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Workers Value Meaning at Work; New Research from BetterUp Shows Just How Much They’re Willing to Pay for It | BetterUp

BetterUp Labs research proves strong connection to measurable business outcomes for meaning and purpose at work; suggests ways for companies to enhance meaning, boost ROI

SAN FRANCISCO — November 7, 2018 —   Employees produce more, work more, stay at companies longer and will sacrifice higher pay if they find meaning in their work, reveals groundbreaking research conducted by BetterUp Labs, the research arm of BetterUp, the company that pioneered mobile coaching to help all workers live their lives with optimal clarity, purpose and passion.

The findings of the study, released today, provide conclusive evidence that meaning is a real, measurable, fosterable, and achievable resource, and that businesses will achieve concrete gains if they answer their employees’ passionate call for more meaning at work.

The Meaning and Purpose at Work (MAP) report is based on investigation into the attitudes, motivations and behaviors of 2,285 American professionals across 26 industries and a range of company sizes, occupations and demographics. Top findings indicate that:

• Employees lack meaning at work . On average, employees say their work is about half as meaningful as it could be.
• Nine of 10 workers will trade money for meaning.   On average, they’d sacrifice 23 percent of future earnings —an average of $21,000 a year—for work that is always meaningful.
• Meaningful work retains, inspires talent.   Employees who find their work highly meaningful stay at jobs for an average of 7.4 months longer than employees who find work lacking meaning. When managers find jobs highly meaningful, turnover rates plummet to 1.5 percent, less than half the national average. Also, employees who find jobs highly meaningful are more likely to have received a recent raise or promotion.
• Meaningful work drives employees to work more . Employees doing meaningful work put in an extra hour per week and take two fewer days of paid leave per year. Raising one employee’s experience from average to highly meaningful generates an extra $9,078 in labor output per year.

“More than ever, people are on the hunt for meaning and that includes at work, where more and more of our time is spent. To attract and retain top talent, and achieve optimal productivity, companies must build greater meaning into the workplace,” says Alexi Robichaux, Co-Founder and CEO of BetterUp. “This research clearly shows that meaningful work is a win for the human condition, for companies, and for society at large. Fostering meaningful work is emerging as a cornerstone of a more creative and conscious business world. ”

The research also reveals groundbreaking insight into the sources of workplace meaning. Workers rank personal growth, in that they can develop their inner selves, as the biggest source of workplace meaning. Other top drivers include: professional growth, a shared purpose, and being of service in work that helps others. In companies with cultures of strong social support, workers rate a collective sense of shared purpose as the most important way work feels meaningful.

Company culture significantly impacts the meaningfulness of work, the research shows. Employees with strong workplace social support networks find more meaning in work. Meanwhile, toxic workplace behaviors, such as bullying and exclusion, drive down meaningful work scores by 24 percent.

The study’s findings suggest a number of concrete steps that companies can take to increase meaning and purpose for their employees. These include offering more flexible work options, recognizing the “knowledge work” entailed in every role, supporting shared purpose across company culture, and protecting against toxicity.

“Providing meaningful work requires investing in employees at both the individual and cultural level,” says Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, head of BetterUp Labs and BetterUp Chief Innovation Officer. “In the long run, both will pay dividends to a company’s bottom line in the form of talent retention and productivity.”

The research is the second major work from BetterUp Labs, which earlier produced widely cited research on   America’s Loneliest Workers . Over the next five years, BetterUp will invest $15-$20 million in BetterUp Labs, a first-of-its-kind behavioral research lab bringing together business, academia and science to fund research to help people be their best selves at work and elsewhere, and to arm companies with tactics to assist.

The full MAP report, which includes other insights including the types of workers who find work most meaningful and at what times of their lives, is available   here .

About BetterUp

Founded in 2013, BetterUp is a mobile-based leadership development platform used by Fortune 500 companies. With a holistic, science-backed methodology, BetterUp develops new behaviors and mindsets that enable high performance amid constant and accelerating change. Through on-demand, virtual coaching sessions, users practice and reinforce new behaviors and skills. Individual growth is measured and tracked. With a diverse range of customers, including Genentech, Logitech and Workday, BetterUp inspires employees to build the skills to thrive personally and professionally. To learn more, visit www.betterup.co

5 questions to ask to better the return to work

5 reasons hr leaders benefit from the betterup + workday partnership, betterup expands in europe to help workers worldwide lead better and live better, betterup and workday partner to enhance worker, workplace well-being, betterup and workday: deploy coaching with precision and scale, betterup named a 2019 “cool vendor” in human capital management: enhancing employee experience by gartnerup your game: a new model for leadership, women at betterup: we need more women in tech, leverage love languages at work to improve your office culture, shift 2018: reimagining work and bringing more meaning to the employee experience, measure the impact of your deib investment with betterup’s people analytics dashboard, how coaching improves mental health: new research from betterup, betterup raises $26 million to democratize professional coaching, betterup’s first chief medical officer on public health, behavior change, and mental fitness for all, betterup partners with josh bersin academy on coaching at scale, fueling organizational performance through betterup’s human transformation platform, member spotlight: growth as a leader is not just upwards, but inwards, 20 ways to make sure you go to work happy, when the new normal is a no-show: why future-mindedness is the mindset organizations need now, stay connected with betterup, get our newsletter, event invites, plus product insights and research..

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Employee Engagement

• First Online: 22 July 2017

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There is a symbiotic relationship between motivation and staff engagement, and so critical to understanding and improving engagement is first to fully understand what motivation is and what actually motivates people.

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Coppin, A. (2017). Employee Engagement. In: The Human Capital Imperative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49121-9_8

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Psychology: Research and Review

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• Published: 04 January 2021

What factors contribute to the meaning of work? A validation of Morin’s Meaning of Work Questionnaire

• Anne Pignault   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7946-3793 1 &
• Claude Houssemand 2  

Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica volume  34 , Article number:  2 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Considering the recent and current evolution of work and the work context, the meaning of work is becoming an increasingly relevant topic in research in the social sciences and humanities, particularly in psychology. In order to understand and measure what contributes to the meaning of work, Morin constructed a 30-item questionnaire that has become predominant and has repeatedly been used in research in occupational psychology and by practitioners in the field. Nevertheless, it has been validated only in part.

Meaning of work questionnaire was conducted in French with 366 people (51.3% of women; age: ( M = 39.11, SD = 11.25); 99.2% of whom were employed with the remainder retired). Three sets of statistical analyses were run on the data. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted on independent samples.

The questionnaire described a five-factor structure. These dimensions (Success and Recognition at work and of work, α = .90; Usefulness, α = .88; Respect for work, α = .88; Value from and through work, α = .83; Remuneration, α = .85) are all attached to a general second-order latent meaning of work factor (α = .96).

Conclusions

Validation of the scale, and implications for health in the workplace and career counseling practices, are discussed.

Introduction

Since the end of the 1980s, many studies have been conducted to explore the meaning of work, particularly in psychology (Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010 ). A review of the bibliographical data in PsychInfo shows that between 1974 and 2006, 183 studies addressed this topic (Morin, 2006 ). This scholarly interest was primarily triggered by Sverko and Vizek-Vidovic’s ( 1995 ) article, which identified the approaches and models that have been used and their main results.

Whereas early studies on the meaning of work introduced the concept and its theoretical underpinnings (e.g., Harpaz, 1986 ; Harpaz & Fu, 2002 ; Morin, 2003 ; MOW International Research team, 1987 ), later research tried to connect this aspect of work with other psychological dimensions or individual perceptions of the work context (e.g., Harpaz & Meshoulam, 2010 ; Morin, 2008 ; Morin, Archambault, & Giroux, 2001 ; Rosso et al., 2010 ; Wrzesniewski, Dutton, & Debebe, 2003 ). Nevertheless, scholars, particularly those in organizational and occupational psychology, soon found it difficult to precisely identify the meaning of work because it changes in accordance with the conceptualizations of different researchers, the theoretical models used to describe it, and the tools that are available to measure it for individuals and for groups.

This article first seeks to clarify the concept of the meaning of work (definitions and models) before bringing up certain problems involved in its measurement and the diversity in how the concept has been used. Then the paper focuses on a particular meaning of work measurement tool developed in Canada, which is now widely used in French-speaking countries. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Morin et al. ( 2001 ) developed a 30-item questionnaire to better determine the dimensions that give meaning to a person’s work. The statistical analyses needed to determine the reliability and validity of Morin et al.’s meaning of work questionnaire have never been completed. Indeed, some changes were made to the initial scale, and the analyses only based on homogenous samples of workers in different professional sectors. Thus and even though the meaning of work scale is used quite frequently, both researchers and practitioners have been unsure about whether or not to trust its results. The main objective of the present study was thus to provide a psychometric validation of Morin et al.’s meaning of work scale and to uncover its latent psychological structure.

Meaning of work: from definition to measurement

Meaning of work: what is it.

As many scholars have found, the concept of the meaning of work is not easy to define (e.g., Rosso et al., 2010 ). In terms of theory, it has been defined differently in different academic fields. In psychology, it refers to an individual’s interpretations of his/her actual experiences and interactions at work (Ros, Schwartz, & Surkiss, 1999 ). From a sociological point of view, it involves assessing meaning in reference to a system of values (Rosso et al., 2010 ). In this case, its definition depends on cultural or social differences, which make explaining this concept even more complex (e.g., Morse & Weiss, 1955 ; MOW International Research team, 1987 ; Steers & Porter, 1979 ; Sverko & Vizek-Vidovic, 1995 ).

