Why we work
Have you ever considered that the work you choose is a really big decision? During our roughly averaged 79 years on Earth, we humans spend a significant amount of time at work. One analysis from Huffpost Australia estimates that we spend an average of 13 years and 2 months at work throughout our lifetime. That comes out to about 24% of a typical 50-year period of employment, nearly 5,000 days, and a lot of cups of coffee. Next to time spent sleeping – 33 glorious years – our time spent working ranks second-highest among the activities of our lifetime.
So we work a lot. That’s a given. And these days we have an overwhelming number of career options, each with its own meandering path. Social work or dentistry? Teaching or sales? Before asking the typical questions to young people or ourselves, perhaps we need to think about what it takes to make those 13+ years count.
One way to wrap our heads around work decisions is to acknowledge that we all have different reasons for working. It’s not always about money, of course, and there are countless micro-decisions over the years that lead us to the thing we do every day. Some people have the privilege to think deeply about the work they do, while others may fall into an industry not from personal reflection, but simply from situation or expectation. No matter what leads us there, work has a different mix of meanings for each of us.
To help break down how we think about work, I’ve found the research of John Budd to be especially helpful in consolidating chaos into coherence. Dr. Budd is a professor of Work and Organization at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, a gem I found while taking an online HR management course. Reflective, approachable, and endearingly quirky, Dr. Budd uses his course to explore the basics of why people work. And if we can grasp the why, shouldn’t that bring us closer to justifying our time spent working (and reconsider our choices if we realize it’s not time very well spent)?
The elusive engagement
Let’s first take a second to think about engagement. Someone who’s engaged in work is highly involved, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace. Seems like a good way to spend all that time to me, but obviously not as easy to achieve. Engagement is determined by things like:
- feeling clear about your role and expectations
- having the right tools to do your job
- having a chance to do the things you do best
- having a strongly committed team
- working with others for a common purpose
It takes a lot for all of these things to fall into place, in 2020 it’s no surprise that 13% of workers were actively disengaged in their work (meaning they had miserable work experiences and spread unhappiness to their colleagues). The same poll suggests that 50% were not engaged at all (psychologically unattached to their organization or work). Low effort and low passion, these folks put in the time but not the energy to get the job done. That’s the majority of us! That leaves only a third of workers that were potentially engaged in their job in 2020.
Engagement ebbs and flows with the times, too. During 2020, it’s not surprising that the largest decline in engagement occurred for people of color, those in leadership positions, those with Democratic party affiliations, and (on-site) service workers. The dual pandemics of the coronavirus and the resurgence of racism in the U.S. accompanied by volatile political undertones surely had consequences for people at work. Engagement isn’t a metric we can sustain with a quick fix, but rather something we need to keep a pulse on pretty regularly.
So how do these two things – engagement and reasons for working – connect? Before we dive into my interpretation of Dr. Budd’s 10 broad ways of thinking about work, remember that work can mean different things to different people and can have a number of meanings for any one of us. So in order to structure work for ourselves and our staff to produce high levels of engagement, we need to think about why people work in the first place. Let’s take a look.
Work as liberation (or not) 🙌🏽
The first way that Dr. Budd describes work is freedom. Work can be a way to achieve independence (from other people or from our environment) and to leverage our growth in a way that’s liberating. This can manifest as creativity, wealth, or a number of things that distinguishes ourselves from the dependence we were all born with.
Another way to look at work is quite the opposite. It’s a curse. Very simply, it’s something we have to do day in and day out, and without question. We work to survive and to maintain the social order. It’s our burden to bear, painfully and monotonously. Think of the movie Office Space. Clock in, clock out, repeat.
Work as things 🔩
A third way to look at work is to see it as a commodity. We put in effort and time into the machine, and it dutifully prints out a paycheck for us. Work has tradable economic value and is therefore governed by the laws of supply and demand. It’s a pretty straightforward thing.
Next is to think of work as occupational citizenship. As members of the human community, we pursue work as a collective whole and earn rights beyond what the basic supply-and-demand market might yield. It’s a base to lend our voice and create deserving standards for ourselves. We are more than the market.
Dr. Budd’s fifth way of looking at work is called disutility. This basically means that work has shortcomings in satisfying our human wants. It’s pretty lousy, but we tolerate it because it allows us to obtain goods and services that will bring pleasure. The the extra time we must give up to earn money will eventually bring us things we value.
Work as Me 👤
As work becomes more employee-oriented (especially in the context of an individualistic society) another reason to work is for personal fulfillment. Our work satisfies our needs, feeding our physical and/or psychological wellbeing each day. Work is good for our inner selves and fills a void that lies within.
Similar to this is work as identity. Beyond wellbeing and wealth, we can gleam a sense of meaning from it. Our work can help us answer questions like Who am I? and Where do I belong in this world? It’s important to mention that identifying with our work doesn’t always produce healthy outcomes when we get too intertwined with it.
Work as Us 👥
The final three ways to think about work involve other people. Some people see work as a source of social relations, where they thrive from human interaction and are guided by the norms and power structures of their organization. Some see work as caring for others to emphasize the cognitive, physical, emotional efforts needed to take care of other people. Similarly we can consider work as serving others (rather than tending to ourselves and our psychological/monetary pursuits). This means devoting time and efforts to other people or ideals including a community, belief system, or country.
Looking at these, it’s clear that work has diverse meanings. You can imagine your own blend of how you might define your reasons to work, with each of these ideas taking up its own space at the table. Here’s a rough sketch of my own motivations for working:
One takeaway for me is that my identity and personal fulfillment slices are pretty large compared to others. Dr. Budd mentions there’s a dark side of working for things like personal fulfillment and identity, especially when there’s a conflict between your work and your authentic self. Thus if good work can produce psychological wellbeing, bad work can produce psychological harm. Perhaps best to keep this precaution in mind as I think more about my own work.
The cool thing about exploring these motivations is that once we understand them, we can restructure our work to create value and opportunities that better serve those motivations. Knowing why we work can help diagnose a lack of work effort and give us clues for where to start when addressing challenging issues. And as managers or self-studiers, we can think of some possible solutions depending on how work is perceived:
| Work Perception | Points of Leverage |
|---|---|
| commodity | financial incentives |
| curse | acceptance, validation |
| occupational citizenship | voice, rights, mobility |
| personal fulfillment | intrinsic rewards |
| identity | positive sense of self |
| freedom | creativity, agency, wealth |
| caring for others | opportunities to serve/value serving others |
Alas, work is complex. There’s no straightforward recipe to improve engagement and support motivational solutions for people 100% of the time, but thinking about why we work might be a good place to start. Whether it be supporting others in choosing a career direction, motivating people you work with, or just plain making sense of what you do every day, it could be interesting to focus on the why. Where it leads you might be another story.
13(+) years is quite some time to spend working. How will you justify yours?