Kramer, S. (2012) How leaders kill meaning at work. McKinsey Quarterly, January.
Aon/Hewitt Associates. (2011) Global employee engagement research.
Baumeister, R. and Leary, M. (1995) The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation, Psychological Bulletin, 117(3): 497-529 (May 1995), Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University.
Collins, J. (2001) Good to Great. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Gallup. (2011) Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in Their Jobs. October 2011. http://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/Majority-American-Workers-Not-Engaged-Jobs.aspx
Hay Group. (2013) 2013 global employee engagement and enablement trends.
Kenexa High Performance Institute. (2011) Worktrends Report.
Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
Weinreich, P. and Saunderson, W. (eds.), (2003) Analyzing Identity: Cross-Cultural, Societal and Clinical Contexts. Routledge.
Wheatley,M. (2005) Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.