At a conceptual level, the meaning of work has been defined in three different ways (Morin, 2003 ). First, it can refer to the meaning of work attached to an individual’s representations of work and the values he/she attributes to that work (Morse & Weiss, 1955 ; MOW International Research team, 1987 ). Second, it can refer to a personal preference for work as defined by the intentions that guide personal action (Super & Sverko, 1995 ). Third, it can be understood as consistency between oneself and one’s work, similar to a balance in one’s personal relationship with work (Morin & Cherré, 2004 ).

With respect to terms, some differences exist because the meaning of work is considered an individual’s interpretation of what work means or of the role it plays in one’s life (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003 ). Yet this individual perception is also influenced by the environment and the social context (Wrzesniewski et al., 2003 ). The psychological literature on the meaning of work has primarily examined its positive aspects, even though work experiences can be negative or neutral. This partiality about the nature of the meaning of work in research has led to some confusion in the literature between this concept and that of meaningful , which refers to the extent to which work has personal significance (a quantity) and seems to depend on positive elements (Steger, Dik, & Duffy, 2012 ). A clearer demarcation should be made between these terms in order to specify the exact sense of the meaning of work: “This would reserve ‘meaning’ for instances in which authors are referring to what work signifies (the type of meaning), rather than the amount of significance attached to the work” (Rosso et al., 2010 , p. 95).

The original idea of the meaning of work refers to the central importance of work for people, beyond the simple behavioral activity through which it occurs. Drawing on various historical references, certain authors present work as an essential driver of human life; these scholars then seek to understand how work is fundamental (e.g., Morin, 2006 ; Sverko & Vizek-Vidovic, 1995 ). The concept of the meaning of work is connected to the centrality of work for the individual and consequently fulfills four different important functions: economic (to earn a living), social (to interact with others), prestige (social position), and psychological (identity and recognition). In this view, the centrality of work is based on an ensemble of personal and social values that differ between individuals as well as between cultures, economic climates, and occupations (England, 1991 ; England & Harpaz, 1990 ; Roe & Ester, 1999 ; Ruiz-Quintanilla & England, 1994 ; Topalova, 1994 ; Zanders, 1993 ).

Meaning of work: which theoretical model?

The first theoretical model for the meaning of work was based on research in the MOW project (MOW International Research team, 1987 ), considered the “most empirically rigorous research ever undertaken to understand, both within and between countries, the meanings people attach to their work roles” (Brief, 1991 , p. 176). This view suggests that the meaning of work is based on five principal theoretical dimensions: work centrality as a life role, societal norms regarding work, valued work outcomes, importance of work goals, and work-role identification. A series of studies on this theory was conducted in Israel (Harpaz, 1986 ; Harpaz & Fu, 2002 ; Harpaz & Meshoulam, 2010 ), complementing the work of the MOW project (MOW International Research team, 1987 ). Harpaz ( 1986 ) empirically identified six latent factors that represent the meaning of work: work centrality, entitlement norm, obligation norm, economic orientation, interpersonal relations, and expressive orientation.

Another theoretical model on the importance of work in a person’s life was created by Sverko in 1989 . This approach takes into account the interactions among certain work values (the importance of these values and the perception of possible achievements through work), which depend on a process of socialization. The ensemble is then moderated by an individual’s personal experiences with work. In the same vein, Rosso et al. ( 2010 ) tried to create an exhaustive model of the sources that influence the meaning of work. This model is built around two major dimensions: Self-Others (individual vs. other individuals, groups, collectives, organizations, and higher powers) and Agency-Communion (the drives to differentiate, separate, assert, expand, master, and create vs. the drives to contact, attach, connect, and unite). This theoretical framework describes four major pathways to the meaning of work: individuation (autonomy, competence, and self-esteem), contribution (perceived impact, significance, interconnection, and self-abnegation), self-connection (self-concordance, identity affirmation, and personal engagement), and unification (value systems, social identification, and connectedness).

Lastly, a more recent model (Lips-Wiersma & Wright, 2012 ) converges with the theory suggested by Rosso et al. ( 2010 ) but distinguishes two dimensions: Self-Others versus Being-Doing. This model describes four pathways to meaningful work: developing the inner self, unity with others, service to others, and expressing one’s full potential.

Without claiming to be exhaustive, this brief presentation of the theoretical models of the meaning of work underscores the difficulty in precisely defining this concept, the diversity of possible approaches to identifying its contours, and therefore implicitly addresses the various tools designed to measure it.

Measuring the meaning of work

Various methodologies have been used to better determine the concept of the meaning of work and to grasp what it involves in practice. The tools examined below have been chosen because of their different methodological approaches.

One of the first kinds of measurements was developed by the international MOW project (MOW International Research team, 1987 ). In this study, England and Harpaz ( 1990 ) and Ruiz-Quintanilla and England ( 1994 ) used 14 defining elements to assess agreement on the perception of work of 11 different sample groups questioned between 1989 and 1992. These elements, resulting from the definition of work given by the MOW project and studied by applying multivariate analyses and textual content analyses ( When do you consider an activity as working ? Choose four statements from the list below which best define when an activity is “ working,” MOW International Research team, 1987 ), can be grouped into four distinct heuristic categories (Table 1 ).

Similarly, England ( 1991 ) studied changes in the meaning of work in the USA between 1982 and 1989. He used four different methodological approaches to the meaning of work: societal norms about work, importance of work goals, work centrality, and definition of work by the labor force. In the wake of these studies, others developed scales to measure the centrality of work in people’s lives, either for the general population (e.g., Warr, 2008 ) or for specific subpopulations such as unemployed people, on the basis of a rather similar conceptualization of the meaning of work (McKee-Ryan, Song, Wanberg, & Kinicki, 2005 ; Wanberg, 2012 ).

Finally, Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, and Schwartz ( 1997 ) developed a rather unusual method for evaluating people’s relationships with their work. Although not directly connected to research on the meaning of work, this study and the questionnaire they used ( University of Pennsylvania Work-Life Questionnaire ) addressed some of the same concepts. Above all, they employed the concepts in a very particular way that combined psychological scales, scenarios, and sociodemographic questions. Through these scenarios (Table 2 ) and the extent to which the respondents felt like the described characters, their relationship to work was described as either a Job, a Career, or a Calling.

This presentation of certain tools for measuring the meaning of work reveals a variety of methodological approaches. Nevertheless, whereas certain methods have adopted a rather traditional psychological approach, others are often difficult to use for various reasons such as their psychometrics (e.g., the use of only one item to measure a concept; England, 1991 ; Wrzesniewski et al., 1997 ) or for practical reasons (e.g., the participants were asked questions that pertained not only to their individual assessment of work but also to various other parts of their lives; England, 1991 ; Warr, 2008 ). This diversity in the possible uses of the meaning of work makes it difficult to select a tool to measure it.

In French-speaking countries (Canada and Europe primarily), the previously mentioned scale created by Morin et al. ( 2001 ) has predominated and has repeatedly been used in research in occupational psychology and by practitioners in the field. Nevertheless, there has not been a complete validation of the scale (i.e., different forms of the same tool, only the use of exploratory factor analyses, and no similar structures found) that was the motivation for the current study.

The present study

The present article conceives of the meaning of work as representing a certain consistency between what an individual wants out of work and the individual’s perception, lived or imagined, of his/her work. It thus corresponds to the third definition of the meaning of work presented above—consistency between oneself and one's work (Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). This definition is strictly limited to the meaning given to work and the personal significance of this work from the activities that the work implies. Within this conceptual framework, some older studies adopted a slightly different cognitive conception, in which individuals constantly seek a balance between themselves and their environment, and any imbalance triggers a readjustment through which the person attempts to stabilize his/her cognitive state (e.g., Heider, 1946 ; Osgood & Tannenbaum, 1955 ). Here, the meaning of work must be considered a means for maintaining psychological harmony despite the destabilizing events that work might involve. In this view, meaning is viewed as an effect or a product of the activity (Brief & Nord, 1990 ) and not as a permanent or fixed state. It then becomes a result of person-environment fit and falls within the theory of work adjustment (Dawis, Lofquist, & Weiss, 1968 ).

Within this framework, a series of recurring and interdependent studies should be noted (e.g., Morin, 2003 , 2006 ; Morin & Cherré, 1999 , 2004 ) because they have attempted to measure the coherence that a person finds in the relation between the person’s self and his/her work and thus implicitly the meaning of that work. Therefore, these studies make it possible to understand the meaning of work in greater detail, meaning that it could be used in practice through a self-evaluation questionnaire. The level of coherence is considered the degree of similarity between the characteristics of work that the person attributes meaning to and the characteristics that he/she perceives in his/her present work (Aronsson, Bejerot, & Häremstam, 1999 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). Based on semi-structured interviews and on older research related to the quality of life at work (Hackman & Oldham, 1976 ; Ketchum & Trist, 1992 ), a model involving 14 characteristics was developed: the usefulness of work, the social contribution of work, rationalization of the tasks, workload, cooperation, salary, the use of skills, learning opportunities, autonomy, responsibilities, rectitude of social and organizational practices, the spirit of service, working conditions, and, finally, recognition and appreciation (Morin, 2006 ; Morin & Cherré, 1999 ). Then, based on this model, a 30-item questionnaire was developed to offer more precise descriptions of these dimensions. Table 3 presents the items, which were designed and administered to the participants in French.

