 It's wonderful to be here. I think we all recognize that there are huge amounts of people who have no access to work at all. Those are not the people I'm going to talk about today. We also see increasingly, including yourself, a lot of people who have very creative ways of escaping the corporation. Those are also not the people I'm going to talk today about. I am going to focus on the ordinary people who work in ordinary organizations, in the public service, hospital, retail, insurance, manufacturing schools. Do they have meaningful work? How would they know that they had meaningful work? And why would it matter? So to get our heads around that question, I just thought I'd start with a question to you, which is, if you were looking for meaningful work, would you join a pet food company? And you probably might first go, yeah, I like animals, why not? So you might sort of look at fit, is this a good fit for me? And then because you're seasoned, meaning seekers, you'd probably already quickly go, it depends. But what would it depend on precisely? And what should it depend on? Because that I think is a really important question. Under what conditions do we want to merge our own human meanings with organizations? So would it be enough for you if you got the ability to volunteer once a month in a company-sponsored pet shelter? Would that make it meaningful? Or would you find meaning in the purpose of the company, and I just found one, I thought I'd better look this up, not knowing anything about pet food companies. I found a lovely one. The purpose of this company is to help enrich and lengthen the special relationship between people and their pets. Would that kind of get you going? Or would you find your meaning in a sense of belonging and appreciation from the company? Where you all had one to forget to get us, and where people were genuinely recognized for their job well done. You might even bring along your families, and you might even altogether sing a pet food song. Would that give you meaning? The sense of being part of this company? Would that give you meaning? Or would it be because company actually reaches out to the community and donates 1% of its profit to animal shelters and guide dogs? Or do you seek meaning in a company that addresses bigger issues, such as the obesity, behavioral problems and rise of designer breeds, all of which are symptoms of the increasing humanization of pets? Or is it meaningful for you to you that a company reduces its own footprint by addressing packaging or energy issues? Not a footprint of its core product, pet food, given that a medium sized dog has the same footprint as a small SUV. Or are you saying actually there's so much luxury around pets, what I would really like my pet company, food company, to do to make it really meaningful is that every can of pet food that we bought, actually a can of food would also go to a human. So really what do you want to take your company responsible for? Where do you get the information on what do you want to make your company responsible for? How would you need to be engaged in that responsibility yourself on a day to day basis in your work, in your day to day work to actually experience your work to be meaningful? These are some questions I think that we need acute answers to. And we've already heard that this conference in many other places, everybody these days needs to be an economist. I also think that everybody actually these days needs to be an expert on what truly motivates people at work and what should be motivating people at work. The pervasive values of our time is of course that you don't just invest your physical self in work as hard as that can already be as we see with the Amazon example. And it's not just enough to invest your psychological self in work, but you now also have to invest your existential self in work. You have to find a job that makes you happy, you have to find your calling, very important to find your passion. You do need to find your why and particularly if you're a leader it's very important to find your why and I'm not entirely sure but that always seems to be written with a capital letter. And if you are the organization has already been spoken about it is very important to find your purpose and it is easy to diminish all of this as a bit of another fact. See if you're a critical academic it is really, really easy to do that. But meaning is not a fad. It is not a fad meaning is who we are. Research shows that meaning is a fundamental human need. Those who do not have meaning ends up in the mental health system or withdraw themselves from significant others or community. So it is an absolute fundamental need. It's not the nice to have. It is not a luxury and I think we show prejudices if we say things like us, of course, a luxury question that white collar workers ask themselves but it's not so important for blue collar workers. I've done research on that. It is just as important for blue collar workers. I think we need to get rid of some of our own prejudices when we call it as something elitist. It is absolutely fundamental. It is our anchor in terms of in times of turmoil and as just described we're facing a significant amount of turmoil. It is our place to come home to, a place where we can check into ourselves, make ourselves whole again and it is our compass when we need direction. At the same time we do see and could take more seriously that there is actually a collective wave happening, a collective desire to put meaningful work onto the agenda and I think we need to take that seriously. A collective desire to determine a new human bottom line but the bottom line is not the corporate bottom line, it is our bottom line on what conditions do we want to give our existential self to work. So it's a fundamental human need. It represents a collective desire to put our needs for meaning on the agenda but in individual level it is also easy to get disconnected from what is meaningful to us. We are incredibly good at getting lost. We're also incredibly adaptive being so we're almost in our desperate need for meaning, we'll kind of grab it wherever it comes towards us and at a socio-political level it is very easy I think for meaning to be misdirected. So in that context and in