Author: Lorna Lythgoe

Is work a means to an end, or a means in itself?

While the answer to that question might depend on a whole slew of factors, in the end it’s those who see work as a calling that have a much better time of it.

According to Amy Wrzesniewski, Professor in Organisational Psychology at Yale University, people who are passionate about their vocation are much more engaged, productive and satisfied. Importantly, it’s not necessarily the job itself that matters, it’s how you look at it.

Perception

In a pivotal study, Wrzesniewski et al found that people conceptualise work in three different ways: Jobs, Careers or Callings. For some, work is a mere necessity to earn a crust – it’s just a job. For others, work is a career that enables advancement and the opportunity for prestige. For one particular group though, work is meaningful and rewarding in itself; it is a source of considerable enjoyment, identity and contribution. For these people, work is a calling.

That’s nice. But getting to do fulfilling work might seem like a pipe dream to many. Does it have to be though?

Job Crafting

In an episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam talks about a study conducted with hospital cleaning staff. While some staff outlined their roles in terms of the job descriptions, others said they were ‘ambassadors for the hospital’ or even ‘healers’. These staff altered the work they did so that it was more meaningful, an act termed ‘job crafting‘. That is, unofficially redesigning work to increase engagement and satisfaction, leading to resilience and flourishing.

Such job crafting sometimes jeopardised the cleaners’ contracts, like when they visited patients they thought were lonely, or stewarded elderly visitors to the exit so the patients wouldn’t worry about them getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors. One woman even switched the pictures around on coma patients’ walls, hoping that the change in stimulation would aid their recovery.

Intrapreneurship

The same principles of job crafting are implicit in ‘intrapreneurship‘. When our work starts feeling stale, instead of leaving we can try carving out a role that fits better within the current organisation.

Can you pilot a new project, train up in an emerging skill, or take/trade responsibility for a growth area? Doing so, you become the go-to person for that specialism, and you’ll have re-written your own job description. You also gain the recognition (and ideally the remuneration) to boot, not to mention marketable experience to ease the way for future career changes.

Career Pivot

When we’ve got the gusto and are in the position to make a career overhaul, incredible things can happen. I’ve got a hunch that a lot more people out there could be blowing their own socks off with the work they’re doing.

Career strategist and author, Jenny Blake, uses the term ‘high net growth individuals’ for people who prioritise meaningful work that utilises their strengths and provides ample opportunities for learning and having a positive impact on others. These ‘impactors’ ask three essential questions of their roles: What did I create? What did I learn? What did I contribute?

Blake characterises these people as being allergic to atrophy, entirely unwilling to simply phone it in, to the point that they may get physiological symptoms if stuck in a position that doesn’t allow them to create, grow and make a difference doing something that feels authentic.

Blake points out that radical advances in technology have reinvented the world of work. Change has accelerated, with product life cycles going from 10 years to 10 months or even 10 days. Many roles have been automated, changing the nature of the work we do, and new roles that never before existed have emerged from brand new industries. The project-based economy is on the rise, with workers being helicoptered in to deliver on a single piece of work before moving on to the next gig or working on several projects at once.

Blake’s point? Career change is the new normal, so we’d better get good at it. The subtext is that we’d also best put to use our ‘magic sauce’ – that thing we’re talented in and love doing. In her practical and insightful 2016 book, Pivot, Blake shows why it’s not just acceptable but worthy to want to do wildly enjoyable work.

As researchers like Wrzesniewski are discovering, when we love our work we do it way, way better.

Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash

What should I be doing with my life?

It’s the school leaver’s question, the quarter- and mid-life crisis question, and possibly the question you ask most days. But what the hell is the answer?!

Some lucky folk find their way into just the right kind of career for them, and any dips in enthusiasm along the way are remedied by a change here and a promotion there. Life and work apparently glide together in contented equilibrium.

I don’t know many of those people.

For most, it seems, work is ‘good enough’ and it’s the extra-curricular that generates most life satisfaction. There’s a lot to be said for this; work puts dinner on the table and enables a lifestyle that has the potential for genuine satisfaction.