Some studies for structurally validating this questionnaire have been conducted over the years (e.g., Morin, 2003 , 2006 , 2008 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). However, their results were not very precise or comparable. For example, the number of latent factors in the meaning of work scale structure varied (e.g., six or eight factors: Morin, 2003 ; six factors: Morin, 2006 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ), the sample groups were not completely comparable (especially with respect to occupations), and finally, items were added or removed or their phrasing was changed (e.g., 30 and 33 items: Morin, 2003 ; 30 items: Morin, 2006 ; 26 items: Morin, 2008 ). Yet the most prominent methodological problem was that only exploratory analyses (most often a principal component analysis with varimax rotation) had been applied. This scale was entirely relevant from a theoretical point of view because it offered a more specific definition of the meaning of work than other scales and, mainly, because some subdimensions appeared to be linked with anxiety, depression, irritability, cognitive problems, psychological distress, and subjective well-being (Morin et al., 2001 ). It was also relevant from a practical point of view because it was short and did not take much time to complete. However, its use was questionable because it had never been validated psychometrically, and a consistent latent psychological structure had not been identified across studies.

As an example, two models representing the structure of the 30-item scale are presented in Table 3 (Morin et al., 2001 ; Morin, 2003 , for the first model; Morin & Cherré, 2004 , for the second one). This table presents the items, the meaning of work dimensions they are theoretically related to, and the solution from the principal component analysis in each study. These analyses revealed that the empirical and theoretical structures of this tool are not stable and that the latent structure suffers from the insufficient use of statistical methods. In particular, there was an important difference found between the two models in previous studies (Morin et al., 2001 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). Only the “usefulness of work” dimension was found to be identical, comprised of the same items in both models. Other dimensions had a maximum of only three items in common. Therefore, it is very difficult to utilize this tool both in practice and diagnostically, and complementary studies must be conducted. Even though there are techniques for replicating explanatory analyses (e.g., Osborne, 2012 ), such techniques could not be used here because not all the necessary information was given (e.g., all factor loadings, communalities). This is why collecting new data appeared to be the only way to analyze the scale.

More recently, two studies (which applied a new 25-item meaningful work questionnaire ) were developed on the basis of Morin’s scale (Bendassolli & Borges-Andrade, 2013 ; Bendassolli, Borges-Andrade, Coelho Alves, & de Lucena Torres, 2015 ). Even though the concepts of the “meaning of work” and “meaningful work” are close, the two scales are formally and theoretically different and do not evaluate the same construct.

The purpose of the present study was thus to determine the structure of original Morin’s 30-item scale (Morin, 2003 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ) by using an exploratory approach as well as confirmatory statistical methods (structural equation modeling) and in so doing, to address the lacunae in previous research discussed above. The end goal was thus to identify the structure of the scale statistically so that it can be used empirically in both academic and professional fields. Indeed, as mentioned previously, this scale is of particular interest to researchers because its design is not limited to measuring a general meaning of work for each individual; it can also be used to evaluate discrepancies or a convergence between a person’s own personal meaning of work and a specific work context (e.g., tasks, relations with others, autonomy). Finally, and with respect to previous results, the scale could be a potential predictor of professional well-being and psychological distress at work (Morin et al., 2001 ).

Participants

The questionnaire was conducted with 366 people who were mainly resident in Paris and the surrounding regions in France. The gender distribution was almost equal; 51.3% of the respondents were women. The respondents’ ages ranged from 19 to 76 years ( M = 39.11, SD = 11.25). The large majority of people were employed (99.2%). Twenty percent worked in medical and paramedical fields, 26% in retail and sales, and 17% in human resources (the other respondents worked in education, law, communication, reception, banking, and transportation). Seventy percent had fewer than 10 years of seniority in their current job ( M = 8.64, SD = 9.65). Only three people were retired (0.8%).

Morin’s 30-item meaning of work questionnaire (Morin, 2003 ; Morin et al., 2001 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ) along with sociodemographic questions (i.e., sex, age, job activities, and seniority at work) were conducted in French through an online platform. Answers to the meaning of work questionnaire were given on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( strongly agree ).

Participants were recruited through various professional online social networks. This method does not provide for a true random sample but, owing to it resulting in a potentially larger range of respondents, it enlarges the heterogeneousness of the participants, even if it cannot ensure representativeness (Barberá & Zeitzoff, 2018 ; Hoblingre Klein, 2018 ). This point seems important because very homogenous samples were used in previous studies, especially with regard to professions.

Participants were volunteers, and were given the option of being able to stop the survey at any time. They received no compensation and no individual feedback. Participants were informed of these conditions before filling out the questionnaire. Oral and informed consent was obtained from all participants. Moreover, the Luxembourg Agency for Research Integrity (LARI on which the researchers in this study depend) specified that according to Code de la santé publique—Article L1123-7, it appears that France does not require research ethics committee [Les Comités de Protection des Personnes (CPP)] approval if the research is non-biomedical, non-interventional, observational, and does not collect personal health information, and thus CNR approval was not required.

Participants had to answer each question in order to submit the questionnaire: If one item was not answered, the respondent was not allowed to proceed to the next question. Thus, the database has no missing data. An introduction presented the subject of the study and its goals and guaranteed the participant’s anonymity. Researchers’ e-mail addresses were given, and participants were informed that they could contact the researchers for more information.

Data analyses

Three sets of statistical analyses were run on the data:

Analysis of the items, using traditional true score theory and item response theory, for verifying the psychometric qualities (using mainly R package “psych”). The main objectives of this part of analysis were to better understand the variability of respondents’ answers, to compute the discriminatory power of items, and to verify the distribution of items by using every classical descriptive indicator (mean, standard-deviation, skewness, and kurtosis), corrected item-total correlations, and functions of responses for distributions.

An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with an oblimin rotation in order to define the latent structure of the meaning of work questionnaire, performed with the R packages “psych” and “GPArotation”. The structure we retained was based on adequation fits of various solutions (TLI, RMSEA and SRMR, see “List of abbreviations” section at the end of the article), and the use of R package “EFAtools” which helps to determine the adequate number of factors to retain for the EFA solution. Finally, this part of the analysis was concluded using calculations of internal consistency for each factor found in the scale.

A confirmatory factor analysis using the R package Lavaan and based on the results of the EFA, in order to verify that the latent structure revealed in Step c was valid and relevant for this meaning of work scale. The adequation between data and latent structure was appreciated on the basis of CFI, TLI, RMSEA, and SRMR (see “Abbreviations” section).

For step a, the responses of the complete sample were considered. For steps b and c, 183 subjects were selected randomly for each analysis from the total study sample. Thus, two subsamples comprised of completely different participants were used, one for the EFA in step b and one for the CFA in step c.

Because of the ordinal measurement of the responses and its small number of categories (5-point Likert), none of the items can be normally distributed. This point was verified in step a of the analyses. Thus, the data did not meet the necessary assumptions for applying factor analyses with conventional estimators such as maximum likelihood (Li, 2015 ; Lubke & Muthén, 2004 ). Therefore, because the variables were measured on ordinal scales, it was most appropriate to apply the EFA and CFA analyses to the polychoric correlation matrix (Carroll, 1961 ). Then, to reduce the effects of the specific item distributions of the variables used in the factor analyses, a minimum residuals extraction (MINRES; Harman, 1960 ; Jöreskog, 2003 ) was used for the EFA, and a weighted least squares estimator with degrees of freedom adjusted for means and variances (WLSMV) was used for the CFA as recommended psychometric studies (Li, 2015 ; Muthén, 1984 ; Muthén & Kaplan, 1985 ; Muthén & Muthén, 2010 ; Yang, Nay, & Hoyle, 2010 ; Yu, 2002 ).

The size of samples for the different analyses has been taken into consideration. A model structure analysis with 30 observed variables needs a recommended minimum sample of 100 participants for 6 latent variables, and 200 for 5 latent variables (Soper, 2019 ). The samples used in the present research corresponded to these a priori calculations.

Finally, according to conventional rules of thumb (Hu & Bentler, 1999 ; Kline, 2011 ), acceptable and excellent model fits are indicated by CFI and TLI values greater than .90 and .95, respectively, by RMSEA values smaller than .08 (acceptable) and .06 (excellent), respectively, and SRMR values smaller than .08.

Item analyses

The main finding was the limited amount of variability in the answers to each item. Indeed, as Table 4 shows, respondents usually and mainly chose the answers agree and strongly agree , as indicated by the column of cumulated percentages of these response modalities (%). Thus, for all items, the average answer was higher than 4, except for item 11, the median was 4, and skewness and kurtosis indicators confirmed a systematic skewed on the left leptokurtic distribution. This lack of variability in the participants’ responses and the high average scores indicate nearly unanimous agreement with the propositions made about the meaning of work in the questionnaire.

