“Don't leave me this way
I don't understand how I'm at your command
…….
I can't survive
I can't stay alive”
Don’t Leave Me This Way by the Communards (Click here for the song)
“There’s low unemployment, a sense of entitlement, it is so easy to get another job..I cant keep paying them more.. how do I retain my staff?”
Coaching client
Regular readers know that employee turnover is expensive. Hiring new employees can be costly, with significant financial resources typically spent replacing former staff. Employee turnover negatively impacts overall company performance by resulting in the loss of valuable knowledge, skills, and abilities and by disrupting established coordination patterns among employees. Some researchers view employees in knowledge-based workplaces as the most critical competitive asset for organisations, emphasising the importance of retention as a top priority.
To tackle this issue, researchers have explored various models to pinpoint aspects of work that can be adjusted to lower the chances of employee turnover.
Demands and resources:
Regular readers would know that Job demands are aspects of work that require effort, physical, cognitive, psychological and emotional. They can be challenging and thus support the employee’s growth and achievement. Or they can be a hindrance by raising excessive constraints or circumstances that inhibit individuals from achieving their goals.
Job resources are aspects of work that enable employees to achieve their goals, and increase motivation. They are aspects of work that reduce demands and provide a stimulus for personal growth, learning, and personal development. Resources include social relationships at work, colleagues or superiors, and changes in structure, job, performance feedback, and autonomy.
Leaders can play a direct or indirect role in the design of jobs and where possible enhancing resources and reducing demands.
“Job design (e.g. task significance and comprehensibility), person-job fit (e.g. values and mission), work relationships (e.g. colleagues and supervisors) and work beliefs (e.g. calling orientation) contribute to the meaningfulness of work-related activities”
Pratt & Ashforth, 2003.
Job Crafting
Employees are becoming more adept at proactively adding challenging job demands to achieve more difficult goals or voluntarily doing additional tasks without reward. However, researchers have found that increasing the challenges at work, had a minimal impact on boredom at work.
The impact of job boredom can result in decreased physical and psychological health, emotional disorders, and the condition of poor well-being. If the employee feels bored continuously, it will lead to high absenteeism, increased turnover intent, counterproductive behaviour, accidents at work, decreased work performance, alcohol or drug abuse, and distress. The longer the period of boredom and subsequent negative behaviours, the decrease in workers’ productivity will impact income and organisational performance. Researchers have found that employees want challenging jobs, fast-paced work, and to receive feedback. When work is monotonous, less challenging, and not autonomous, employees tend to experience job boredom.
Is job crafting enough?
Researchers have found that at an organisational level, leaders should cultivate an organisational climate that encourages job crafting. In addition, leaders should model crafting behaviours to their subordinates. Improving recruitment and selection practices to ensure they consider person-job fit and work beliefs will positively contribute to meaningfulness at work.
Personality
By drawing on the theory of proactive personality, researchers found that employees who have a proactive personality are more inclined to exhibit crafting behaviour. More specifically, employees who have a proactive personality are more likely to increase social or structural job resources and challenging job demands and decrease hindering job demands.
Employees who craft their jobs according to their interests and motivation may perceive their work activities as opportunities to express themselves. Some researchers propose that job crafting enables an increase in they will experience sense of meaning, engagement and retention.
Many employee retention strategies recommended by the literature refer to job design for increasing meaningfulness, engagement, autonomy, variety, and coworker support or matching jobs to employees’ personal values and life interests to ensure that work is interesting, challenging, and meaningful. Job crafting involves encouraging employees to proactively change their job demands and job resources.
“job crafting changes the meaning of work by changing job tasks or relationships in ways that allow employees to reframe the purpose of the job and experience the work differently”
Wrzesniewski and Dutton
What is meaningful work?
“Meaningful work is not simply whatever work means to people (meaning), but as work that is both significant and positive in valence (meaningfulness). Furthermore, we add that the positive valence of MW has a eudaimonic (growth- and purpose-oriented) rather than hedonic (pleasure-oriented) focus.”
Steger et al.
According to Michael Steager, one of the leading researchers in this area, meaningful work has the following three facets:
Psychological Meaning in Work. This is the subjective experience, that people judge their work as having a personal significance, it matters.
Meaning-making through work. This is the idea that work is an important source of meaning in life as a whole. Finding a common overlap between one’s work and one’s life work. Meaningful Work may help people deepen their understanding of their selves and the world around them, facilitating their personal growth.
Greater good motivations. Meaningful work encompasses the desire to make a positive impact on the greater good, such that work is most meaningful if it has a broader impact on others.
Meaningful work is defined as an individual's perception of his/her work as a meaningful and positive thing, supportive of self-development, oriented towards specific goals, and beneficial to others and the surrounding environment.
What are the benefits of meaningful work?
Regular readers know that employees who view their work as meaningful and/or serves a greater social or communal good report better psychological adjustment, and simultaneously possess qualities that are desirable to organisations. They value work more highly, experience greater job satisfaction, enjoy improved team cohesion, put in more discretionary effort, and find their work more fulfilling.
Recent research found that absenteeism was not related to whether or not people were satisfied with their jobs. Nor was it related to how committed they were to their organisation. It was not even related to intentions to leave their employer. Instead, they found that people absent themselves from work that holds no meaning for them. When combating boredom, for example, researchers found that Job enrichment can be effective, but its benefits are limited if employees do not find their work meaningful. They discovered that meaningful work plays a more significant role in reducing job boredom compared to simply increasing challenging job demands. Moreover, when work lacks meaning, adding challenging demands can actually lead to more boredom. Notably, for employees who feel overqualified, meaningful work can reduce job boredom by 52%.
Endang Parahyanti, who studied Generation Y workers, demonstrated that whilst job enrichment will only impact employee retention, only if the employee finds the work meaningful. Researchers have found that the perception that their work has meaning, will give meaning to themselves, is beneficial to others and the surrounding environment, and generates job resources and goals for employees.
What is the role of the leader?
Regular readers would know that none of the above could be achieved without the support of the leader. Researchers have proposed employers are responsible for certain objective work features such as autonomy, dignity, freedom, and security that contribute to meaningful work. The term Objective Meaningful Work captures what a moral or decent employer-employee relationship should look like through the design of work. Researchers have found that Objective Meaningful Work is necessary but not sufficient to enhance well-being.
Final thoughts:
Many of the researchers in this space have used Michael Steager’s Work and Meaning Inventory, I am keen to include it in my coaching work. Please contact me if you are interested.
Please click here if you would like to read my past blogs.
References:
Steger, M.F., Dik, B.J. and Duffy, R.D. (2012). Measuring Meaningful Work. Journal of Career Assessment, [online] 20(3), pp.322–337. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072711436160.
Zharifah, A.T. and Parahyanti, E. (2022). Meaningful Work as the Moderator of Increasing Challenging Job Demands and Job Boredom in Generation Y Workers. Journal An-Nafs: Kajian Penelitian Psikologi, [online] 7(2), pp.238–253. doi:https://doi.org/10.33367/psi.v7i2.2760.
Lips-Wiersma, M., Haar, J. and Cooper–Thomas, H.D. (2022). Is meaningful work always a resource toward well-being? The effect of autonomy, security and multiple dimensions of subjective meaningful work on wellbeing. Personnel Review, 52(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1108/pr-10-2020-0754.
Vermooten, N., Boonzaier, B. and Kidd, M. (2019). Job crafting, proactive personality and meaningful work: Implications for employee engagement and turnover intention. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 45(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v45i0.1567.
Oprea, B., Păduraru, L. and Iliescu, D. (2020). Job Crafting and Intent to Leave: The Mediating Role of Meaningful Work and Engagement. Journal of Career Development, p.089484532091866. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0894845320918666.
Siahaan, F.L. and Gatari, E. (2020). Searching for meaning: The mediating role of work engagement in the relationship between meaningful work and turnover intention of Millennials. Psikohumaniora: Jurnal Penelitian Psikologi, 5(1), p.15. doi:https://doi.org/10.21580/pjpp.v5i1.4305.
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