But for some people, ‘good enough’ work is not, well, good enough. They want work to be incredible.

Out there right now is a whole universe of highly motivated and capable individuals who want to wake up excited for the day ahead and to feel that they are doing the best with their talents. As the adage goes, we spend at least a third of our lives at work so we’d better enjoy it.

Jumping out of bed

How can we be satisfied at work? Dan Pink, career analyst and author of Drive and Free Agent Nation, says work satisfaction comes from having autonomy, mastery and meaning:

1. Autonomy – the desire for self-direction.

2. Mastery — the urge to get better at something.

3. Purpose — the yearning to do something meaningful that has an impact.

Pink gives the example of open-source software, such as Linux, to illustrate people’s willingness to create exceptional work with no financial benefit to themselves. He also describes how software company Atlassian gives its developers a day every quarter to do whatever they want, no holds barred. It’s a fun 24 hours, with beer and food in a relaxed environment, and the innovation it yields is outstanding.

Google used to do something similar when they encouraged employees to take on ‘20% projects‘ where they could work on anything they wanted of potential benefit to Google for 20% of their working week. Gmail was the offspring of one such passion project.

It’s clear from these examples that it’s possible to experience autonomy, mastery and purpose with the right employer. Especially, perhaps, in workplaces that adopt a ‘results only work environment’ (ROWE), where employees have no fixed hours and are instead measured on output.

Increasingly though, plucky workers are setting out on their own. There has been a revolution in recent years with the rise of the gig economy – that is, freelancers contracted by organisations for short engagements (aka ‘gigs’).

Gigging

Gigging often gets a bad rap in the press, with companies like DPD, Deliveroo and Uber accused of exploiting independent workers because contracting rather than employing them means they get no benefits or protection.

On the flip side though, freelancing for many – white collar workers especially – can be lucrative, and the flexibility and opportunity appealing.

“Critics might argue that self-employment equates to exploitative working practices. However, this is an archaic view of what is becoming a revolutionary form of business… Instead of working 9-to-5 for a single employer, they are leveraging their advantages to make earning money more relaxed and enjoyable,” says David Shadpour in Forbes.

Remarkable advancements in technology have enabled freelancing, breaking down traditional barriers to getting work. With cloud-based platforms proliferating, global freelancers can get hired wherever they are. Busy parents, including so-called ‘mompreneurs‘, can piggyback on technologies that enable home-working on their own timetable. Solopreneurs (solo business owners) and side hustlers (those who freelance alongside other full-time work) have the digital tools they need to do their thing.

Often overlooked are the cultural barriers that freelancing can sidestep. According to the Financial Times,

“for women [in the Muslim world], in particular, the gig economy is liberating. It provides an unprecedented opportunity to bypass cultural constraints on their time and mobility”.

Most appealing to many, though, is that you can carve out a niche to fit you like a glove. For the restless, pioneering types who eschew convention and the constraints of a single specialism, being an independent worker can mean forging a very individual career path. The so-called ‘protean career‘ allows workers to work in line with their character, aims and values, prioritising self-fulfillment above other measures of success.

Win-win

For organisations, the advantages of contracting talent – even white collar contractors who are paid more than full-time employees – are lower overheads, faster turnaround and the benefits of a motivated freelancer’s targeted efforts.

If Pink’s right about the motivating force of autonomy, mastery and purpose – and he certainly seems to have disrupted popular carrot-and-stick ideas of motivation (not that he’s without critics – see this analysis) – then freelancers have the potential to be highly productive. It’s win-win for workers and organisations.

As organisations and workers adapt to technological, economic and social changes, the nature of ‘working’ is set to evolve. According to a recent BBC article, online freelance marketplace PeoplePerHour predicts that 50% of UK and US workers will be going it alone by 2020.

If you’re thinking of going freelance then, it looks like you’ll have company.

Further Reading:

Read more about the protean career on the British Psychological Society website and in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour.