
What Makes Work Meaningful or Meaningless - bootload
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-makes-work-meaningful-or-meaningless
======
bambax
> _our 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_

Spolsky:

> _Administrators [_ code name for managers _] aren’t supposed to make the
> hard decisions. They don’t know enough. All those super genius computer
> scientists that you had to recruit from MIT at great expense are supposed to
> make the hard decisions. That’s why you’re paying them. Administrators exist
> to move the furniture around so that the people at the top of the tree can
> make the hard decisions._

[http://avc.com/2012/02/the-management-team-guest-post-
from-j...](http://avc.com/2012/02/the-management-team-guest-post-from-joel-
spolsky/)

~~~
enraged_camel
I follow an imaginary and totally-not-backed-by-science model whereby I view
managers as a force multiplier on their teams. The number can be anything
between 0 and 10. In this model, a PHB[1] hovers between 0.2 and 0.8 (it
depends on how well the team can ignore him/her), whereas the average manager
hovers somewhere between 0.8 and 1.2; their effect on their teams is neutral,
give or take. Good managers are between 1 and 3 -- they can double or triple
their team's output -- whereas excellent managers are 3 and up. Such managers
also tend to possess very strong leadership skills.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-
haired_Boss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss)

~~~
JamesBarney
What types of things can a good manager do that increases an output by triple?
That seems incredibly high to me. The little bit of research that's been done
looking at how managers increase employee output have found the vast majority
of force multiplication comes from training.

~~~
enraged_camel
Using political capital to shield the team from political BS, remove obstacles
and have more resources allocated to the team can make a big difference.

------
alatkins
Full text:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PV10pZW...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PV10pZWoBB0J:sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-
makes-work-meaningful-or-meaningless/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
arien
How odd. I was reading it on mobile this morning and the whole article was
(still is, just checked) fully available.

~~~
alatkins
Paywalled for me, but that was from .au.

------
unabst
Workers often blame their superiors for lack of motivation or inspiration, but
that wouldn't account for the good workers who show up to work inspired
already. They find it before work, and if they can't find it, they move on.

They don't stick around and dig for it. That's why you want people who have
other options to work for you, and when you work for others, you want to know
you could be doing something else. Meaning is defined from the choices we
exercise. Why here instead of there is what is meaningful.

No one can tell you how to live your life. Similarly, no one can tell you why
you're doing your job. You need to figure that out yourself, and seeking it
should involve finding other jobs, not just repeatedly digging at the same
spot.

Good teachers and good managers alike can help you immensely if you already
have your reasons. They provide a synergy. And for that, they need you to be
inspired and be passionate. Synergy fails if either is void. So if you show up
inspired to a boss who isn't, that's a sign you may need to revisit your
choices also.

Eventually meaning always comes. Maybe it finds us. But if you want to make
the most of it, never wait and never settle. All one needs is the courage to
move on.

~~~
brokenmachine
Nicely written.

I would attribute blame to a manager who is a void however.

------
curiousfiddler
This article strikes a chord for me. I also read a book sometime back, called
Flow [1] by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which draws similar conclusion and is
good, quick read.

And then I feel sad, because all the effort to seek that personal connect with
work at my current workplace, have been taken away by a disconnected and
immature middle management, which only works for meeting the goals and
deadlines given to them...

1\. Flow:
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow)

~~~
JSeymourATL
Pair this with 'Give Yourself a Flow Test' >
[https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/07/the-motivation-
tool...](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/07/the-motivation-toolkit/)