Table 4 also shows that the items had good discriminatory power, expressed by corrected item-total correlations (calculated with all items) which were above .40 for all items. Finally, item analyses were concluded through the application of item response theory (Excel tools using the eirt add in; Valois, Houssemand, Germain, & Belkacem, 2011 ) which confirmed, by analyses of item characteristic curves (taking into account that item response theory models are parametric and assume that the item responses distributions follow a logistic function, Rasch, 1980 ; Streiner, Norman, & Cairney, 2015 , p. 297), the psychometric quality of each item and their link to an identical latent dimension. These different results confirmed the interest in keeping all items of the questionnaire in order to measure the work-meaning construct.

Exploratory analyses of the scale

A five-factor solution was identified. This solution explained 58% of the total variance in the responses of the scale items; the TLI was .885, the RMSEA was .074, and the SRMR was .04. The structure revealed by this analysis was relatively simple (saturation of one main factor for each item; Thurstone, 1947 ), and the communality of each item was high, except for item 11. The solution we retained presented the best adequation fits and the most conceptual explanation concerning the latent factors. Additionally, the “EFAtools” R package confirmed the appropriateness of the chosen solution. Table 5 shows the EFA results, which described a five-factor structure.

Nevertheless, the correlation matrix for the latent factors obtained by the EFA (see Table 6 ) suggested the existence of a general second-order meaning of work factor, because the five factors were significantly correlated each with others. This result could be described as the existence of a general meaning of work factor, which alone would explain 44% of the total variance in the responses.

Internal consistency of latent factors of the scale

The internal consistency of each latent factor, estimated by Cronbach alpha and McDonald omega, was high (above .80) and very high for the entire scale (α = .96 and ω = .97). Thus, for S uccess and Recognition at work and from work ’ s factor ω was .93, for Usefulness ’s factor ω was .92, for Respect ’s factor ω was .91, for Value from and through work ’s factor ω was slightly lower and equal to .85, and finally for Remuneration ’ s factor for which ω was .87.

Confirmatory factor analyses of the scale

In order to improve the questionnaire, we applied a CFA to this five-factor model to improve the model fit and refine the latent dimensions of the questionnaire. We used CFA to (a) determine the relevance of this latent five-factor structure and (b) confirm the relevance of a general second-order meaning-of-work factor. Although this procedure might appear redundant at first glance, it enabled us to select a definitive latent structure in which each item represents only one latent factor (simple structure; Thurstone, 1947 ), whereas the EFA that was computed in the previous step showed that certain items loaded on several factors. The CFA also easily verified the existence of a second-order latent meaning of work factor (the first-order loadings were .894, .920, .873, .892, and .918, respectively). Thus, this CFA was computed to complement the previous analyses by refining the latent model proposed for the questionnaire.

According to conventional rules of thumb (Hu & Bentler, 1999 ; Kline, 2011 ), although the RMSEA value for the five-factor model was somewhat too high, the CFI and TLI values were excellent (χ 2 = 864.72, df = 400, RMSEA = .080, CFI = .989, TLI = .988). Table 7 presents the adequation fits for both solutions: a model with 5 first-order factors (as EFA suggests), and a model with 5 first-order factors and 1 second-order factor.

Figure 1 shows the model after the confirmatory test. This analysis confirmed the existence of a simple structure with five factors for the meaning of work scale and with a general, second-order factor of the meaning of work as suggested by the previous EFA.

Standardized solution of the structural model of the Meaning of Work Scale

The objective of this study was to verify the theoretical and psychometric structure of the meaning of work scale developed by Morin in recent years (Morin, 2003 ; Morin et al., 2001 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). This scale has the advantages of being rather short, of proposing a multidimensional structure for the meaning of work, and of making it possible to assess the coherence between the aspects of work that are personally valued and the actual characteristics of the work environment. Thus, it can be used diagnostically or to guide individuals. To establish the structure of this scale, we analyzed deeply the items, and we implemented exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which we believe the scale’s authors had not carried out sufficiently. Moreover, we used a broad range of psychometric evaluation methods (traditional true score theory, item response theory, EFA, and structural equation modeling) to test the validity of the scale.

Item analyses confirmed results found in previous studies in which the meaning-of-work scale was administered. The majority of respondents agreed with the proposals of the questionnaire. Thus, this lack of variability is not specific to the present research and its sample (e.g., Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). Nevertheless, this finding can be explained by different reasons (which could be studied by other research) such as social desirability and the importance of work norms in industrial societies, or a lack of control regarding response bias.

The various versions of the latent structure of the scale proposed by the authors were not confirmed by the statistical analyses seen here. It nevertheless appears that this tool for assessing the meaning of work can describe and measure five different dimensions, all attached to a general factor. The first factor (F1), composed of nine items, is a dimension of recognition and success (e.g., item 17: work where your skills are recognized ; item 19: work where your results are recognized ; item 24: work that enables you to achieve the goals that you set for yourself ). It should thus be named Success and Recognition at work and from work and is comparable to dimensions from previous studies (personal success, Morin et al., 2001 ; social influence, Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). The second factor (F2), composed of seven items, is a dimension that represents the usefulness of work for an individual, whether that usefulness is social (e.g., Item 22: work that gives you the opportunity to serve others ) or personal (e.g., Item 28: work that enables you to be fulfilled ). It can be interpreted in terms of the Usefulness of work and generally corresponds to dimensions of the same name in earlier models (Morin, 2003 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ), although the definition used here is more precise. The third factor (F3), described by four items, refers to the Respect dimension of work (e.g., Item 5: work that respects human values ) and corresponds in part to the factors highlighted in prior studies (respect and rationalization of work, Morin, 2003 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). The fourth factor (F4), composed of four items, refers to the personal development dimension and Value from and through work (e.g., Item 2: work that enables you to learn or to improve ). It is in some ways similar to autonomy and effectiveness, described by the authors of the scale (Morin, 2003 ; Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). Finally, the fifth and final factor (F5), with six items, highlights the financial and, more important, personal benefits sought or received from work. This includes physical and material safety and the enjoyment of work (e.g., item 14: work you enjoy doing ). This dimension of Remuneration partially converges with the aspects of personal values related to work described in previous research (Morin et al., 2001 ). Although the structure of the scale highlighted here differed from previous studies, some theoretical elements were nevertheless consistent with each other. To be convinced of this, the Table 8 highlights possible overlaps.

A second important result of this study is the highlighting of a second-order factor by the statistical analyses carried out. This latent second-level factor refers to the existence of a general meaning of work dimension. This unitary conception of the meaning of work, subdivided into different linked facets, is not in contradiction with the different theories related to this construct. Thus, Ros et al. ( 1999 ) defined the meaning of work as a personal interpretation of experiences and interaction at work. This view of meaning of work can confer it a unitary functionality for maintaining psychological harmony, despite the destabilizing events that are often a feature of work. It must be considered as a permanent process of work adjustment or work adaptation. In order to be effective, this adjustment needs to remain consistent and to be globally oriented toward the cognitive balance between the reality of work and the meaning attributed to it. Thus, it has to keep a certain coherence which would explain the unitary conception of the meaning of work.

In addition to the purely statistical results of this study, whereas some partial overlap was found between the structural model in this study and structural models from previous work, this paper provides a much-needed updating and improvement of these dimensions, as we examined several theoretical meaning of work models in order to explain them psychologically. Indeed, the dimensions defined here as Success and Recognition , Usefulness , Respect , Value , and Remuneration from the meaning of work scale by Morin et al. ( 2001 ) have some strong similarities to other theoretical models on the meaning of work, even though the authors of the scale referred to these models only briefly. For example, the dimensions work centrality as a life role , societal norms regarding work , valued work outcomes , importance of work goals , and work-role identification (MOW International Research team, 1987 ) concur with the model described in the present study. In the same manner, the model by Rosso et al. ( 2010 ) has some similarities to the present structure, and there is a conceptual correspondence between the five dimensions found here and those from their study ( individuation , contribution , self-connection , and unification ). Finally, Baumeister’s ( 1991 ), Morin and Cherré’s ( 2004 ), and Sommer, Baumeister, and Stillman ( 2012 ) studies presented similar findings on the meaning of important life experiences for individuals; they described four essential needs that make such experiences coherent and reasonable ( purpose , efficacy - control , rectitude , and self - worth ). It is obvious that the parallels noted here were fostered by the conceptual breadth of the dimensions as defined in these models. In future research, much more precise definitions are needed. To do so, it will be essential to continue running analyses to test for construct validity by establishing convergent validity between the dimensions of the various existing meaning of work scales.

It is also interesting to note the proximity between the dimensions described here and those examined in studies on the dimensions that characterize the work context (Pignault & Houssemand, 2016 ) or in Karasek’s ( 1979 ) and Siegrist’s ( 1996 ) well-known models, for example, which determined the impact of work on health, stress, and well-being. These studies were able to clearly show how dimensions related to autonomy, support, remuneration, and esteem either contribute to health or harm it. These dimensions, which give meaning to work in a manner that is similar to the dimensions highlighted in the current study (Recognition, Value, and Remuneration in particular), are also involved in health. Thus, it would be interesting to verify the relations between these dimensions and measures of work health.

