What Makes Work Meaningful — Or Meaningless?

Meaningful work is something we all want. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl famously described how the innate human quest for meaning is so strong that, even in the direst circumstances, people seek out their purpose in life.

 A recent study by MIT Sloan Management Review showed:

 Meaningfulness was more important to employees than any other aspect of work, including pay and rewards, opportunities for promotion, or working conditions. Meaningful work can be highly motivational, leading to improved performance, commitment, and satisfaction.

 Researchers anticipated that the data would show that the meaningfulness experienced by employees in relation to their work was clearly associated with actions taken by managers. Instead, the research showed that quality of leadership received virtually no mention when people described meaningful moments at work, but poor management was the top destroyer of meaningfulness.

 The research aimed to uncover how and why people find their work meaningful. The study showed that meaningfulness was often associated with a sense of pride and achievement at a job well done, whether they were professionals or manual workers.

 “Those who could see that they had fulfilled their potential, or who found their work creative, absorbing, and interesting, tended to perceive their work as more meaningful than others. Accordingly, receiving praise, recognition, or acknowledgment from others mattered a great deal.”

The Five Qualities of Meaningful Work

The study also revealed five unexpected features of meaningful work; in these features might explain the fragile and intangible nature of meaningfulness.

 1. Self-Transcendent

 Individuals tended to experience their work as meaningful when it mattered to others more than just to themselves. Their work was meaningful when it showed the impact and relevance of their work on the individuals, the group or the community. 

 2. Poignant

 The experience of meaningful work can be poignant rather than purely euphoric. The experience of coping with challenging conditions led to a sense of meaningfulness far greater than they would have experienced dealing with straightforward, everyday situations.

 3. Episodic

A sense of meaningfulness arose in an episodic rather than a sustained way. It seemed that no one could find their work consistently meaningful, but rather that an awareness that work was meaningful arose at peak times that were generative of strong experiences.

 4. Reflective

 Meaningfulness was rarely experienced in the moment, but rather in retrospect and on reflection when people were able to see their completed work and make connections between their achievements and a wider sense of life meaning.

 5. Personal

 Other feelings about work, such as engagement or satisfaction, tend to be just that: feelings about work. Work that is meaningful, on the other hand, is often understood by people not just in the context of their work but also in the wider context of their personal life experiences. 

How Does Your Incentive or Loyalty Program Measure Up?

 

Executives want to know what they can expect in return for investing in an incentive, B2B, channel or loyalty reward program. That is a fair question, and one that the incentive industry have had trouble answering succinctly. We can pull from dozens of published case studies and examples, but these are best-case scenarios and not necessarily helpful in setting a minimum expectation — we need a baseline.

The following results come from research conducted and published in the Sept 2021 edition of Sales & Marketing magazine showed some things that could be foundational for program baselines.  Respondents for this survey included program owners and managers from sponsoring brands, as well as design strategists and program directors from companies that provide incentive solutions.

Q: What Kind of Results Can you Expect from Your Incentive Program?

• ·          9 out of 10 Programs Achieve 5-10% Year over Year program lift

o   2/3 of well-designed programs achieve greater than 10% incremental lift

• ·       82% of programs increased retention by 5-10%

o   Half of the expert respondents cited greater than 10%

• ·       90% of the programs achieved ROI’s 2:1 to 4:1

o   One in three of well-designed exceeded a 4:  ROI

With these findings, what is the reason that so many companies implement their own non-cash incentive programs without the assistance of industry design strategists and specialists?  In our opinion the reason is the vast majority of incentive reward companies are devoid of great strategists.  It simply costs too much money to keep them when they have such a difficult time being competitive.  Today you are more likely to have a seasoned veteran of industry calling on you charged with selling you just the “prizes”, which is where most of the budget is.   

Research: Gift Cards Better Than Cash for Employee Wellness

 

When it comes to promoting healthy behaviors in workers, managers should keep their cash and reach for gift cards. That was the finding by a team of researchers at Brigham Young University, who found that gift cards were far more likely to motivate participants in a workplace wellness program to successfully complete their challenges. 

Published online at Management Accounting Research, the study was conducted by BYU researchers Bill Heninger, Steve Smith and David Wood. It tracked an institution that rewarded workers who completed a six-week wellness challenge, giving participants a choice between a cash bonus on their paycheck, a gift card or a material reward of the same value. Approximately 60 percent of participants selected cash, 30 percent chose gift cards and 10 percent selected the tangible reward.

While cash was the most popular choice, the most effective choice turned out to be gift cards. According to the findings, those who selected gift cards were approximately 25 percent more likely to complete the challenge than the participants selecting other rewards, taking into account all other factors.

"You would presume that when people pick the reward type that is the most appealing to them, it would have the most motivational power," Smith said in a statement. "But that wasn't the case. Employees choosing to be rewarded with gift cards actually reaped the greatest health benefits.

The findings add more evidence to the assertions long held by leaders of the incentive industry that gift cards are a more effective incentive than cash. The authors suggest that the gift cards might have proved more effective because they strike a balance between flexible and specific when it comes to entertainment or fun. 

"People keep mental accounts," Wood explained. "If you work and make $10, that's your work money. If you find 10 bucks on the ground, then that's free money. You might go out to lunch with the free money, when you normally wouldn't with your work money."