What does a meaningful workplace actually look like?

In my review of Gurnek Bains’ Meaning Inc my main criticism was that it barely said anything about representation, without which there can be no meaning. Unfortunately there wasn’t any space to develop the idea further, and as it probably sounds a bit arcane on first reading I want to spend some time filling in a few blanks.

Back in the nineteenth century most scientists believed there was a very strange substance that filled the universe called luminiferous aether, or more simply, ether. It was invisible, intangible, in fact completely impossible to observe. So why did they believe it existed? Because they had figured out that light was a wave, and they knew that all waves needed a medium to travel through. Neither of those statements turned out to be completely true, but they seemed so obvious back then that no one really challenged them.

Taking this as a parable, ether was to a previous generation of physicists what I fear meaning is becoming for the current generation of HR directors. Employees are happier, fitter and more productive when they can (in Gurnek Bains’ phrase) “connect their work to experiences that are important to them”. Meaning then becomes the invisible, unobservable, hypothetical medium through which the connection is made.

It becomes treated as a quantifiable thing, as people observe that there “is (or isn’t) much meaning in our workplace”, or “we need to bring more meaning into our employees’ lives”. Budget is then spent on meaning-generation activities – bringing values to life, empowering workers, improving communications and so on.

Now I really like the definition of meaning as the connection between what I do and what’s important to me, but I suggest we need to get beyond the “ether” model of how this happens. For the whole concept to be useful, we need a much more precise understanding of exactly what is being connected with what, and that can’t be done unless we understand how people represent their experiences. In short, meaning is not a connection between experiences but between representations of experiences.

If I say “our strategy is meaningless”, I’m not thinking about a disembodied, abstract concept that just somehow came to be in my mind, I’m thinking about how I felt when I picked up the 16 pages of jargon with corporate branding on the cover and the CEO’s picture on the first page that landed on my desk, or the hour long presentation of business-speak and pie charts I was subjected to in a darkened conference hall at the start of the year. If I say our organisation’s values are meaningless, I’m probably talking about the list of words on my mouse pad or my screensaver, which seem totally divorced from my everyday experience.

Similarly, if I say that what I actually do at work is meaningless, I’m referring to physical interactions with physical people and physical things, not an ethereal atmosphere that pervades my surroundings. The meaning is (or isn’t) being represented through the spreadsheets I fill in, the components I assemble, the programs I write, the conversations I have and so on. Either these represent something that is important to me or they don’t.

I guess most HR or OD directors would love their people’s representation of work to be whatever they’ve written in their people strategy: “A challenging, rewarding, exciting … (fill in the blanks) … place to work” or whatever. But this is the land of ether. Meaning in reality is created by individuals, with individual experiences. You can’t create meaning for them, but you can create more meaningful representations.

That NASA janitor everyone talks about who supposedly said that scrubbing the floors was helping to put a man on the moon might not have been quite so upbeat if no one had mentioned to him the moon part. This is the situation in most large organisations – there is no JFK figure giving the big picture that people can locate themselves in.

So how do you make a meaningful representation? The answer is that you connect what you are saying and the way you are saying it as closely as possible to the actual working experiences of your people. Sounds fine in theory; here are some ideas in practice:

• Read the Sun. Then use the same vocabulary for your internal comms. Stop speaking the language of your leadership team, because their experience is absolutely not the norm for everyone else.
• Tell stories. People will sit for two hours enthralled in a cinema, but will be fidgeting after two minutes in the average corporate presentation. People make connections through narrative, not through bullet points.
• Make space for conversations. How many people in your organisation would say that their most meaningful experiences of the day are talking to friends over the water cooler? When people can speak (without feeling guilty about wasting time) to colleagues from other parts of the business, they are creating connections that help them see how they fit into the bigger picture.
• Be honest if you don’t know the answer. Leaders too often fill the vacuum of uncertainty with the right-sounding words. Because the words aren’t meaningful though, they just serve to disconnect people further.
• Be visual. Not wanting to sound too much like a sales pitch, but people find visual representations of ideas and stories easier to follow and remember than purely verbal ones (think cinema again). Everyone says that for a workplace to be meaningful, people need to see how they fit in the bigger picture, but ironically all we usually show them is words.

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Meaning Inc:  What does it all mean?

Meaning Inc came out about a year ago now, and is basically a manifesto from business psychology consultancy YSC. Although its stated author is YSC’s CEO Gurnek Bains, judging from the Acknowledgements it was very much a collaborative effort. The models and case studies (not to mention cover recommendations) are evidently drawn from client history. This isn’t problematic, although the content does sometimes wander into sales-pitch territory, and I think awareness of potential clients reading the text has probably watered a lot of it down.