Thus, the conceptual dimensions of the meaning of work, as defined by Morin ( 2003 ) and Morin and Cherré ( 1999 ), remained of strong theoretical importance even if, at the empirical level, the scale created on this basis did not correspond exactly. The present study has had the modest merit of showing this interest, and also of proposing a new structure of the facets of this general dimension. One of the major interests of this research can be found in the possible better interpretations that this scale will enable to make. As mentioned above, the Morin’s scale is very frequently used in practice (e.g., in state employment agencies or by Human Resources departments), and the divergent models of previous studies could lead to individual assessments of the meaning of work diverging, depending on the reading grid chosen. Showing that a certain similarity in the structures of the meaning of work exists, and that a general factor of the meaning of work could be considered, the results of the current research can contribute to more precise use of this tool.

At this stage and in conclusion, it may be interesting to consider the reasons for the variations between the structures of the scale highlighted by the different studies. There were obviously the different changes applied to the different versions of the scale, but beyond that, three types of explanation could emerge. At the level of methods, the statistics used by the studies varied greatly, and could explain the variations observed. At the level of the respondents, work remains one of the most important elements of life in our societies. A certain temptation to overvalue its importance and purposes could be at the origin of the broad acceptance of all the proposals of the questionnaire, and the strong interactions between the sub-dimensions. Finally, at the theoretical level, if, as our study showed, a general dimension of meaning of work seems to exist, all the items, all the facets and all the first order factors of the scale, are strongly interrelated at each respective level. As well, small variations in the distribution of responses could lead to variations of the structure.

The principal contribution of this study is undoubtedly the use of confirmatory methods to test the descriptive models that were based on Morin’s scale (Morin, 2003 , 2006 ; Morin & Cherré, 1999 , 2004 ). The principal results confirm that the great amount of interest in this scale is not without merit and suggest its validity for use in research, both by practitioners (e.g., career counselors and Human Resources departments) and diagnostically. The results show a tool that assesses a general dimension and five subdimensions of the meaning of work with a 30-item questionnaire that has strong psychometric qualities. Conceptual differences from previous exploratory studies were brought to light, even though there were also certain similarities. Thus, the objectives of this study were met.

Limitations

As with any research, this study also has a certain number of limitations. The first is the sample size used for statistical analyses. Even if the research design respected the general criteria for these kind of analyses (Soper, 2019 ), it will be necessary to repeat the study with larger samples. The second is the cultural and social character of the meaning of work, which was not addressed in this study because the sample was comprised of people working in France. They can thus be compared with those in Morin’s studies ( 2003 ) because of the linguistic proximity (French) of the samples, but differences in the structure of the scale could be due to cultural differences between America and Europe. Nevertheless, other different international populations should be questioned about their conception of the meaning of work in order to measure the impact of cultural and social aspects (England, 1991 ; England & Harpaz, 1990 ; Roe & Ester, 1999 ; Ruiz-Quintanilla & England, 1994 ; Topalova, 1994 ; Zanders, 1993 ). In the same vein, a third limitation involves the homogeneity of the respondents’ answers. Indeed, there was quasi-unanimous agreement with all of the items describing work (see Table 4 and previous results, Morin & Cherré, 2004 ). It is worth examining whether this lack of variance results from a work norm that is central and promoted in industrialized countries as it might mask broader interindividual differences. Thus, this study’s protocol should be repeated with other samples from different cultures. Finally, a fourth limitation that was mentioned previously involves the validity of the scale. Concerning the content validity and because some items loaded similarly different factors, it could be interesting to verify the wording content of the items, and potentially modify or replace some of them. The purpose of the present study was not to change the content of the scale but to suggest how future studies could analyze this point. Concerning the construct validity, this first phase of validation needs to be followed by other phases that involve tests of convergent validity between the existing meaning of work scales as well as tests of discriminant validity in order to confirm the existence of the meaning of work construct examined here. In such studies, the centrality of work (Warr, 2008 ; Warr, Cook, & Wall, 1979 ) should be used to confirm the validity of the meaning of work scale. Other differential, individual, and psychological variables related to work (e.g., performance, motivation, well-being) should also be introduced in order to expand the understanding of whether relations exist between the set of psychological concepts involved in work and individuals’ jobs.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author.

Abbreviations

Confirmatory factor analyses

Comparative Fit Index

Exploratory factor analyses

Luxembourg Agency for Research Integrity

• Meaning of work

Tucker Lewis Index of factoring reliability

Root mean square error of approximation

Standardized root mean square residual

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Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The Luxembourg Agency for Research Integrity (LARI) specifies that according to Code de la santé publique - Article L1123-7, it appears that France does not require research ethics committee (Les Comités de Protection des Personnes (CPP)) approval if the research is non-biomedical, non-interventional, observational, and does not collect personal health information. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements. At the beginning of the questionnaire, the participants had to give their consent that the data could be used for research purposes, and they had to consent to the publication of the results of the study. Participation was voluntary and confidential. No potentially identifiable human images or data is presented in this study.

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Pignault, A., Houssemand, C. What factors contribute to the meaning of work? A validation of Morin’s Meaning of Work Questionnaire. Psicol. Refl. Crít. 34 , 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41155-020-00167-4

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Research Reports: Definition and How to Write Them

Reports are usually spread across a vast horizon of topics but are focused on communicating information about a particular topic and a niche target market. The primary motive of research reports is to convey integral details about a study for marketers to consider while designing new strategies.

Certain events, facts, and other information based on incidents need to be relayed to the people in charge, and creating research reports is the most effective communication tool. Ideal research reports are extremely accurate in the offered information with a clear objective and conclusion. These reports should have a clean and structured format to relay information effectively.

What are Research Reports?

Research reports are recorded data prepared by researchers or statisticians after analyzing the information gathered by conducting organized research, typically in the form of surveys or qualitative methods .

A research report is a reliable source to recount details about a conducted research. It is most often considered to be a true testimony of all the work done to garner specificities of research.

The various sections of a research report are:

• Background/Introduction
• Implemented Methods
• Results based on Analysis
• Deliberation

Learn more: Quantitative Research

Components of Research Reports

Research is imperative for launching a new product/service or a new feature. The markets today are extremely volatile and competitive due to new entrants every day who may or may not provide effective products. An organization needs to make the right decisions at the right time to be relevant in such a market with updated products that suffice customer demands.

The details of a research report may change with the purpose of research but the main components of a report will remain constant. The research approach of the market researcher also influences the style of writing reports. Here are seven main components of a productive research report:

• Research Report Summary: The entire objective along with the overview of research are to be included in a summary which is a couple of paragraphs in length. All the multiple components of the research are explained in brief under the report summary.  It should be interesting enough to capture all the key elements of the report.
• Research Introduction: There always is a primary goal that the researcher is trying to achieve through a report. In the introduction section, he/she can cover answers related to this goal and establish a thesis which will be included to strive and answer it in detail.  This section should answer an integral question: “What is the current situation of the goal?”.  After the research design was conducted, did the organization conclude the goal successfully or they are still a work in progress –  provide such details in the introduction part of the research report.
• Research Methodology: This is the most important section of the report where all the important information lies. The readers can gain data for the topic along with analyzing the quality of provided content and the research can also be approved by other market researchers . Thus, this section needs to be highly informative with each aspect of research discussed in detail.  Information needs to be expressed in chronological order according to its priority and importance. Researchers should include references in case they gained information from existing techniques.
• Research Results: A short description of the results along with calculations conducted to achieve the goal will form this section of results. Usually, the exposition after data analysis is carried out in the discussion part of the report.

Learn more: Quantitative Data

• Research Discussion: The results are discussed in extreme detail in this section along with a comparative analysis of reports that could probably exist in the same domain. Any abnormality uncovered during research will be deliberated in the discussion section.  While writing research reports, the researcher will have to connect the dots on how the results will be applicable in the real world.
• Research References and Conclusion: Conclude all the research findings along with mentioning each and every author, article or any content piece from where references were taken.

Learn more: Qualitative Observation

15 Tips for Writing Research Reports

Writing research reports in the manner can lead to all the efforts going down the drain. Here are 15 tips for writing impactful research reports:

• Prepare the context before starting to write and start from the basics:  This was always taught to us in school – be well-prepared before taking a plunge into new topics. The order of survey questions might not be the ideal or most effective order for writing research reports. The idea is to start with a broader topic and work towards a more specific one and focus on a conclusion or support, which a research should support with the facts.  The most difficult thing to do in reporting, without a doubt is to start. Start with the title, the introduction, then document the first discoveries and continue from that. Once the marketers have the information well documented, they can write a general conclusion.
• Keep the target audience in mind while selecting a format that is clear, logical and obvious to them:  Will the research reports be presented to decision makers or other researchers? What are the general perceptions around that topic? This requires more care and diligence. A researcher will need a significant amount of information to start writing the research report. Be consistent with the wording, the numbering of the annexes and so on. Follow the approved format of the company for the delivery of research reports and demonstrate the integrity of the project with the objectives of the company.
• Have a clear research objective: A researcher should read the entire proposal again, and make sure that the data they provide contributes to the objectives that were raised from the beginning. Remember that speculations are for conversations, not for research reports, if a researcher speculates, they directly question their own research.
• Establish a working model:  Each study must have an internal logic, which will have to be established in the report and in the evidence. The researchers’ worst nightmare is to be required to write research reports and realize that key questions were not included.

