Zach Mercurio's Blog, page 2

Finding Purpose in a Pandemic

I was in the parking lot at my kids’ daycare when I got the notification. I looked down at my phone, and nausea returned.

The first word of the e-mail subject line read, “Canceled.” It was the latest in a string of messages that obliterated my false sense of stability, security, and purpose.

A big part of my work (and income) comes from sharing research through speaking to large groups. It’s not a very pandemic-resistant occupation. A few months of work was wiped out on a Friday afternoon.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck. I don’t face food insecurity. I don’t rely on a front-line service job for my family’s health benefits.

Still, I felt an eerie emptiness. Why?

The true value of something in our lives is often revealed when we lose it.

Though I research purpose and meaning, the pandemic is revealing that I overvalue the things I do, my activity.

It’s always a risky bet to tie our identity to what we do. At some point – because of a pandemic or some other external inevitability – we won’t be able to do it.

Then what? When the “thing” disappears, our sense of self goes with it.

That’s why psychologists find people who set too many achievement-oriented goals are more likely to feel stressed, anxious, and depressed than those who set contribution-oriented goals.

For many of us over the next few weeks and months, the activities we thought gave our lives meaning will change or vanish.

Parents won’t have the bustle of bringing kids to and from school, rehearsals, and practices. We won’t be able to go to our regular church service, to our weekly happy hour with friends, or take our favorite workout class. Remote workers won’t get to see their co-workers or their customers every day, and many artists and athletes won’t get to practice craft they’ve spent their whole lives honing.

We’ve been forced to pause, quarantined to reflect.

In this newfound vacuum of activity, we have an opportunity to move on to better questions, ones that we know result in longer-term thriving: Apart from what I do, achieve, or produce, who am I?

Why am I?

What is my purpose in the absence of all the doing?

Here are ways to start answering that question.

1. Realize that your purpose isn’t what you do

It’s first essential to realize that your purpose isn’t what you do, it’s the contribution you make through what you do.

School, a job, or a volunteer position are ways through which you make an impact, not the impact itself.

Realizing this difference is powerful because as soon as you can separate what you do with the impact you want to make, new possibilities emerge that aren’t confined to a role or activity (that you may not be able to do anymore).

Purposeful people tend to focus more on the contribution they can make where they are, and not on the things they do.

Research finds the result is more energy, increased mood, better health, and ultimately more resilience.

During this pause, if you want a great way to identify the impact you want to make, my friends at PurposeMatch are offering readers of my blog free use of a powerful tool that helps you identify where your strengths are needed most.

Just head here and enter the code TIMEFORPURPOSE within the next 30 days.

2. Learn to see purpose in the mundane by crafting a purposeful mindset

A few years ago, my 97-year-old grandfather sent me a card for my birthday. In it, he asked one question: “How do you improve the moment?”

That is the question for this moment. The one constant on even our worst day is the opportunity to contribute.

Now, more than ever, our lives may be comprised of more ordinary moments.

In my research on how people come to experience meaningfulness in their work, I’ve come to one conclusion: The most extraordinary people do ordinary things with an extraordinary perspective.

Studies show that your approach and your mindset about what you do have more influence on a sense of meaningfulness than the task itself.

 And, you can learn a purposeful mindset.

Before each day during these trying times, ask yourself: How is what I’m going to do today going to affect others? Who is relying on me today?

As you think about the tasks you need to do, ask: How does this impact another person? What will be possible because I am doing this? How will this help me make an impact in the future?

At the end of your day, ask: What mattered today? When did I feel a sense of purpose today?

What we pay attention to is what we think about. What we think about is who we are.

3. Redefine success

After reading that cancellation e-mail, I finally got out of my car and walked in to pick up my kids. My first stop was my two-year old’s classroom.

As soon as I got to the door and he saw my face, he dropped the toy he was playing with and toddler-sprinted to me. He latched on to me and gave me what I noticed or just hoped was an extra-long hug.

He wasn’t disappointed that my 2020 revenue was down. He was glad I was there so he could tell me about the mouse he finger-painted.

I then went to pick up my 5-year old. He, too, ran up to me and hugged me. He wasn’t frustrated that another keynote got canceled, he was glad I was there and took me by the hand and showed me a Lego tower he was “proud of.”

 Then, he turned to me and said, “Daddy, I want to go home.”