There’s a long line of purpose / values / culture books that started with Peters & Waterman and Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the early eighties, all stressing the importance of motivation through vision, values, culture and so on. The question is, is YSC’s “blueprint for business success in the 21st century” genuinely new, or is it the same old ideas re-packaged with new labels? The authors raise this question themselves by making a big deal about the year 2000 as a reference point for change, saying that “what worked in the 1980s and 1990s is not working any longer”. So do they have a different answer?

What is meaning?

The whole package revolves around the central concept of meaning, a word that I imagine will scare off quite a few people right from the off. So what do they mean by it?

“Here is a broad, yet precise, definition of the term: essentially the meaning of any word is directly related to the other words it connects with or the external reality to which it relates. It is the sense of connectedness with something that lies at the heart of meaning in a literal sense … Meaning is experienced when we are able to connect our thoughts or activities with something else in a way that creates a sense of relevance or context.” P79

“(Meaning Inc.) refers to companies whose success is founded on creating meaning for their employees, as well as for their customers and other stakeholders”. P15

So meaning, at its simplest level, is connection. As the quote suggests, this is most obvious when we talk about the meanings of words, but it applies to other forms of meaning as well. For businesses, meaning arises “when people are able to connect what they are doing to things that matter to them”. The connection idea may seem a little abstract, but it’s actually a really helpful concept. Firstly, as the authors suggest, it matches what we know about the way brains physically work. When we make sense of something, the wiring in our heads actually changes, making new connections to reflect the new learning. Secondly, it gives leaders a simple mental picture about what meaning creation looks like: Somebody somewhere is connecting whatever they’re seeing reading / hearing / overhearing to something that’s important to them. Similarly, meaninglessness is disconnection. Think of the average corporate conference – lots of slides, lots of presentations, but no meaning if people can’t connect what they are seeing and hearing with the things they care about.

Meaning creation

The book proceeds to cover the various ways that leaders can help their employees create meaning, which can be summarised as follows:

• Articulate the “why” – not just the what and the how. To do this, leaders need to be more authentic, which means doing one or two things really well rather than trying to be all things to all men.

• Move the company’s purpose beyond either simple metrics (the “we will be number one” mentality) or an existence rationale (“we make great widgets”). You need to “place employees as players in a wider social narrative”.

• Help employees connect to the organisation’s history and values, creating meaning by locating themselves in an ongoing story. Everything else may be moving, but the “corporate DNA” has to stay consistent.

• Base the brand on the corporate DNA, and make sure it’s lived from the “inside out”. Brands “find life in the behaviour of people”.

• Help people have an impact, by giving them clear outcomes and the freedom to achieve them creatively.

• Promote employee growth – both professionally and personally. As with leadership, this means turning “spikes” of competency into “towering area of distinctiveness”.

• Help people feel “liked, accepted and validated” in order to create a sense of belonging.

• Take work-life balance more seriously.

But why “meaning”?

This is a great list. My problem is, exactly the same content could be (and has been) written many times without needing to talk about “meaning” at all. All of the above activities are supposed to create meaning by connecting what people do with things that are important to them. I’m not saying for one minute that they don’t, but surely the question is how? Because the exploration of meaning itself is so shallow, the question of how never arises … all the practical chapters could be re-written without reference to meaning at all. I suggest there are two foundational building blocks missing, which would cast the list above in a new light:

Firstly, the relationship between meaning and personal experience. Things are more meaningful to us when they are more closely connected to our experience. If a child wants to know what a word means, I need to explain it to them in light of what they already know. So I explain the meaning of “horse” to a four-year old in relation to “cow”, not in relation to “mammal”, because I can connect to their experience of cows, not mammals.

The problem in business is that most leaders try to connect what they are saying to their own experience, rather than the experience of their people. “Profitability” and “competitive threat” may be highly meaningful to a chief executive, but probably mean nothing to a fork-lift truck driver.

Secondly, the relationship between meaning and representation. Meaning doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All the “components” of meaning the authors describe – purpose, strategy, values, “corporate DNA” and so on – are described in the abstract, but they are things that people have to represent to themselves in some form if they are to have any meaning. The strategy has to be written down. The business plan has to be drawn up.

This makes it astonishing to me that there is virtually no discussion at all about communications. The main way in which leaders attempt to pro-actively make meaning for their people is through communications. I think most of those attempts fail because – as I said before – people can’t connect the abstract content they hear and read with the physical experience of their everyday lives.

So, in conclusion: There’s little here by way of practical advice that I haven’t read before. That doesn’t mean the book won’t be hugely valuable as a stimulus and source of ideas. But to my mind there’s a much fuller popular analysis of meaning yet to be written, that could cast new light on the problems this book addresses.

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