Learn more: Quantitative Observation

• Gather all the information about the research topic. Who are the competitors of our customers? Talk to other researchers who have studied the subject of research, know the language of the industry. Misuse of the terms can discourage the readers of research reports from reading further.
• Read aloud while writing. While reading the report, if the researcher hears something inappropriate, for example, if they stumble over the words when reading them, surely the reader will too. If the researcher can’t put an idea in a single sentence, then it is very long and they must change it so that the idea is clear to everyone.
• Check grammar and spelling. Without a doubt, good practices help to understand the report. Use verbs in the present tense. Consider using the present tense, which makes the results sound more immediate. Find new words and other ways of saying things. Have fun with the language whenever possible.
• Discuss only the discoveries that are significant. If some data are not really significant, do not mention them. Remember that not everything is truly important or essential within research reports.

Learn more: Qualitative Data

• Try and stick to the survey questions. For example, do not say that the people surveyed “were worried” about an research issue , when there are different degrees of concern.
• The graphs must be clear enough so that they understand themselves. Do not let graphs lead the reader to make mistakes: give them a title, include the indications, the size of the sample, and the correct wording of the question.
• Be clear with messages. A researcher should always write every section of the report with an accuracy of details and language.
• Be creative with titles – Particularly in segmentation studies choose names “that give life to research”. Such names can survive for a long time after the initial investigation.
• Create an effective conclusion: The conclusion in the research reports is the most difficult to write, but it is an incredible opportunity to excel. Make a precise summary. Sometimes it helps to start the conclusion with something specific, then it describes the most important part of the study, and finally, it provides the implications of the conclusions.
• Get a couple more pair of eyes to read the report. Writers have trouble detecting their own mistakes. But they are responsible for what is presented. Ensure it has been approved by colleagues or friends before sending the find draft out.

Learn more: Market Research and Analysis

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Latest Research on Meaning and Purpose At Work

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• Research Report: Definition, Types + [Writing Guide]

One of the reasons for carrying out research is to add to the existing body of knowledge. Therefore, when conducting research, you need to document your processes and findings in a research report. 

With a research report, it is easy to outline the findings of your systematic investigation and any gaps needing further inquiry. Knowing how to create a detailed research report will prove useful when you need to conduct research.  

What is a Research Report?

A research report is a well-crafted document that outlines the processes, data, and findings of a systematic investigation. It is an important document that serves as a first-hand account of the research process, and it is typically considered an objective and accurate source of information.

In many ways, a research report can be considered as a summary of the research process that clearly highlights findings, recommendations, and other important details. Reading a well-written research report should provide you with all the information you need about the core areas of the research process.

Features of a Research Report 

So how do you recognize a research report when you see one? Here are some of the basic features that define a research report. 

• It is a detailed presentation of research processes and findings, and it usually includes tables and graphs. 
• It is written in a formal language.
• A research report is usually written in the third person.
• It is informative and based on first-hand verifiable information.
• It is formally structured with headings, sections, and bullet points.
• It always includes recommendations for future actions. 

Types of Research Report 

The research report is classified based on two things; nature of research and target audience.

Nature of Research

• Qualitative Research Report

This is the type of report written for qualitative research . It outlines the methods, processes, and findings of a qualitative method of systematic investigation. In educational research, a qualitative research report provides an opportunity for one to apply his or her knowledge and develop skills in planning and executing qualitative research projects.

A qualitative research report is usually descriptive in nature. Hence, in addition to presenting details of the research process, you must also create a descriptive narrative of the information.

• Quantitative Research Report

A quantitative research report is a type of research report that is written for quantitative research. Quantitative research is a type of systematic investigation that pays attention to numerical or statistical values in a bid to find answers to research questions. 

In this type of research report, the researcher presents quantitative data to support the research process and findings. Unlike a qualitative research report that is mainly descriptive, a quantitative research report works with numbers; that is, it is numerical in nature. 

Target Audience

Also, a research report can be said to be technical or popular based on the target audience. If you’re dealing with a general audience, you would need to present a popular research report, and if you’re dealing with a specialized audience, you would submit a technical report. 

• Technical Research Report

A technical research report is a detailed document that you present after carrying out industry-based research. This report is highly specialized because it provides information for a technical audience; that is, individuals with above-average knowledge in the field of study. 

In a technical research report, the researcher is expected to provide specific information about the research process, including statistical analyses and sampling methods. Also, the use of language is highly specialized and filled with jargon. 

Examples of technical research reports include legal and medical research reports. 

• Popular Research Report

A popular research report is one for a general audience; that is, for individuals who do not necessarily have any knowledge in the field of study. A popular research report aims to make information accessible to everyone. 

It is written in very simple language, which makes it easy to understand the findings and recommendations. Examples of popular research reports are the information contained in newspapers and magazines. 

Importance of a Research Report 

• Knowledge Transfer: As already stated above, one of the reasons for carrying out research is to contribute to the existing body of knowledge, and this is made possible with a research report. A research report serves as a means to effectively communicate the findings of a systematic investigation to all and sundry.  
• Identification of Knowledge Gaps: With a research report, you’d be able to identify knowledge gaps for further inquiry. A research report shows what has been done while hinting at other areas needing systematic investigation. 
• In market research, a research report would help you understand the market needs and peculiarities at a glance. 
• A research report allows you to present information in a precise and concise manner. 
• It is time-efficient and practical because, in a research report, you do not have to spend time detailing the findings of your research work in person. You can easily send out the report via email and have stakeholders look at it. 

Guide to Writing a Research Report

A lot of detail goes into writing a research report, and getting familiar with the different requirements would help you create the ideal research report. A research report is usually broken down into multiple sections, which allows for a concise presentation of information.

Structure and Example of a Research Report

This is the title of your systematic investigation. Your title should be concise and point to the aims, objectives, and findings of a research report. 

• Table of Contents

This is like a compass that makes it easier for readers to navigate the research report.

An abstract is an overview that highlights all important aspects of the research including the research method, data collection process, and research findings. Think of an abstract as a summary of your research report that presents pertinent information in a concise manner. 

An abstract is always brief; typically 100-150 words and goes straight to the point. The focus of your research abstract should be the 5Ws and 1H format – What, Where, Why, When, Who and How. 

• Introduction

Here, the researcher highlights the aims and objectives of the systematic investigation as well as the problem which the systematic investigation sets out to solve. When writing the report introduction, it is also essential to indicate whether the purposes of the research were achieved or would require more work.

In the introduction section, the researcher specifies the research problem and also outlines the significance of the systematic investigation. Also, the researcher is expected to outline any jargons and terminologies that are contained in the research.  

• Literature Review

A literature review is a written survey of existing knowledge in the field of study. In other words, it is the section where you provide an overview and analysis of different research works that are relevant to your systematic investigation. 

It highlights existing research knowledge and areas needing further investigation, which your research has sought to fill. At this stage, you can also hint at your research hypothesis and its possible implications for the existing body of knowledge in your field of study. 

• An Account of Investigation

This is a detailed account of the research process, including the methodology, sample, and research subjects. Here, you are expected to provide in-depth information on the research process including the data collection and analysis procedures. 

In a quantitative research report, you’d need to provide information surveys, questionnaires and other quantitative data collection methods used in your research. In a qualitative research report, you are expected to describe the qualitative data collection methods used in your research including interviews and focus groups. 

In this section, you are expected to present the results of the systematic investigation. 

This section further explains the findings of the research, earlier outlined. Here, you are expected to present a justification for each outcome and show whether the results are in line with your hypotheses or if other research studies have come up with similar results.

• Conclusions

This is a summary of all the information in the report. It also outlines the significance of the entire study. 

• References and Appendices

This section contains a list of all the primary and secondary research sources. 

Tips for Writing a Research Report

• Define the Context for the Report

As is obtainable when writing an essay, defining the context for your research report would help you create a detailed yet concise document. This is why you need to create an outline before writing so that you do not miss out on anything. 

• Define your Audience

Writing with your audience in mind is essential as it determines the tone of the report. If you’re writing for a general audience, you would want to present the information in a simple and relatable manner. For a specialized audience, you would need to make use of technical and field-specific terms. 

• Include Significant Findings

The idea of a research report is to present some sort of abridged version of your systematic investigation. In your report, you should exclude irrelevant information while highlighting only important data and findings. 

• Include Illustrations

Your research report should include illustrations and other visual representations of your data. Graphs, pie charts, and relevant images lend additional credibility to your systematic investigation.

• Choose the Right Title

A good research report title is brief, precise, and contains keywords from your research. It should provide a clear idea of your systematic investigation so that readers can grasp the entire focus of your research from the title. 

• Proofread the Report

Before publishing the document, ensure that you give it a second look to authenticate the information. If you can, get someone else to go through the report, too, and you can also run it through proofreading and editing software. 

How to Gather Research Data for Your Report  

• Understand the Problem

Every research aims at solving a specific problem or set of problems, and this should be at the back of your mind when writing your research report. Understanding the problem would help you to filter the information you have and include only important data in your report. 

• Know what your report seeks to achieve

This is somewhat similar to the point above because, in some way, the aim of your research report is intertwined with the objectives of your systematic investigation. Identifying the primary purpose of writing a research report would help you to identify and present the required information accordingly. 

• Identify your audience

Knowing your target audience plays a crucial role in data collection for a research report. If your research report is specifically for an organization, you would want to present industry-specific information or show how the research findings are relevant to the work that the company does. 