“Me too,” I said.

Someone needs you right now, too. 

Being there is success. 

Being there is purpose.

The post Finding Purpose in a Pandemic appeared first on Zach Mercurio.

It’s Time to Stop Dehumanizing Frontline Workers

Last year, in an airport restroom, I saw a man crumple a paper towel and throw it toward a trash can attached to a janitor’s cleaning cart. It bounced off the rim and dropped to the floor, right next to the janitor’s boot. The two exchanged glances and the man walked out the door, leaving the wad of paper settling on the floor.

The janitor picked up the avoidable litter as if experiencing casual disrespect was part of his routine. For many of the 24 million frontline workers who do society’s necessary work, it is.

One of society’s greatest hidden ills is the tendency to devalue, degrade, and dehumanize the people in the jobs we need most.

I’m ashamed to admit I wouldn’t have noticed this act of indifference if I wasn’t in the midst of a two-year research project exploring how janitors made meaning in their work.

Studies, including ours, find that degrading acts, mainly from the public, contribute to feelings of meaninglessness characterized by hopelessness, a loss of dignity, and despair for an already susceptible segment of our workforce.

The Effects of Stigma on Frontline Workers: Meaninglessness and Despair

Janitorial work is one of many stigmatized jobs, occupations looked down on because of their undesirable nature, the low skill level required, or low pay. Since the 1940s, the National Opinion Research Center has surveyed the public to measure what society-at-large deems worthy work. The occupations consistently rated lowest are laborers, packers, food service workers, and cleaners – the frontline jobs comprising most of the American workforce.

Often the perceived unworthiness of a job gets unduly transferred to the person in the job. If the work one does is “dirty,” the person doing it must be dirty. If a job doesn’t require post-secondary education, the person in it must be “uneducated.”

Many acts of stigma are commonplace, such as the parents I overheard threatening a college student by saying, “You need to get your grades up or you’ll be working at McDonald’s,” while in front of a barista. Some are more striking, like the supervisor who told a janitor in my study that he “could train a monkey to do this job” during an onboarding session.

All acts of stigma are avoidable.

A janitor in our study described stigma’s impact, saying, “When somebody’s flat out rude to you or calls you a ‘maid,’ or things like that, it does rake on you. It makes me feel like my job is worthless like, ‘If you don’t want me here, why am I bothering?’”

Dignifying Dirty Work: Giving Meaning

Experiencing meaninglessness compounds the well-documented low engagement and low satisfaction among frontline workers, worsened by the historic lack of investment from organizations and sparse academic research on their experiences.

At the same time, research finds that experiencing meaningful work – perceiving a job as positive, purposeful, and significant – is associated with increased work engagement, higher overall satisfaction, and well-being outside of work.

In a study of hospital cleaners, Yale University professor of organizational behavior Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues found a significant source of cleaners’ experiences of meaningfulness came from verbal or nonverbal messages they received from others.

Affirming cues like a patient demonstrating an interest in their work contributed to positive meaning, while disaffirming cues like a doctor leaving a mess right in front of them contributed to meaninglessness. Most of the cues were small acts, such as a glance or a “thank you.”

In other words, just as we can take meaning away from others, we can also give it.

People in stigmatized jobs are part of your routine, their invisibility a byproduct of both their indispensability and good work doing the things most of us have the luxury of forgetting about, the work that enables us to live.

They comprise the workforces of the companies we love. They ensure safe roads to drive on, ship our Amazon packages, clean our doctor’s offices, ready our hotel rooms, decontaminate our drinking water, and dispose of our trash.

As individuals, organizations, and society, we should thank them, but above all, we should respect and revere them and their important occupations.

As I was leaving that airport bathroom, I looked up at the janitor said, “Hey, thanks for doing that.”

He startled, looked up at me and said, “my pleasure.” He smiled.

He was seen.

The post It’s Time to Stop Dehumanizing Frontline Workers appeared first on Zach Mercurio.

How to Connect Your People to Purpose and Why It’s Vital

If you’ve read the many workplace psychology studies and whitepapers published over the past decade, you probably know that a sense of purpose in work is important.

Studies show that when people believe that their work matters, they’re four times more likely to be engaged, are more motivated, learn faster, and are more fulfilled.

But do you know how to activate purpose and connect your people to it?

