We all know that there’s a relationship between our work and our wellbeing. But what kind of relationship? In social media parlance, it’s complicated. We’re all different: we do different jobs and even those of us in similar jobs will be attracted by different aspects of that work. We know work can stress us out but we also know people for whom work is a passion, a pillar of personal identity and a source of support and human interaction.
I recently participated in an on-campus event during Mental Health Awareness Week, aimed at promoting mental health research from across the university and opening a dialogue between its students, staff and members of the wider local community. As well as research posters and interactive exhibits, a number of professionals and volunteers who work to support people’s mental health were present to give information and advice. Those organisations included Aware NI, Parenting NI, Inspire and the Occupational Health Division of Queen’s University. During a relatively quiet period, I asked a few of the folks exhibiting(a) what it means to them to be well at work and (b) what employers can do to ensure employees are as well as possible(1). This is the first of a series of blogs in which I explore some of the themes which emerged their responses.
Marion from Inspire, who offer phone and in-person counselling to employees across a range of organisations, said that for her, being well at work means “to enjoy my job, to look. forward to going to work on a daily basis, and to know what I am doing has meaning for me and others”. This was directly echoed by a member of QUB Occupational Health who highlighted the importance of having “meaningful work”. I would see ‘meaning’ as akin to having a sense of purpose: the good days at work for me are the ones where I leave with a sense of having moved closer to the purpose I had in mind when first taking the job.
An occupation is more than being occupied. The keyboard-wielding comedian David O’Doherty does a joke about how he recently ‘finished the internet’, at which point he was asked to enter his initials beside a picture of Bill Gates. He also observes how easy it is to feel busy in the modern world and to be thoroughly diverted by the latest distraction the internet has to offer. This bi-product of hyperconnectivity clearly impacts the working day. Innovations like email and laterally Slack are in theory here to reduce the time it takes to communicate and to bring us into a more frictionless and efficient space wherein we can harness one another’s talents and seamlessly collaborate like cells in a giant socially-formed brain. And yet paradoxically, it’s conceivable that we could all spend all our working days thoroughly processing and actioning all of our emails and yet for not one of us to feel as if they’ve moved any closer to our particular goals, or even gotten done what we set out to do first thing this morning. This phenomenon of being occupied but without a sense of purpose or progress seems directly antithetical to the pursuit of meaning in work which my contributors highlighted as a key facet of workplace wellbeing.
So how do we connect to our sense of purpose and harness that pursuit of meaning as a force to drive our work forward? As individuals, we can introduce practices such as having a personal mission statement which we regularly review and update, planning our time over a long enough period that we can protect certain hours in the day, week or month to ensure that our core direction of travel is towards further those higher values and goals which we see in our work. I would argue that time and space for regular reflection is key to noticing how even small tasks which might seem like time thieves can form a piece of a much bigger jigsaw and be more aligned to one’s purpose than it might initially appear.
Of course, this is more than just a challenge for individual employees at an organisation. Employers also have it within their power to help the people working for them to have purpose and have ownership over some part of the organisation’s mission. This can come through reward and recognition, but can also be infused into training for team leaders and into processes such as supervision and appraisal. Now, consider two different processes through which this infusion of purpose could be achieved. One is the bottom-up emergence of a culture where the values of individual staff are pooled to shape a declared mission organisation. At the other end of the spectrum is the setting by leadership of values and purpose without broad-based input, followed by a top-down process of aligning how staff see their purpose with the declared purpose of the organisation. Is either of these likely to succeed, or has either a better chance that the other? I would suggest that if these represent two extreme points on a spectrum, the balancing point probably lies closer to the bottom-up point.
Zooming out one degree further, I think there’s a duty on society as a whole to examine and question the connection between work and purpose. I’ve been involved in some work with colleagues on ageing, retirement and the agenda to ‘extend working lives’. One theme which comes up when people talk about retirement is the idea of becoming purposeless. While our families, friends and passions beyond work can all give us purpose and drive, few things organise and marshall our actions and efforts in a goal-directed manner in the way that the formal setting of our employment does. But must that be the case? Are there ways we can organise our society such that meaning in life isn’t so firmly bound into our culture of work? Are there objectives we are striving for as a society which could be shared among people in a way that creates both individual and shared purpose? Perhaps this is happening already?
One final note: I haven’t mentioned passion. I’ve written before about the emerging discourse of passion, particularly in recruitment. It’s a theme I want to explore again soon, particularly having read some divergent and challenging perspectives on this soon. While not unrelated to purpose and meaning, I suspect that passion is also somewhat distinct and I hope to explain why.
As mentioned, I’ll be returning to the responses to my questions about the meaning of workplace wellbeing for inspiration and further themes. Should you with to submit your own perspectives, the link to the questions is: https://forms.gle/iNVnsQBi4AYrnvzD7 . Please note this is not formal or ethically approved research, just a way to garner feedback and ideas and ensure I’m basing my thoughts on more than introspection! I’m hoping for this to be an evolving resource and I welcome your feedback via the comments or though personal contact if you have any thoughts on any of the questions I throw out, any criticism or if there’s anything you’d like to see covered here in more detail.
- Responses were typed into a Google Form; each person was told that the purpose was for a blog post.