Today’s employees hunger for purpose and meaningful work at levels never seen before. Recent studies show that 70% of people define their purpose through work and two-thirds have questioned the place that work should have in their life. While this shift is present in all working generations, millennials (who will be 75% of the workforce by 2025) are now prioritizing purpose over paycheck. They will look at company websites and want to see corporate social responsibility and a real commitment to equality and the environment. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are even more committed to these issues, so purpose and meaningful work will drive talent decisions for decades to come.

Purpose and Well-Being are Top Priorities

While purpose mattered before the pandemic, this worldwide traumatic experience clarified people’s priorities. As many experienced high levels of burnout, they suffered from its three main components: emotional exhaustion, a lack of accomplishment and the depletion of empathy.

Burnout takes a toll on people’s physical and mental health, which naturally pushes people to focus on their well-being. A recent Forbes headline read, “The Future of Work is Employee Well-being.” Deloitte found that half of employees quit their jobs because it negatively affected their well-being.

Gallup has also turned its research to well-being, discovering that only 21% of U.S. employees feel that their organization cares about their well-being.

The U.S. Surgeon General released a report identifying “the five essentials for workplace mental health and well-being,” which are:

• Protection from harm.
• Connection and community.
• Work-life harmony.
• Mattering at work.
• Opportunity for growth.

The report includes strategies workplaces can implement to improve well-being and mental health.

Why Humans are Wired for Purpose

Centuries ago, the observations of ancient Greek scholars identified two types of human well-being: hedonic and eudaimonic. Today’s neuroscientists have confirmed their importance and identified that each activates different regions of the brain. Research shows that true well-being comes from having both in the right balance.

Hedonic well-being focuses on attaining happiness and pleasure. Happiness is more immediate — that fleeting sense of pleasure or joy. For example, the temporary pleasure a person gets from a good dessert. Hedonic well-being tends to be focused on the self and is self-enhancing. A delicious treat is a form of desire, but other values that drive happiness are money or fame/status/relevance. For example, many people get a brief feeling of happiness on social media when their story or post is “liked” by another person — that expresses our value for relevance.

Eudaimonic well-being results from striving toward meaning, purpose, potential and self-realization. Its hallmark is a longer-term, deep sense of fulfillment or satisfaction, though it is not always pleasurable. Striving for purpose or meaning often requires hard work as well as struggle. But the longer term and deeper satisfaction makes it worthwhile. This type of well-being usually pushes us to ask ourselves: How can I be of service? How can I contribute to good in the world? How can I make a difference to other people?

As a result, eudaimonic well-being is self-transcending. It takes us beyond our personal experiences and encourages us to consider the wider community and the good we can do for others. Often the values at play here are relationships, personal growth and the community.

Studies consistently show that having a sense of purpose yields all kinds of benefits for our mental and physical health. Consider these results:

• Increased resilience of brain cells to injury and degradation.
• Slowed age-related cognitive decline.
• Reduced risk for dementia (50%), stroke (72%), and heart attack (48%).
• Reduced isolation, anxiety and depression.
• Longer lifespans.

Having a sense of purpose at work also creates significant benefits for organizations. McKinsey found that those employees who say that they live their purpose at work are:

• 5X more likely to report higher resilience.
• 4X more likely to report better health.
• 6X more likely to want to stay at the company.
• 5X more likely to go above and beyond to make their company successful.

Deloitte’s research reveals that purpose-driven companies experience significant benefits like increased innovation and retention of top talent, stating, “Purpose-driven companies witness higher market share gains and grow three times faster on average than their competitors, all while achieving higher workforce and customer satisfaction.” Organizations that harness the power of purpose thrive, while others falter or fail.

How to Create Meaningful Work

When people strive to find purpose in their work, they often seek what is termed meaningful work. We can think of it as a continuum ranging from meaningless on one end to meaningful on the other. You can place various experiences on that continuum but it’s your continuum: Personal, subjective and unique to each person.

What you perceive as meaningful work can significantly differ from another person’s perspective, even if you both hold similar positions or work in the same organization. This is because the evaluation of work’s meaning is not solely an individual process but is also influenced by societal factors. In fact, there are three key societal concepts that come into play in this evaluation:

• Meaning of work: How you perceive the overall concept of work.
• Meaning in work: How meaningful that work is to you, specifically.
• Meaning at work: More narrowly defined as the context of that specific job in that particular organization.

Researchers find four main factors that comprise meaningful work. Consider how you can boost these through training in your organization:

• Job design includes the variety of assigned tasks, autonomy and working at one’s edge to develop potential and perceived significance (as opposed to being pointless).
• When we enjoy working with our colleagues, it contributes to our sense of meaningful work.
• Leaders and managers play a significant role in creating or undermining the sense of meaning that people find in their work. Leaders need to inspire employees toward a shared vision and engage in frequent and transparent communication that builds rapport and trust.
• Finally, we have the organizational level, where work is done to benefit the greater good through a self-transcendent or purpose-driven orientation.

Not surprisingly, many other researchers find that when people have a good fit between their needs and a job, as in either person-job or person-organization fit, they experience more meaningful work.

When our needs for meaningful work align with the opportunities we have, we are more likely to be highly attentive and engaged. However, when this alignment is off, we may experience boredom (when there’s too little meaning) or burnout (when there’s an excess of supply). This suggests the existence of a sweet spot where the balance between our needs and the supply of meaningful work is just right, leading to the most beneficial outcomes.

The concept of “fit” played out in real time during the pandemic. Health care workers are known for having a high sense of purpose in their work and, generally, a good fit with their need for meaning (the ability to help people heal) and its supply (the regular load at a hospital or clinic). However, the pandemic significantly overloaded the supply of meaning, especially in the early days before vaccines or treatments were available. Health care workers all over the world found themselves facing the extraordinarily difficult task of caring for people who were dying in record numbers and for which their everyday skills and tools were woefully ineffective.

6 Strategies to Boost Purpose in Your Organization

There are several strategies organizations can use to become more purpose-driven (It’s crucial to remember that talent and training professionals are key players in these efforts; their involvement is instrumental):

1. ​Help your people explore and identify their sense of purpose.
2. Identify the organization’s purpose, including the social good it does for the world, and make this information easy to find.
3. ​Help employees find alignment with their own sense of purpose and their work at your organization.
4. ​Identify and address violations of your organization’s purpose/values as perceived hypocrisy seems to be the most damaging to engagement and retention.
5. ​Design work environments and experiences that help people connect with their colleagues, because relationships are essential to making work meaningful.
6. ​Train leaders and managers on how to have authentic conversations about purpose and meaningful work as well as how to cultivate it in their teams.

Gallup research found that only 1 in 10 people have the talent to manage others and, worse, organizations select the wrong candidate 82% of the time! Give managers the skills and tools they need to succeed. The best programs include training on coaching, emotional intelligence, creating psychologically safe and inclusive environments, and empowering a sense of purpose and meaningful work. Manager training more than pays for itself in increased productivity, employee engagement and retention.

By placing purpose at the heart of our operations, we can unlock a wealth of benefits. Purpose not only serves as a guiding north star, directing strategic decisions and fostering innovation, but it also plays a crucial role in building credibility with customers, employees, partners and communities. Most importantly, purpose enhances the value of the work, transforming the way we perceive and engage with our tasks. Ultimately, this inspires employees and customers alike.