If you’re unsure, you have company.

A recent survey of over 502 leaders revealed that while 79% of leaders think that connecting their people to an inspiring purpose is critical to success, just 27% say they regularly enact purpose when working with their teams.

Closing the gap between the stimulating idea of purpose and its transformative practice to drive employee engagement, motivation, and fulfillment may be the most important task of modern organizational leaders.

Here’s why.

Why Purpose in Work Matters Now

The human yearning for purpose in work isn’t a new idea, it’s a universal human desire.

In 1974, oral historian Studs Terkel published his findings from in-depth interviews with over 130 people in diverse occupations. He found that for most, 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.”

As Terkel’s findings emphasize, because we’ll spend an average of 35% of our waking lives at work, it’s a critical context through which meaning is made of life itself.

It’s not a surprise that most people want that meaning to be positive.

Over the past 40 years, researchers confirm that people seem to have an inherent need and desire for meaningful work – work that is experienced as significant and purposeful.

Today, experiencing a sense of purpose in work seems more important than ever.

A 2018 study showed that 83% of people in diverse occupations say finding meaning in work is a daily top priority, and more than 50% of people across numerous occupations and industries indicate they would take a lower-paying job for more meaning and a greater sense of purpose.

This August, 181 of the world’s most powerful CEOs pledged that business should no longer exist solely to make a profit but should serve a human-centered purpose first.

Today, if an organization doesn’t have a digital footprint, it’s irrelevant. It seems the same will be true in the coming decade for organizations that aren’t purpose-driven.

What Purpose Is and How Purpose Works to Drive Employee Fulfillment

Purpose generally means the reason for which something is done or created, the reason for its existence.

When applied to work, purpose is our usefulness and our contribution – the reason why what we’re doing exists in the world.

When people can clearly see how their work contributes to others and serves a greater reason for being, research shows they become better.

Why?

First, when purpose is embedded into an organization’s culture, it constantly reorients people to focus on contribution.

This is powerful because neuroscientists find that human beings are hard-wired for altruism.

Studies show that when we think about our impact on others or directly help someone else, we get a boost of the “happiness trifecta” of neurotransmitters: oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin.

Oxytocin supports empathy and social bonding. Dopamine plays a major role in motivation and movement. Serotonin regulates mood.

The results are the desirable individual and organizational outcomes like increased engagement, motivation, and fulfillment.

Second, purpose lasts longer as a motivator than achievements or results. Results push people for the short-term, but a bigger other-centered purpose pulls them for the long-term.

This is partly why Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found in her comprehensive study on resilience, that the pulling force of purpose is one of the key predictors of grit.

“Grit,” Duckworth said, “is stamina, but it’s not just stamina in your effort. It’s also stamina in your direction.”

Cultivating a motivated, fulfilled, engaged, and gritty workforce starts with purpose.

3 Ways to Connect Your People to Purpose

One of the most influential functions of a leader is the ability to infuse purpose into people’s work and enable positive meaning.

But it’s not enough to “have purpose.” Leaders must create a culture that promotes being purposeful.

Here are some research-backed ways to do it:

1. Regularly show people how their work benefits others

A couple of years ago, I worked with a team responsible for packing and distributing small components that are shipped to a manufacturer that assembles diagnostic medical devices.

After a tough financial quarter, this team was visibly demoralized.

Toward the end of a workshop I facilitated on purposeful work, a team leader raised her hand.

“I’ve been here for 12 years, but last month I learned for the first time why my job exists,” she said. “I was diagnosed with cancer and as I was laying in the MRI machine, I looked up at the logo imprinted on its side and thought to myself, ‘we distributed the widget in this machine.’”

“I realized my job had existed all this time to save my own life.”

If you want an antidote to employee disengagement, show people how they matter. Before my eyes, I saw her colleagues become more engaged.

Connecting people to purpose starts regularly showing people how their work matters. The results can be transformative. In fact, Wharton School professor Adam Grant and colleagues found in a landmark study that meeting just one person your job impacts can increase motivation and productivity by 400%.

