Creating That Golden Moment - Value Driven Work

Creating That Golden Moment - Meaning and Value Driven Work

Your career is in a natural state of entropy.

In following the second law of thermodynamics, entropy (the measure of randomness) will never decrease as the number of variables continuously increase over time. With the constant expansion of variability, a sense of meaning can also be lost. This loss of meaning in your work may cause you to only go through the motions at work, while avoiding any negative repercussions. Your job may seem like an endless stream of meaningless busywork which is constantly multiplying and being thrust upon you. Worst of all, you may feel trapped in your job for whatever reason. This may be the case for you, or your employees. Fortunately, through specific actions you can remediate the situation to reengage yourself or your employees.

To find meaning, you or your employees need to continually draw attention to work through significant interactions. While the responsibility for creating meaning is shared between the employee and the organization, a large amount of influence rests on the shoulders of management - through the work environment - creating trust and engagement. The main influences to create meaning are: moral structure, emotional intelligence, vision, teamwork, rewards and trust.

The first step in creating meaning is by creating, defining, and redefining your morals and emotional intelligence. In setting your morals, you are defining a general framework of your values. This is the anchor of creating meaning in your career, as you are focusing on your basic needs and personal boundaries. This will be tested and refined over time. An open and realistic reflection, personally or with others, will be paramount in this process. Additionally, when building your emotional intelligence, you are creating meaning through intentions, interactions, accomplishments, purpose, candor and ownership. By reviewing your morals and building your emotional intelligence, you are setting the foundation of expectations and an atmosphere of openness.

Building from a strong foundation, comes the structure of great teams and morale. As the saying goes, you are a reflection of those around you. Creating an environment of motivation begins with trust and respect where openness and challenge can be build a dynamic team. Creating meaning is to seek understanding on the effects that a job has in respect to life. When showing alignment between action and result participation, diligence and input creates meaning to your job by ways of trust and engagement.

To sustain meaning and engagement, you need to create a dynamic environment and have a strong vision. One way of creating that environment is by rewarding excellence at any level. Give validation to employees who have gone above and beyond or had a great outcome to a project. Validation is a simple way of encouraging and thanking employees for the work being done and can easily be done in a team or division meeting. Having a strong vision is another way of sustaining engagement. A clear vision creates a clear direction for employees, reducing confusion, initiating a rise to the challenge set forth, and reducing burnout in employees. Having the vision clearly communicated to the team also provides direction and excitement to a group, especially when developed jointly by the team and management.

Seeking meaning is an action of a more developed person looking for greater understanding of life. Creating meaning is a task done within one’s mind, seeking a pattern or knowledge or greater truth in life. By creating an atmosphere to satisfy the thirst for knowledge, happiness and impact - engagement and productive employees are created.

-thePonderingNick