addition to that you know the current quest of meaning emerges in a time in a particular context. So we can't just look at it in an individual level yearning or phenomena, it's happening against the background of acceleration of speed of us simply not having time to think anymore who we are and what we really want out of life and not asking the question often enough so that we keep very much at a service level because I think if you ask those questions about what do people really want again and again you'd also get other needs that would come out. That we have a lot of professional autonomy at every level of work all the way from leaders to people at the bottom of the organization who are doing craft work and those sort of things and of course that we have an existential angst in terms of facing our future and where we are rightly questioning whether all our organizations collectively are really addressing the issues of injustice and ecological meltdown as holy and as fastly as they should. So in that context then some would argue we have a beautiful win-win situation arising. On the one hand research clearly shows and this is true this is undeniable that even individual finds meaning in their work the organization benefits they get higher levels of engagement more commitment more job satisfaction. Research too shows that for you it is actually much better to find work. If you work as if you experience your work as meaningful you experience increased life satisfaction more meaning in other parts it's a spillover effect. If your meaning work is more meaningful it is also easier for you to experience meaning in your community or in your family and in general your health and well-being improves if you experience meaning. So in a typical corporate win-win we could just say that we that our search for meaning fixes a problem makes a profit and can do so in ways that is efficient and consistent and we can iron out the doubts and dilemmas we just put two and two together off we go happily ever after but if we buy into this win-win situation my deep concern is that we are actually handing the meaning agenda over to the organization and that the moment we do that meaning like so many other things before it will actually die a gentle death and unlike so many other things before it that is a real problem because it's our last stronghold it's our last place to stand at the moment. So meaning is your anchor and you need to be responsible for it so what do you need to know to stay responsible for your meaning in the context of work and being an academic I just need to make a small disclaimer here and also actually because we always do and the other thing I need to do is apologize because what academics do they do research on work and then they come up with these books which then become the latest facts and actually create a great loss of meaning in your work and so that is not what I am trying to do what I'm trying to do is just give you some ideas to think about when you think about is this work meaningful to me should I commit myself to it how much of it myself should I commit to it or am I better off to just go there and create all those wonderful community activities and all and love my family and all the other things that we heard about so what follows are some research based considerations to help you understand how meaning might get lost and found and what you might want to look out for if you're looking for aligning your meaning with work to start with probably one of the biggest questions are you actually looking for meaning or purpose and when you say I want meaning for work do you want work that has a purpose a purpose beyond profit like my pet food company I'm becoming a bit attached to my pet food company by now or I just talking about the day to day experiences the interactions that you have with people something that enables you to care for another person something that enables you to discover and express unique talent something that enables you to have a high quality interaction with somebody else at work I think we need to remember that we're looking for both there are many organizations and always have been that have fantastic purposes so now all the corporates are in search of purpose but we've had always had organizations where the purpose was blindingly obvious they never needed to be in search of it we've had hospitals having wonderful purposes healing the sick objectively we can all agree we don't need to do a purpose search for that that is just a great purpose we've had all educational institutions educating the next generation fantastic purpose but what we also know is that nurses are becoming real estate agents and at a maximum time a new teacher is working currently as a teacher is in New Zealand it's five years so something in these purposeful organizations is not working so we have purpose without meaning we're objectively people have agreed there is a good purpose and you're gonna so but people don't experience meaning in their daily lives on the other hand we have meaning without purpose and there is a lovely study that Michael Pratt did a long time ago in M-Way where he describes how the M-Way distributors were encouraged to continually develop bigger usually more abstract dreams such as saving the United States and the world to selling M-Way products people completely bought into this right because if you if you put these purposes in front of people often enough we all have this existential yearning we we do want our lives to matter so if through my simple M-Way job I don't know if it's simple it sounds quite complicated to me actually but if through that job I actually get connected up to a grand vision where we can actually save the United States particularly at present I think that pretty cool right this is you know and in addition to do it the M-Way colleagues became your real friends and you could really identify as a plant part of a clan these people all said they had deeply meaningful work did it have purpose probably not so why why what are the implications of some of the thinking I think one of them is that the whole purpose movement meaning it I think it's already said it emerges from the bottom up and and when the more we start focusing on purpose and the more