Here are some key practices for showing people how their work benefits others:

During onboarding, make sure people connect early and often to a beneficiary of the work – direct stories work bestWhen delegating or assigning anything, before you tell people what to do and how to do it, show them why it matters through a storyWhen giving positive feedback and recognition, don’t tell someone they “did a good job,” specifically show them the difference they madeInvite employees to tell stories of their impact on others and incorporate these stories in regular team touchpointsEncourage people to keep a weekly “contribution” journal that documents the ways they made a difference for team members or end-users



2. Help people tie their everyday tasks to a bigger purpose worth committing to

As John F. Kennedy was about to give a speech to launch the Apollo missions, he walked past a janitor and asked, “What do you do here?”

The janitor replied, “I’m putting a man on the moon,” and went back to mopping the floor.

This legendary and well-told story is inspiring, but how NASA’s leaders maintained a clear focus on this bigger purpose amongst a 300,000-person dispersed team is instructive for modern leaders.

In an archival study of organizational practices at NASA, researchers uncovered that each functional unit had a “ladder to the moon” – a tangible view of how each group’s tasks accomplished tangible objectives which would enable a moon landing.

Being able to clearly see how a task, no matter how small, contributes to a bigger purpose is called task identity and is a key predictor of meaningfulness.

Here are some key practices to connect people’s everyday tasks to a bigger purpose:

Ensure the organization has a clear, contribution-focused purpose statement to harmonize energy and that it is able to be articulated at all levelsMake sure each team has a “ladder to the purpose” and that every person and position can see how their core work tasks and processes meet measurable objectives that enable the purpose to be deliveredMake the pathway to purpose a daily discussionRegularly assess whether employees can articulate the bigger contribution their core tasks enableProvide the space for each individual to build their own purpose statement and provide a clear path for how it connects to delivering the organization’s purpose



3. Make contribution goals more important than achievement goals

What a culture rewards is typically what a culture becomes. Most organizations unintentionally reward for self-serving behaviors.

Cultivating a purposeful workforce means rethinking both the nature of the goals people set and what goals people are rewarded for achieving.

Psychologists find there are two types of goals: self-image goals and compassionate goals. Self-image goals are those used to get ahead. Compassionate goals are those used to contribute more.

Through studying groups of people over long periods of time, researchers find that those who set other-centered goals experience more motivation, learn more, and form more supportive relationships than those who don’t.

Studies also find that when teams use “we” instead of “I” they experience more meaningfulness and engagement.

Here are some key practices to make contribution goals more important than achievement goals:

Review the goals set for employees, are more of them achievement-oriented or contribution-oriented?Set organizational goals that are measured by their relative impact on others, not on organizational gainEncourage individual employees to set goals that result in a contribution to othersCreate a rewards structure – yes even financial – that reward for purposeful behavior



Purpose in Work Isn’t A Trend, It’s an Expectation

To summarize, the search for purpose isn’t a trend, it’s a uniting trait of our species. That search doesn’t stop when someone clocks in.

Organizations that enable the experience of purpose in work inspire their people to be more engaged, motivated and fulfilled.

By regularly showing people how their work benefits others, helping people tie their everyday tasks to a bigger purpose worth committing to, and making contribution goals more important than achievement goals, you can help people experience positive meaning in work.

Psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl wrote that “Striving to find meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force of man.”

Purposeful organizations unleash this force.

This story originally appeared on  Bonus.ly .

The post How to Connect Your People to Purpose and Why It’s Vital appeared first on Zach Mercurio.

Everyday Purpose: How to Find Meaning in the Mundane

If most of your day is spent doing mundane tasks, you’re not alone.

Surveys find that almost 60 percent of the average person’s day is spent on routine details like paperwork, e-mail, informal conversations, or planning and being in meetings. For most U.S. workers who reside in wage-earning service-based occupations, that percentage is probably much higher with days often filled with repetitive, manual tasks.

If researchers’ consensus is right that you’ll work for around 90,000 hours in your lifetime, then roughly 2,250 full days will likely be spent in ordinary ways. That doesn’t include the time spent commuting, waiting in lines (we’ll spend close to 235 days of our lives doing that), or doing the other necessary activities of being a functioning human.

If you have the economic privilege (most people don’t)
and think that “following your passion” or landing your “dream
job” will help you escape mundanity, you’re probably mistaken.

Recently, I talked with an accomplished classical
pianist. While fawning over how amazing and meaningful his work must be, I
said, “You must just love what you do.” To which he replied,
“Well, the 1% of performing is amazing, but 99% of what I do is a complete
grind, I sit in my studio and practice a small part of a piece of music for
eight hours straight, every single day of my life.”