------
zby
Ever since reading [http://strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) I have been thinking about this.
One problem with this is the definition of 'meaningful', it is not very
concrete. But I think the phenomenon is true - more and more work feels like
doing something unnecessary (bullshit). I don't agree with Graeber explanation
why this happens - which is basically a grand conspiration by all business
owners to give worthless work to people so that they don't revolt. I think it
is the result of the growing complexity of our work - we encounter more and
more rules that we suspect to be stupid. Many of the rules are stupid indeed -
based on some random past events, but many are not - they are just covering
some cases that we have never thought of. It is easier to assume that the
rules are stupid than admit incompetence. But as the complexity grows less and
less people understand the rules, the bad rules are not revised and it all
goes in a vicious circle.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I've seen the scenario where every time something goes wrong a new rule is
handed down from on high, eventually you get to the point where you aren't
allowed to prepare food in the kitchen or use the shower to have a shower or
more importantly you aren't allowed to do the work you are there for.

~~~
dmichulke
This is "power corrupts" at play.

People in power almost always try to increase their level of control,
essentially centralizing the power structure of the entity. At some point of
time the entity is completely inefficient and collapses under its own weight
(rules, bureaucracy).

You can see this everywhere where power can be centralized: companies,
organizations, nation states.

Ironically, successful leaders these days often do the opposite of leading,
they decentralize, making the company much more efficient (assuming there are
still sub-entities that can/want to be efficient).

~~~
zby
This might be a part of the story - but it is not the most important one. It
makes a good story - a fight between the good and the evil bureaucracy. But
what I have seen is rules created in perfectly good faith and often they are
reasonable answers to some immediate threats. The problem is with revising
them when the situation changes or understanding how they work in the presence
of other rules etc.

It is quite analogue to how code becomes bloated - this might be an effect of
some programmers believing that this is their work security - but more often
than that the programmers hate it. Bureaucratic rules are quite literally the
code that the administration runs - and we need them, it is just very hard to
understand them all.

------
jypepin
Once thing that always strikes me with those studies, and a lot of other
medical, economical or psychological studies and tryouts are the sample
size...

A study that interviews 135 people? And this is seen as significant? It seems
to me saying something like "we tried this on 150 people, and we saw that 60%
of them X" proves nothing because of how small the sample size is.

what I am missing?

~~~
dredmorbius
In statistics, what matters far more than the _size_ of your sample is the
_method_ of your sampling.

This is where lay and academic understandings of statistics diverge
dramatically. There's far more discussion of how to ensure an appropriate
sample size (determined generally by the independent variables you're tracking
and how you plan on subsetting the sample) and _tests for randomness_. Which
is why the time to call a statistician into your study isn't when you want to
run algos over your data _but before you even begin collecting data_.

Oh, and _large sample_ statistics is a thing. You need to have a minimum
number of observations before large-sample methods are generally considered
accurate, described by _n_.

 _n_ = 30.

 _If_ (and that's a crucial if) your sampling _is_ random, you can draw
tremendous inferences from small datasets. This is why many national-level
polls rely on samples of about 300 individuals. The key isn't the size, it's
making sure those 300 are _really, really_ random. Goof that and you end up
with a "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline. Or Trump as the GOP candidate.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman)

(Both owe a lot to how phones are used -- in 1948, landline phones were still
a sufficient luxury item that it skewed phone-polling methods. In 2016, cord-
cutting is having similar effects.)

I had the interesting experience a while ago of looking at data as it came in
generating an estimate of a population of 2.2 billion individuals, based on a
sample of 50,000 (Google+ activity, relying on a sitemap file of profiles,
where sitemaps are restricted to 50,000 entries per). Well within the first
100 records, the long-term trend of ~8-10% (my final value was 9%) of profiles
showing any public activity was established. Given web polling and delays
introduced (I tried, and succeeded, to avoid tripping any bot-denial
mechanisms), the data rolled in slowly, so I simply set my stats script to
loop over the incoming files every minute or so.

Somewhere in my testing I also ran a set of resamplings based on the data I'd
ingested -- taking small sets of data from within the larger one and looking
for any wildly anomolous trends. This would have suggested that the sitemap
file itself wasn't randomly constructed, but eyeball tests of various aspects
(including account age, region, and activity) strongly suggested it was. This
spared me some more complex sample-generation.

(My conclusions were independently verified from a much larger sample of 500k
profiles by Stone Temple Consulting and Eric Enge, a pretty heartening
validation.)

________

Edit to add: another crucial point is that statistical error is governed by
sqrt(n) -- SE = 1/sqrt(n). To halve your error, you've got to _square_ your
sample size. So if 30 doesn't work for you, you're looking at 900, not 60.
Assuming sampling costs increase with n, reducing error gets expensive fast.

And for the pedants, SE is "standard error", as I'm aware.