we sometimes lose all the things that are giving people meaning in the here and now and so it's really important that when you help organizations I think that's what the job is of several of yours to identify their purpose all those type of things that you actually focus on what people are experiencing in their daily work that that I think is one another thing here is that we need both big and little meanings at some level we would all like our work to really matter and at some level the stories that we tell each other and the things that make us feel more good are often about the small meanings yeah they're just going to a soccer match of a child they're looking after the parents they're having a slightly longer conversation with somebody in this in in a retail shop or if you are a retailer actually the retailers of the wonderful research work of Adrian made Madden and Katie Bailey they their stories about meaning were all that they took five minutes somewhere extra to have a conversation with a lonely customer and they'd know them because that you know they could identify these people coming back in and the organization had said that that was okay that they could spend time on that those are little meanings they're not this shittering they're not changing the world but they hold us together on a day-to-day basis if we're not held together on a day-to-day basis like the news like the teacher we cannot serve that bigger purpose on the other hand we shouldn't fool ourselves that that is just enough if the bigger purpose is saving the United States true and another question or something that I think is useful for consideration is this whole question who provides meaningful work because somehow this whole meaning conversation seems to have been hijacked or at least emerged at the same time that we have become incredibly interested in leadership those schools of books on leadership leadership training billions of dollars literally go into that we we identified a young leadership potentials and they get separate treatment in the organization there's an awful lot and then we kind of say well it's not really about the leader and it's about leadership and we can all share that but it doesn't quite do it does it because there is a class of people who somehow seem to have this conversation around meaning and a class of people that somehow seems to not have it so some interesting research here and the role of leaders is is often mentioned is not often mentioned spontaneously so if you ask people about meaningful work it's not that the first thing say well my leader came to me and set this grand vision and man the blinkers went off and I you know I saw the light and from that moment on it became meaningful actually they did had 12 professions and almost nobody ever mentioned a leader kind of interesting also leaders are often at a loss for meaning themselves research shows that the leaders do not have a better understanding of what makes a meaningful life than anybody else has and and often when they face problems for which they are painfully unprepared so as a currently Facebook they find solutions in technical or other places but but are very hard very not very good at actually addressing the existential questions underpinning the issues facing the organization there are many exceptions wonderful exceptions but we're talking a general ordinary organization here what we do know is that leaders are very good at destroying meaningful work quite a bit of research on that by confining people by just when you're on track and you're doing something that's meaningful to you you know moving it moving you in some other direction by stopping questioning like like for instance you know my pet food shop manufacturer what leaders are very good is is that I would in all my questioning I probably just could get to the environmental footprint of the organization itself so leaders are good at confining the organization and not so good at addressing the next lot of questions we always inevitably want to ask when we get engaged in conversations of meaning our mind started spending and then we go what about this what about the fact that we're actually starting to humanize all this human and what about the fact that pet food is taking up so much of the planetary resources what about the fact that people are playing 10 times as much for a kind of cat food and that they're not spending on other necessities you know what what's happening here so leaders often let you go so far in a conversation and and then confine what you can say having said that of course leaders can because they're in positions of power and let's let's not deny that they can help you make connections they can care for you they can remove obstacles to work and that does make an enormous difference but that makes a difference not because they better understand what is meaningful than you do it makes a difference because they have more resources at their disposal to make meaning happen and to remove obstacles to it so I think in this leadership conversation we need to be very careful that we are not unwittingly creating another class of have nots and has it within what is almost a final frontier of being human okay time for a couple of other questions does meaningful work require a relative measure of flexibility and participation I think we already talked about the past capacity to build democracy to work and I think this is important if you ask yourself you're working with an organization want to create meaning this would be one of the first questions I would ask myself is this organization creating the capacity for democracy in me would it give us the capability to find our voice to advocate to resist to organize what it do these type of things I think that is really important partly it is important because of this learning these skills there's a lot of research that shows there's a spillover effect children learn some of these skills at work they spillover in all other areas of our lives and on the contrary if some of those skills are crashed at work then we struggle to take them out of the hat in the other areas of our lives so work really does have a responsibility there and we need to hold them to account on that basis there is quite what is meaning