The meaning of meaning

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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