~~~
gjm11
> statistical error is governed by sqrt(N)

Yup.

> To halve your error, you've got to _square_ your sample size.

Nope. You've got to multiply it by 4. (It's the 2 that gets squared.) The
square root of 1/120 is half that of 1/30.

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks. I was thinking that through. Math is getting too hard ;-)

Doubling (and repeatedly doubling) occurs through _doubled powers_ of 2. So
halving = 2^2, quartering = 2^4, reduce to 1/8, 2^6.

So insteady of n = 30, 60, 120, 240 (initial, halve, quarter, eighth), you end
up with 30, 120, 480, 1920.

------
saosebastiao
It was like reading a description of Amazon. Thousands of talented and
intelligent employees with thousands of ideas that could make or save godless
amounts of money, 99% of which were shot down after they bubble their way up
through a leadership telephone game which eventually totally misrepresents the
idea, and the remaining 1% of ideas get the resource strangle after some VP
decides his pet project needs all the resources and allocates his budget
accordingly.

Amazon is a place where intelligent ambition is rewarded with plenty of money,
but never used for anything but implementing other people's ideas.

------
drops
There is a word "ikigai", which is a Japanese concept meaning "a reason for
being". Pic related:
[http://i.imgur.com/k6UCbN0.png](http://i.imgur.com/k6UCbN0.png)

Ideally, your work should fall in the center. If only it was so easy though

~~~
happyslobro
And the French have "raison d'être", literally, "reason for being". Maybe part
of the problem is that the language of business does not have a strong idiom
for this.

~~~
77pt77
That is not the same point that diagram illustrates.

~~~
happyslobro
No, it is not as complete. It does not cover as many points of view. But it is
analogous, and it is better than anything that English has. English has enough
going for it that it can get away with dropping the ball many times. I like to
call it every time ;)

------
andyjohnson0
PDF full text is at [1]. Looks like it is legitimately published by the
principal author's university.

[1]
[http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/61282/1/What%20makes%20work%20meanin...](http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/61282/1/What%20makes%20work%20meaningful%20or%20meaningless%20accepted%20version.pdf)

~~~
az0xff
Reading the full text, I can't help but notice the mention of "Episodic"
meaningfulness, which means that meaningfulness peaks at certain times rather
than being present at a constant level throughout.

Does this apply to the feelings about what someone is doing that day, or does
it apply to the job as a whole?

------
ilaksh
There are so many examples of the 'deadly sins' of poor management because the
concept of work is not far removed from slavery, and managers are essentially
the slave masters.

Good jobs and good treatment are the exception.

Hierarchies are poor organizational structures.

~~~
bambax
The French word for work, _travail_ used to mean _torture_ , and still
designates suffering induced by child delivery (as does _labor_ in English).

In Latin there isn't even a word for work, it's just "non leisure" (neg-otium)
(I think... it's been a while since I've studied any Latin...)

Work isn't supposed to be fun or meaningful.

~~~
brazzledazzle
I can agree that work isn't supposed to be fun (it's orthogonal really) and if
it is fun one should be thankful. But the earliest forms of work mankind
engaged in was as meaningful as it gets. It was work done to survive. It's no
surprise that work you can't derive meaning from is so emotionally problematic
when we evolved in an environment where survival was a day-to-day battle. I
wouldn't be surprised if the lack of fulfillment that motivates the wealthy to
engage in all kinds of good, bad and weird behavior is driven by the same
innate need for one's work to have meaning.

------
amelius
> Individuals tended to experience their work as meaningful when it mattered
> to others more than just to themselves.

Can this be applied to art as well? Isn't the meaning of a work of art the
greatest to the artists themselves?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Yes, but for me the meaning isn't necessarily in the finished work outside of
creating something I like to look at. Considering I'm pretty prolific - I work
on art most days, and have stacks that people haven't seen, I truly have to
say I do it for my own benefit. Sometimes I put things that others find
meaningful in the work because folks like that stuff.

It does give a flutter when other people see meaning in my otherwise
meaningless work, though, and I still get giddy when I happen to sell a piece,
as I don't sell often. There is some sort of encouragement to be had from
others finding meaning in it. Much like getting a better than expected review
at work. But I'd do it regardless of outside encouragement.

------
p4wnc6
I wonder how much counter-signalling there is on the part of the interviewees.
They are going to be prone to say things that associate far-mode, positive
ideals with them.

Like, they won't say, "I found a lot of meaning that time my hard work, blood,
sweat, and tears were actually meritocratically rewarded with that large
bonus" because it makes them sound near-mode, greedy, overly materialistic,
etc.

Instead, they'll say something far-mode, about how they related to the human
element of an experience or a coworker or a client, or how their family
finally appreciated the deeper meaning in their work.

I'm not sure I really believe that people find work meaning mostly in these
far-mode, idealistic things. Rather, I think they want _to be seen as someone
who values these things_ because then people will associate good stereotypes
with them.

This also helps explain why it's more reflective, episodic, and after-the-fact
rationalized to be meaningful, rather than being tied to concrete properties
of the work itself.

I think for myself, I do have some moral and ethical baselines that I don't
want the byproducts of my labor to violate, like harming others, perpetuating
government oppression, wasting resources.

But beyond these things, I don't actually get more or less meaning out of any
different topical type of work than some other type.

What _does_ make me feel like work is meaningful is to experience lots and
lots of _autonomy_ in my workplace decision making and my approach to solving
problems. I also like to feel that I have the freedom to pursue whatever
quality standards are pragmatic for the problem, and am not constrained by
bureaucracy to pursue inelegant solutions when there's no pragmatic reasons
why they actually need to be inelegant (this happens all the time).

After that, I feel meaning at work most when I am given adequate quiet and
private physical space and can reach a state of psychological flow.

I could be writing code to process ATM transactions or to cure cancer and I'll
feel the same amount of meaning if (a) I can mostly do it my own way within
some loose context of the broader team's needs, and (b) I am left alone to
actually get work done and I am not interrupted or inundated with an
unhealthy, oppressively wide open working space.

For me, these resonated more with the comment in the article that good
managers are rarely even mentioned in the context of meaningful work, whereas
bad managers are often to blame for work that is not meaningful.

Good managers are invisible geniuses who know how to fade into the backdrop,
get out of your way, allow you to make decisions, and do not feel fear that
they have to micromanage or create empty superficial artifacts to justify that
they are working. They are so, so hard to find, and when you find one, you are
so happy that you will give so much loyalty to working for that manager, and
forgive so much other crap the company might pull.

~~~
CalRobert
At my last interview with a medium-sized tech company I had about 5 positive
interactions with 5 interviewers. However, there was a "culture component"
chat where I was asked what I had found difficult in the past.

I mentioned that in my previous role I'd been in a unique position to work
with both customers AND development, and as a result had built a rich toolset
for solving customers' problems. Note that this was a company with a small
number of high-paying customers, so losing anyone was a big problem. At least
enough customers had specifically stated they stayed with my employer as a
result of these tools to show that I earned my keep.

I mentioned that making the tools had been my favourite part of that work, and
being told by my manager (after making them) that it was a poor use of time
the worst. Mind you, I'd been mentioning these things to him for some time and
getting "mmhmmm ok" in response. I asked the interviewer "is this a company
where somebody with an idea can develop a prototype and try it out without
getting approval from three different people?"

The interviewer hemmed and hawed and we got to an awkward silence. I was
actually relieved not to have to worry about an offer.

~~~
bambax
> _is this a company where somebody with an idea can develop a prototype and
> try it out without getting approval from three different people?_

What a fantastic question to ask as a candidate!!