that list and three spin research been done on that as well is bogus empowerment and somebody was already just talking also about fake democracy we know when we're being fooled you know so so so it's almost better than to just say pay to people this is how it is if you don't like it just live through the day and express all of those ideas and other parts of your world of your life rather than getting gathering all that energy but in the end the person still cannot express who they truly are not sound a unique note in the universe not connect with the necessary others that they need to have around them and not make the difference that they really want to make another thing around flammability and participation that is important is it is not enough for people to have a company with a purpose even if that's a great purpose and even if you're totally believed and it wasn't purpose washing even with all of those for people to experience meaning they need to be connected to that purpose and make a difference in their daily lives so that is to you know how do you organize how flat does your organization need to be that everybody is connected in one way or the other to say that customer and what that client or that patient that you're making a difference to these are really questions we need to start asking ourselves how can we be more organic more flexible so that we can connect people to what in managerial times you would call the end user but from a meaning perspective is the person who feeds back to you that what you're doing is actually truly meaningful so questions to ask we know that empowerment and power and democracy is frustrating we need to build the skills I think there's a workshop here for birds or can you know it's it's not always that easy and but we do know how to do it so how much power are your superiors willing to give away would be something I would ask if I look for meaningful work but also how much responsibility am I willing to take in the context of work and I'm a quick question is whether it's meaningful to be positive at work that the meaningful work movement has been very much hijacked by the positive psychology movement and I say at some level rightly so we do need to start working at what works and particularly the young generation the next generation they we know that they don't respond well for politicians who keep telling them what is not working or keep telling them what is wrong with all the other politicians they just go get on with it well you what you know we've just recently seen that in in New Zealand where there's just such a breath of fresh air because we have politicians at the moment who are just focusing on the agenda and where they are taking us rather than all the other stuff so I think that is very important we need to be constructive and meaning is a constructive conversation at the same time and Buddhist know this better than anybody and I'm not a Buddhist but I've just spent some time in Sri Lanka doing workshops and on meaningful work meaning comes from facing the struggle and I think if we are too glossy and too positive and this tends to also be a bit of a thing around leadership if you're very positive you get those positions if you have too much of a bias towards positivity you are not facing the not knowing you're not facing the half baked ethical decision which you inevitably made you're not facing the relational discomfort and in not facing that you're actually completely denying meaning because you're making it unreal so quickly then in what life should work be the primary source of meaning I think at a time where we a lot of who we are gets absorbed by our work I do think we need to ask that question because we are living at a time where never has has so much identity being tied up in paid work for so many people around the world and that argument is why we're spending so much making hours at work so we might as well make it meaningful kind of and I don't know if that is the right question to ask the research shows you will have a lot more meaning if you bet on more than one horse because meaning comes and goes research shows it's episodical we don't it's not a constant in our lives so it might come in your family and disappear in your work it might disappear in your work and come in your community so you need for your sanity you absolutely need to find meaning across different life roles and different life responsibilities so that also is very important in here also you don't shouldn't just have one meaning that you use like if your meaning is that you're really good at helping people to organize become a collective it's good to use that in one place like work but they're not in the community or not at your daughter's tennis court so you know try to think about meanings as multiple meanings and and if you're good at driving something in one place look at the meaning of caring for something in another place or connecting to people in another place so you have to have multiple places to express multiple meanings because ideally you can express all of those at work but that is not often possible so in summary then sorry about that will the current quest for meaning lead to reclaiming our humanity at work I think meaning is important but it can be co-opted in many very subtle ways I really think we're at a stage where we can go gently into that good night in the captivity of the organization that it can be used toward instrumental purposes um whether it be a lot of talk about meaning and purpose but we actually disconnect rather than connect at the same time it can I think be a roar it can be a new place from which we set the agenda for which we as humanity set the agenda for organizations and test every organizational practice every organizational idea every organizational purpose by our own meaning so and I think there is there is the potential at this particular time to actually really start a movement for meaning and create and claim back our humanity to do that paradoxically even though we need to create meaning together we will start first start to have to take true responsibility for our own meaning and I think understand it a lot better what it is and what makes it tick than we currently do that is all I want to share with you today