• Create Surveys/Questionnaires

A survey is a research method that is used to gather data from a specific group of people through a set of questions. It can be either quantitative or qualitative. 

A survey is usually made up of structured questions, and it can be administered online or offline. However, an online survey is a more effective method of research data collection because it helps you save time and gather data with ease. 

You can seamlessly create an online questionnaire for your research on Formplus . With the multiple sharing options available in the builder, you would be able to administer your survey to respondents in little or no time. 

Formplus also has a report summary too l that you can use to create custom visual reports for your research.

Step-by-step guide on how to create an online questionnaire using Formplus  

• Sign into Formplus

In the Formplus builder, you can easily create different online questionnaires for your research by dragging and dropping preferred fields into your form. To access the Formplus builder, you will need to create an account on Formplus. 

Once you do this, sign in to your account and click on Create new form to begin. 

• Edit Form Title : Click on the field provided to input your form title, for example, “Research Questionnaire.”
• Edit Form : Click on the edit icon to edit the form.
• Add Fields : Drag and drop preferred form fields into your form in the Formplus builder inputs column. There are several field input options for questionnaires in the Formplus builder. 
• Edit fields
• Click on “Save”
• Form Customization: With the form customization options in the form builder, you can easily change the outlook of your form and make it more unique and personalized. Formplus allows you to change your form theme, add background images, and even change the font according to your needs. 
• Multiple Sharing Options: Formplus offers various form-sharing options, which enables you to share your questionnaire with respondents easily. You can use the direct social media sharing buttons to share your form link to your organization’s social media pages.  You can also send out your survey form as email invitations to your research subjects too. If you wish, you can share your form’s QR code or embed it on your organization’s website for easy access. 

Conclusion  

Always remember that a research report is just as important as the actual systematic investigation because it plays a vital role in communicating research findings to everyone else. This is why you must take care to create a concise document summarizing the process of conducting any research. 

In this article, we’ve outlined essential tips to help you create a research report. When writing your report, you should always have the audience at the back of your mind, as this would set the tone for the document. 

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What do people really want in their work? Meaning and stability

Widespread volatility is strengthening employee resolve to advocate for security, purpose, and well-being on the job

Vol. 55 No. 1 Print version: page 64

• Healthy Workplaces

[ This article is part of the 2024 Trends Report ]

When it comes to employment, Americans in all sorts of occupations—from auto workers to Hollywood actors, from startup founders to restaurant servers—are feeling unsteady thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), reverberations of the pandemic, job design, and other factors, psychologists say.

“Instability of work is something that has been part of humanity, and it feels like it’s getting worse in some ways because it is getting worse,” said David Blustein, PhD, a professor in Boston College’s Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.

“The number one thing people are craving right now is stability—especially in their workplaces,” said Ella F. Washington, PhD, an organizational psychologist and professor of practice at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

But the future of work isn’t all bleak: An unstable ground is strengthening workers’ resolve to advocate for meaning, well-being, and work-life balance on the job, and psychologists are poised to help.

[ Related : A sense of belonging is crucial for employees. How employers can foster connection and social support ]

“We know how to improve jobs and to improve motivation, to increase people’s satisfaction, and also to make it so that they add value,” said Susan J. Lambert, PhD, codirector of the Employment Instability, Family Well-Being, and Social Policy Scholars Network at the University of Chicago.

In other words, working toward greater stability, she added, “is good for business and it’s good for people, and I think it’s really good for society.”

Origins of instability

Instability at work doesn’t just mean the threat, or reality, of layoffs. Researchers define it as “a state in which the consequences of a mismatch between an individual’s functional and/or cognitive abilities and demands of their job can threaten continuing employment if not resolved” ( Brain Injury , Vol. 20, No. 8, 2006 ).

Maybe someone’s not paid enough to maintain their lifestyle, maybe they can’t keep up with the pace, maybe they lack a sense of belonging, maybe their environment is straight-up toxic.

However workers experience it, the pandemic is perhaps the most blatant driver of instability at work—continuing to shake up the literal ground many employees stand on as employers experiment with hybrid schedules. While research suggests more flexibility largely benefits workers’ mental health and productivity , quickly-shifting mandates on who should work where and when can be disorienting, as can an office environment that’s just not the same.

Employees are “not necessarily in the same location when they are ‘on location.’ They’re not necessarily, or rarely, with the same configurations of people and activities that they were before,” said Amy Wrzesniewski, PhD, a professor of management at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania who studies meaning at work. “So maybe people are in the office a few days a week, but the office isn’t the office anymore.”

Job design is contributing to instability too, said Lambert, a professor at the University of Chicago Crown School of Social Work who studies work scheduling practices among low-wage workers.

“A lot of jobs have just been so fragmented that people can’t complete a whole job from beginning to end, and they can’t take pride in it,” she said. It’s easier for a salesperson who sees a purchase all the way through to reap satisfaction, for example, than someone whose single duty is to price items.

Put another way: When jobs are designed so that people can be replaceable, they’ll feel replaceable.

Relatedly, an increasing reliance on contract workers over salaried employees is driving instability, Blustein said. This played out in the auto workers’ strike of fall 2023, he said, where the workers demanded automakers stop hiring so many temporary workers to do their tasks.

Wavering equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts can also contribute to instability at work, particularly among employees from marginalized groups, said Washington, an EDI expert who serves as founder and CEO of Ellavate Solutions in Washington, D.C.

Washington said she’s witnessed many organizations ease up on their commitment to EDI—sometimes unintentionally, and often quietly, such as having a page on their website about inclusion go dark or an EDI director role go unfilled.

“To me that’s the more scary part of the change because—unlike the change in 2020—you can’t see it until it’s too late,” she said.

But employees from underrepresented populations can feel it and, as a result, start to psychologically retreat. That has implications for both them and their employers, Washington said.

“Research shows that when employees can be their authentic selves and they can work and play toward their strengths, they’re not only happier and feel more of a sense of psychological safety, but they also do better work,” she said.

Finally, how artificial intelligence is and will affect people’s livelihoods is contributing to both practical and emotional instability among workers.

In a follow-up to APA’s 2023 Work in America survey specifically about AI , 38% of respondents reported worrying that AI might make some or all of their job duties obsolete, and 64% of those who were worried said they typically feel tense or stressed during the workday.

In one recent study, Wrzesniewski explored how 94 former or unemployed newspaper journalists have navigated not just job loss but also the decline of their whole industry, and often along with it, a sense of identity and purpose. She and collaborator Winnie Jiang, PhD, found that whether people had a “fixed” or “flexible” meaning in their work predicted whether they held out hope that their field would be restored—or they reinvented their careers.

Those with a more flexible mindset tended to recover more quickly from the sadness of their loss, and even found a sense of freedom along the way. Professionals of all stripes who may be impacted by AI should take note.

“There’s some pretty good evidence that AI is going to affect people in jobs that are more precarious to begin with, or jobs that are easily replaced by automation,” Blustein said. “So that’s a huge issue, and that’s going to add to the precariousness of work.”

Finding meaning amid uncertainty

Despite a social media trend of younger workers saying they want mindless work that allows them to clock in and out and live their lives, research suggests people of all ages largely crave a deeper purpose on the job.

In APA’s survey, 93% reported believing it’s very or somewhat important to have a job where they feel the work has meaning. Fortunately, most workers felt their jobs met the mark. Indeed, “mattering at work,” which is defined to include meaning and dignity, has been listed by the U.S. Surgeon General as one of the “five essentials” for mental health and well-being in the workplace.

If you’re not seeking value from your work outside of a paycheck, Wrzesniewski asked, “then where is that sense of meaning or that sense of accomplishment or that sense of development and learning and pride coming from?”

“If there’s not an available other domain in life in which that’s happening,” she said, “then I think it becomes a pretty closed and unfulfilling loop ultimately.”

The search for meaning shouldn’t be a privilege limited to white-collar workers, Lambert said. “Everybody wants to have a job that uses their skills, that allows them to take pride in their work,” she said. “Think of the electrician, think of the plumber, think of the craftsmen who used to be able to make something and put their name on it. Those are incredibly rewarding jobs.”

[ Related : Employees really value making a difference at work. Here are 7 tips from psychology to get them there ]

But meaning is self-defined: For some, earning a paycheck is richly meaningful alone, Blustein said.

Meaningful work can also coexist with firm work-life demarcation, something employees increasingly say they want, but that the pandemic further blurred, according to Tammy Allen, PhD, a distinguished university professor in the University of South Florida’s Department of Psychology who studies work-life balance. Indeed, APA’s Work in America survey found only 40% said their time off is respected.

That’s problematic for all parties since, Allen said, “some detachment from work makes people be able to be better workers and to be able to bring their best selves to work, as opposed to being perpetually on and overworked, which can result in burnout.”

She’s found that simple so-called temporal boundary management tactics can help people set boundaries between work and home. Shutting down the computer at the end of the day and taking breaks during the day, for instance, can make a big difference in improving employee mental health.