Most professional athletes spend half of their waking lives doing the same drills over and over and over. Before the historic “one small step for man” moment, Neil Armstrong and his fellow Apollo 11 astronauts sat at desks in a classroom learning rudimentary geology and spent countless hours using a small shovel in the Arizona desert to create the muscle memory to be able to take a sample of moon rock.

Despite the cautious hopes of automation freeing us
from the mundane (which could happen), or a magical new management paradigm
infiltrating organizations in the coming decades (which I’m all for), the
reality is that the repetitive details comprising our work and lives are
unlikely to change.

If author Annie Dillard was right when she said,
“How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives,”
learning the skill to find the meaning in the mundane might be key to finding
meaning in work and life itself.

Adopting a Craftsperson’s Mindset

Many of the people I study do repetitive, manual work in jobs like janitors, mechanics, or plumbers.

Those who report experiencing regular meaningfulness in
their work tend to adopt what Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown,
called a “craftsman’s mindset” in his book, “Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”

There’s a legend in the stonemasonry community about a
man who happened upon three stonemasons tediously chipping away chunks of
granite. The first stonemason was unhappy, looking at his watch and scowling.
The man asked the mason what he was doing. The first mason said, “What
does it look like? Just hammering this stupid rock so I can get home at 5 p.m.
and get paid.”

The second mason was more into his work, hammering more
carefully. When the man asked this mason what he was doing, he said, “I’m
molding this rock so it can be used to finish that wall over there, it’s not
too bad, but I can’t wait until it’s done.”

The third mason was hammering and chipping diligently
and methodically, frequently stopping and running his hand over the rock and
stepping back to admire his work. The first time the man asked him what he was
doing, he didn’t hear him because he was so engrossed in the task.

Finally, this third mason said, looking skyward,
“I’m building a cathedral!”

The third stonemason was enacting a craftsperson’s mindset, the ability to consistently think about how a small duty connects to something greater and remain focused on it.

Authors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly depicted the role of the craftsman
as “not to generate meaning, but rather cultivate in himself the
skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.”

While most of us aren’t stonemasons building a cathedral or astronauts going to the moon, what we do every day, no matter how tedious, is inextricably linked to something bigger than the task itself.

Most likely, that “something bigger” is
another human being.

People who experience sustained meaningfulness tend to be able to think about, approach, and do everyday tasks with their inevitable contribution at the forefront.

Here are some ways to learn how:

3 Questions to Help Discern Meaning in the Mundane

In 1975, organizational psychologists J. Richard
Hackman and Greg R. Oldham studied 658 workers in 62 different
jobs to determine the “critical psychological states”
necessary for motivation to do work tasks. The researchers found, and extensive validation has
supported, that experienced meaningfulness was the more powerful
predictor of work motivation.

To experience meaningfulness in a task, the study found
workers need to be able to do and experience three elements.

First, they must know the significance of the
task to another person. Second, they must be able to identify how the
task fits into a bigger outcome, and third, they had to be able to see how they
could use their pre-existing strengths to accomplish it.

Now, think of a task you don’t like doing because it’s
mundane, routine, or repetitive.

Now try asking these three questions:

1. “How will it impact another human being?”

Prosocial values and behaviors can be characterized as
being guided by and acting on a concern for others. Studies show that such
values and behaviors are linked to increased everyday meaningfulness.

The result is what psychologists call a “greater good motivation.”

Every time you approach a mundane task, try asking
yourself, “How will this impact another human being?”

And if you’re still having trouble, try a thought
experiment and ask, “What will happen to another human being if I don’t do
this?”

What you’ll slowly realize is that most of what we do
impacts someone else – whether it’s an end customer, user, or your co-worker in
the next cubicle who’s relying on you to do it.

When we do this small self-talk exercise over time, research indicates we can start to recraft how
we perceive and do the task itself.

2. “What end outcome does it make
possible?”

Many times, tasks become burdensome because we see them
as futile. A sense of futility is the enemy of meaningfulness.

A common reason we experience tasks as futile is that
we get delegated the task with no clear picture of how it fits into a larger
whole.

Simply asking someone to show you what the end outcome
will be of the task you’re doing can be powerful. If the outcome isn’t seeable
yet, try imagining what it will look like and be like.

This was an effective practice at NASA leading up to
the moon landing. With over 300,000 people working on minuscule parts of a
project, many of whom would never see its completion, making sure each person
had a “ladder to the moon” was a vital leadership practice
in helping people see how what they did would contribute to a bigger outcome.

3. “How can I use my strengths more to do
it?”

Harvard scientist Ellen Langer asked two groups to do a
boring activity they didn’t like such as vacuuming, doing dishes, or dusting
the house. For one of the groups, she told them to pay attention to three new
things while completing the task, activating the character strength of
curiosity.

The group who enacted curiosity reported enjoying the
task more and even continued to do the task after the timing of the experiment
was over.

Enacting curiosity by asking yourself: “How might
I better use my strengths to do this?” can help you see the task in a new
light.

And when we use our strengths
more in work, we tend to feel better and be more productive.

Seeing Your Inevitable Consequence

The philosopher Sivananda once wrote,

“A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.”

Experiencing meaningfulness starts with acknowledging our own and our tasks inevitable consequence, especially the ones we’ve come to label as routine and mundane.

Even if you “don’t like” what you’re doing right now, if
you can learn the skill to discern the meaning where you are, doing whatever
you’re doing, you’ll be able to do it wherever you want to go.

The post Everyday Purpose: How to Find Meaning in the Mundane appeared first on Zach Mercurio.

How to Be a Meaning-Giver: Why “Meaningful Work” is Everyone’s Job

Meaningful work is everyone’s job.

Lisa had been a janitor for a decade when I asked her to describe a time when she experienced her work as especially meaningful.

She needed just a few seconds to recall a moment, “This one has given me motivation ever since.”

It wasn’t what I was expecting.

She started, “I once worked at a sports stadium, and one time there was a woman who just vomited all over the outside of the bathroom door, and it was right where a long line of people would go in to go use the bathroom…”

As Lisa continued to detail an especially messy moment from an already messy occupation, I wondered, “Where’s the meaningfulness in cleaning up vomit in a crowd of people?”

Then, there it was: “And it was on that day,” Lisa emotionally shared, “I was thanked by more people than I ever have been since; almost 20 people walked past me saying, ‘Thank you for that. Thank you for doing that.’”

“For the first time, it made me feel like I actually did something good. People are impacted by what I am doing. I can keep doing this, and knowing I mattered then has motivated me ever since.”

Lisa described that the actual job of cleaning up that mess, on its own, was a lower point in her career. Yet the contrast between the unpleasant nature of the task and the profound and lasting positive meaning it had amplifies what happens when people clearly see that they and what they do matter.

The “work” didn’t give Lisa meaning, the evidence of the work’s impact on others did.

The anonymous people waiting in line that day were meaning-givers, they gave Lisa evidence of her mattering through their direct gratitude.

Lisa’s story highlights an important lesson we’re learning about meaningful work: We can know our work is meaningful and craft our work as meaningful, but that feeling tends to be short-lived without the ongoing evidence of our work’s meaning to others.

We hold that evidence for each other.

How to Be a Meaning-Giver

Studies from the past decade find clear links between the experience of meaningful work and increased motivation, engagement, satisfaction, and overall well-being. Yet, we still don’t fully understand how people come to experience work as meaningful.

Lisa was part of a forthcoming study in which I interviewed janitors to better understand what the lived experience of meaningful work is like in front-line, repetitive work. The prompt was simple: Describe a time from your everyday work when you most experienced meaningfulness.

Like Lisa, every janitor described a moment when they experienced direct affirmation of their work’s impact on others. The effects of these “moments of mattering” tended to be long-lasting, sometimes producing motivation for many years, even decades.

The problem is that every janitor also described these moments as rare.

The infrequency of regular, meaningful gratitude – showing others how their efforts contribute positively to other people – seems to be common in most organizations. Ryan Fehr, an Assistant Professor of Management at the Foster School of Business, wrote that prevailing norms of workplaces as “transactional,” and dated notions of what is “professional” still contribute to a lack of interpersonal affirmation in work.

But when it comes to maintaining meaningfulness in work, experiencing regular meaningful gratitude that reaffirms one’s impact seems essential.

