Meaningful work: what it is and how can we help our clients to identify it?

Meaningful work is something which has been written about a fair amount in the literature but it's always been a bit piecemeal. It's a topic of interest to organisational and business psychologists, positive psychologists and of course career development theorists, but these academic arenas haven't really paid much attention to each other, resulting in an evidence base which is patchy and confusing.
This paper "Purpose and meaning in career development applications" starts to plug the gap, providing a good summary of the relevant literature and giving some examples of practical exercises that career practitioners can use with their clients.
The authors identify six different areas that are deemed worthy of our consideration: strengths, positive emotions and flow, gratitude, work hope, job crafting and calling.
Overall the evidence between career well-being and life well-being is strong and the research indicates that people, these days, are looking for work which matters in a deeper and more existential way, developing their potential and making a contribution to the common good.
But what do we know about what factors lead to a more meaningful career, and how can we as practitioners help our clients to achieve this?

1. Strengths.
According to strengths theory our strengths carry intrinsic meaning, so simply using our strengths brings meaning to our lives. Evidence shows that using our strengths on a daily basis increases the levels of meaning in our lives and using them at work increases meaning at work and job satisfaction. Two classifications of strengths are recommended for our work with clients: the Values in Action strengths finder and Clifton's Strengths finder. These can be great tools to help your clients identify their strengths and this can lead to valuable discussions.

2. Positive emotions and flow
When people feel better at work they are more fulfilled and they work more effectively. Positive emotions have been shown to link with creative problem solving, helping behaviours and job satisfaction. We can help our clients to experience more positive emotions at work by getting them to think of ways in which they can seek out or create situations which are likely to make them feel good. One way to do this is to try and get them to think about the situations in which they experience 'flow'.
Flow is that feeling you get when you are so absorbed in a task that you're not aware of time passing and don't notice anything going on around you. It can enhance mood, boost self-esteem and give you a sense of purpose. Flow tends to happen when people are engaged with something they are good at but find hard. If we can get clients to identify times when they experience flow at work, we could then work with them to think about how they could get themselves in to those situations more frequently.

3. Gratitude
Being thankful and giving thanks for what you've got has been linked to greater well-being. It has been shown to stir up positive emotions, allows us to focus on our blessings, and creates an expectation and a confidence that good things will come to us. There is a little bit of evidence too that these positive outcomes apply to work-related gratitude. The authors therefore suggest that we should encourage our clients to count their work blessings and maybe even engage in thanking some of their colleagues for what they have brought to their working lives.

4. Work hope
Hope in an academic context means something much more specific than its definition in everyday conversation. In psychological terms it has three elements: a goal, a pathway to a goal and agency. So it's knowing where you want to get to, knowing how to get there, and believing that you can do it. Having hope is linked to increased self-esteem, making self-directed career decisions and is so closely associated with having meaningful work that some academics claim that it is in fact a core element of meaningful work, rather than a separate construct. Working with clients on identifying goals and breaking these down in to numerous sub-goals has been shown to help foster hope.

5. Job crafting
This is one which has been around for a while in career development theories but is new to positive psychology. It makes explicit the idea that we have some control over our jobs and can shape them to better meet our needs. Workers can engage in task, relational and cognitive crafting. This process results in individuals changing their daily work to involve more tasks which better suit them, spending time with people they work well with, and thinking about their work more positively. It has been shown to link with performance, satisfaction and commitment, so everyone is a winner!

6. Calling
Again, not a new one for many career practitioners. As sense of calling is when someone feels destined to fulfil a particular role which fits with their broader life purpose and has a connection with something pro-social. Links have been found in the research between having a calling and life wellbeing, job satisfaction and meaning at work. Conversations with clients which encourage them to think about the three key elements (what they were born to do, what do think matters in life, and what could they contribute to the greater good) can spark off ideas in clients who may not have identified their calling.

Dik, B.J., Duffy, R.D., Allan, B.A., O’Donnell, M.B., Shim, Y. and Steger, M.F. (2015) Purpose and meaning in career development applications The Counseling Psychologists, 43(4) 558 – 585