In 2003, Amy Wrzesniewski, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale, and her colleagues interviewed 29 hospital cleaners to learn how they made meaning in their work. The researchers found that meaning was primarily derived from what they called “interpersonal cues” or the verbal or nonverbal messages they received and interpreted from others. Affirming cues from others significantly contributed to lasting feelings of positive meaning.

The sustained experience of meaningful work is everyone’s job.

Here are some ideas on how to be a meaning-giver:

1. Acknowledge People in Regular, Small Ways

In addition to asking the janitors what made work meaningful, I also asked them to describe when they experienced work as meaningless.

Feeling unacknowledged by others – supervisors, peers, and the public – was a common part of all the janitors’ moments of meaninglessness. Interestingly, it wasn’t the absence of formal acknowledgment such as scheduled feedback, performance evaluations, appreciation banquets, or awards that made work meaningless.

Rather, the moments that produced meaninglessness were smaller, like being brushed past in the hallway by a co-worker or completing a project withoutany verbal or nonverbal feedback.

It seems that even small gestures of acknowledgment can go a long way when it comes to meaning and motivation.

For example, in one study, Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, offered participants money to circle identical letters on a piece of paper with random letters.

In each successive round, they were offered less compensation than the previous round. The participants were split into three groups. The experimenter in the first group collected the papers with the participants’ names, looked them over, made eye contact and said “uh, huh” before putting in a pile.

The experimenter in the second group simply put the papers in a pile with no nonverbal or verbal feedback, and the experimenter in the third group shredded their papers right away.

The people whose work was shredded needed twice as much money to keep doing the task than the first group who received eye contact and a simple “uh, huh.” The second group, whose work was ignored, needed about the same amount of money as the group whose work was shredded.

Ariely said,

“Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort before their eyes.”

Making the effort to consistently acknowledge people’s work in small ways within everyday routines can be meaning and motivation-giving.

This could be as simple as saying “thank you” as in Lisa’s case, or making eye contact and smiling to let someone know you appreciate what they do.

2. Show People the Difference They Make

If informal acknowledgments are so effective in giving meaning to others’ work, it’s not surprising that ongoing, meaningful feedback is found to be a key predictor of motivation and engagement in work.

But when I ask people to share with me how they tell people they did a good job, the typical response is, “I tell them, ‘good job.’”

The problem is vague positive affirmation is psychologically unmotivating because it’s divorced from the actual impact the “good job” had on others.

 since the 1970s show that task significance, or the ability to see how our work affects someone else, is a critical predictor of both meaningfulness and work motivation.

Instead of telling people they did a good job, show them the difference they made.

One of the janitors I interviewed told me that a supervisor over 25 years ago defined the word “custodian” for her as someone who “takes ownership and custody over a space.” She told me that those few minutes of glimpsing the possible bigger impact of her work shaped how she approached her entire career.

In a landmark experiment, Wharton School Management Professor Adam Grant and his colleagues found that callers at a university fundraising center who spent just five minutes hearing the impact of their work through a scholarship recipient’s story spent more than double the amount of time on the phone and generated triple the donations compared to the callers who never heard a story of their potential impact.

By being “story-collectors” and storytellers of others’ impact, we can show people the difference they make.

To do this, try the simple model below whenever you give affirmation or show gratitude:

First, describe the situation. When did it occur? Starting with an acknowledgment that you personally observed the behavior is important and can maintain authenticity.

Second, describe the behavior. What did the person do or say? Be specific. If people don’t know what they did to make an impact, they’re less likely to do it again.

Finally, show them the impact. How did their behavior contribute to your work, life, or that of another person?

This is where the skills of story-collecting and storytelling are important.

For example, if someone taking on an extra task helped to free up your time to work on another important project, show them the outcome of that important project.

3. Look Beyond Your Workplace

Meaning-giving isn’t just a practice for your workplace, it’s a life practice.

Other human beings’ hard work impacts our lives daily, so we have endless opportunities to give meaning.

Whether they’re the people paving the road you drive to work on, the person making sure your doctor’s office is clean, someone who helps you with your taxes, or the person collecting your trash so you don’t have to, acknowledge people and show them the difference they make for you.

As Lisa reminded me, a small moment of gratitude could be what gives them meaning; what sustains and energizes them in the place they’re likely to spend upwards of 40% of their waking lives.

The post How to Be a Meaning-Giver: Why “Meaningful Work” is Everyone’s Job appeared first on Zach Mercurio.

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