[ Related : 2023 Work in America Survey: Workplaces as engines of psychological health and well-being ]

Wrzesniewski’s research on “job crafting,” meanwhile, demonstrates how employees can weave their own values and interests into their work to keep them more engaged. For example, an accountant may implement a new way to file taxes to make the job less repetitive or a teacher who moonlights as a musician may reframe their lectures as a performance. People who successfully job craft, other work has found, are more likely to have their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness at work met, and they also report better subjective and psychological well-being ( Journal of Happiness Studies , Vol. 15, 2014).

“Try to start to build up and out from where you are to run these small experiments and make these small moves that may become bigger moves that get sustained and cemented into changes in your role over time,” she said.

Still, much of the onus is on employers to design roles, cultivate work environments, and support relationships that help staff find purpose, belonging, and ultimately, more security. Policymakers, governments, and health care providers also have a responsibility to support workers’ mental health through population-wide, not just individual, interventions a recent article in The Lancet argues ( Rugulies, R., et al., Vol. 402, No. 10410, 2023 ).

The good news, psychologists say, is that employers are waking up to this reality, which also supports their bottom line.

“Organizations are realizing they need to adapt to the needs of their workers,” Blustein said, “and that would be a very positive trajectory for the future.”

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The search for purpose at work

In this episode of The McKinsey Podcast , Naina Dhingra and Bill Schaninger talk about their surprising discoveries about the role of work in giving people a sense of purpose. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.

Diane Brady: Hello and welcome to The McKinsey Podcast . I’m Diane Brady. In this episode, we’re talking about fascinating new research on individual purpose, the impact that it has on companies, and the impact that your company has on your own sense of purpose. Joining me are two colleagues—first, Naina Dhingra, a partner in the New York office. Hi, Naina.

Naina Dhingra: Hi, Diane. Happy to be here.

Diane Brady: Great. And Bill Schaninger, a senior partner in McKinsey’s Philadelphia office. Hi, Bill.

Bill Schaninger: Hi, Diane.

Diane Brady: So let’s start, Naina, with you. Purpose is a term that is tossed around quite a bit. Define it in this context. What’s individual purpose?

Naina Dhingra: When we think about this idea of individual purpose , the way we think about it is it’s an overarching sense of what matters in a person’s life. I like to use the term “North Star”—this idea of having a sense of direction, intention, and understanding that the contribution you’re making is going somewhere. Now, that’s a technical definition but I think we all intuitively know what it feels like to be on purpose. It’s when you feel energized and inspired and alive.

And it turns out, actually, in some of our research about 85 percent of people  feel they have a purpose. But only about 65 percent of them believe they can actually articulate that purpose—which we thought was really interesting.

Diane Brady: Bill, it feels almost like an existential problem, our sense of purpose. Can you root it in the context of organizational health ?

Bill Schaninger: You know, I think one of the things that’s been really challenging during the pandemic was a bifurcation. There were people who were frontline or customer-facing or critical workers , who had to go to work in a time when livelihoods took a back seat to lives. It felt risky.

And that really brought front and center the idea of “my primary purpose at this point is I have to work, and I’d like to make it home without getting sick.” But for a significant other portion, people were removed from the workplace while still having to do work.

We had this unbelievable smashing together of two worlds: the home world and the work world. I think it’s really brought to the fore “Well, what exactly does work mean to me? What do I have to get out of it? Is it merely a check that facilitates the rest of my life or is it something more purposeful?”—using that word quite explicitly.

Can we put a finer point on starting with the person and leaving behind the arrogance that the organization thinks it dictates to people what their purpose is? That is just nonsense. Individuals decide what their purpose is. It’s the organization’s role and opportunity to figure out how to help people bring that purpose to a finer point of what matters to them and to figure out whether or not they can create a role or an experience within the organization that helps meet that. So a big portion of this was, one, starting with the idea that the person was in the prime role and, two, the organization was in a facilitative role, not in front.

Defining one’s purpose through work

Diane Brady: Naina, I’d love to unpack purpose a bit more because, to Bill’s point, I often think about it at the corporate level. It is something that usually speaks to higher values or a higher mission. On an individual level, can you give me some examples of how people define their purpose?

Naina Dhingra: When we think about employees themselves and how they think about their own sense of purpose, one of the things that we were surprised to find in the research is that about 70 percent of people say they define their purpose through work. And, actually, millennials, even more so, are likely to see their work as their life calling. So what that means is that people are looking for opportunities in the work they do day-to-day to be actually contributing to what they believe their purpose is.

One of the things that we were surprised to find in the research is that about 70 percent of people say they define their purpose through work. And, actually, millennials, even more so, are likely to see their work as their life calling. Naina Dhingra

Diane Brady: You know, I hear “life calling” and I can’t help but think that’s a little bit sad. Bill, maybe I’m just biased here. Is work our life calling right now because we don’t have a lot else to do but be on our Zoom calls and work? Is this a good thing?

Bill Schaninger: Well, yeah, I’ll tell you, as someone who’s been trapped in a home that was supposed to be a weekend retreat, I’ve basically not left here in 14 months. I can see how we’d land at that idea. Let me take a slightly different take on it. I think what the millennials are saying to us is “Anything I do, I’m going to do with gusto. Time is zero sum. There are only so many hours in the day. If I’m going to do something, it has to work for me. And part of it having to work for me is that it has to work for others.”

I think there’s something admirable about that. I’m 51, so I’m a product of the ’80s and, you know, Gordon Gekko, 1 A character in the 1987 film Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone. who was presented to us as a nemesis and ended up becoming a folk hero.

Diane Brady: “Greed is good.”

Bill Schaninger: Right, exactly—the Michael J. Fox version of Alex P. Keaton, 2 Alex P. Keaton, played by Michael J. Fox, was a character in the TV series Family Ties, which ran from 1982 to 1989. right? The archetypal Republican mantra from the ’80s into the ’90s; it just was a different worldview. I think it’s really nice that we have people saying, “Hey, I don’t want to be associated with people who are scumbags or do things that hurt the world. I want to be associated with people who are a force for good.”

I love that. And that doesn’t mean it’s naive. It may be uncalibrated. It may be unspecific.

I think it’s really nice that we have people saying, “Hey, I don’t want to be associated with people who are scumbags or do things that hurt the world. I want to be associated with people who are a force for good. Bill Schaninger

Certainly, some of the stuff that we found when we were engaging with our newest joiners or our youngest members was, as Naina was saying, the difficulty to put a fine point on what the end state is. So they could say that they know “it” has to be better and “it” has to help others. But they had a difficult time explaining explicitly what “it” is. As people mature—and I don’t mean age but rather just mature in their experiences—as soon as there is another viable claim on their time, attention, and energy, then work can diminish a bit in its importance.

But it also gets way clearer the role that work has to play. Work may have an economic contribution, in terms of carrying and providing for the people you love. But you likely also start getting way more specific in terms of where you’d like to put in your time and your effort. That could be education. It could be making people safer. It could be making better roles or jobs for communities. The whole point is, as you get a little further down the line and you start to have other people who need you in terms of your providing care for them, then work goes from diffuse to quite specific pretty quickly.

How parenting affects purpose

Diane Brady: Naina, one of the things that fascinated me in looking at this study was the fact that parents, for example, place a higher premium on purpose. Can you talk a little bit about the slicing and dicing of the demographics around this?

Naina Dhingra:  I say this as a millennial with gusto: part of the reason for the research was the debate that Bill and I were having around the role of purpose in one’s life and the role of work in purpose—and whether or not these were two distinct concepts or concepts that were actually quite overlapping, particularly from the perspective of a millennial. The findings about parents we found really interesting, particularly the fact that parents were more than twice as likely to say that they relied on work for purpose. Time is always so scarce. Given the trade-offs that parents are making between work and home, parents are keen to make work time as meaningful as possible. The time that you’re spending away from family really, really needs to matter.

In a number of focus groups, parents would say that having a child actually made and helped crystallize their purpose and the impact on the world that they want to have and why it matters. And so, if anything, it’s helped parents actually look at work and what they want out of work—to ask for and seek more meaning in their work. One of the things we are looking at when we look at this choice parents make, often when they consider leaving the firm, is how are we ensuring that people are getting more meaning so that they feel the trade-off is worth it and that they have the ability to fulfill their purpose at work.

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Looking for purpose outside of work.

Diane Brady: You mentioned that you and Bill had been debating prior to doing this study. I’m curious to know where you differed and whether this survey reinforced your beliefs or surprised you in some way. Bill, I’m going to go to you on that one.

Bill Schaninger: Well, I think the earliest debate was when I was saying we’re living in something of a gilded cage. It’s really a position of privilege. We work for a preeminent institution. Many of us have extensive academic backgrounds. Basically, these are folks on the far end of a spectrum who work in knowledge roles, so we’re lucky. My push was that there are people who don’t look for purpose through work—that’s not how they view it. It’s a paycheck. And that check is there because they need the transactional exchange, the economic exchange to pay for their obligations, their responsibilities, to take care of other things. There are people who really just want to be skateboarders or really just want to be skiers or sailors. And whatever they do with their gifts, work funds that.

Diane Brady: They’re called my children.

Bill Schaninger: Yeah, exactly. So I was challenging Naina to say that we should get our heads around the idea that organizational purpose just doesn’t matter that much. For some people, it’s just a check. And we were going back and forth on that. At a minimum, this allowed us to come to the idea that personal purpose, individual purpose, is prime.

There’s an amount that people give to work or vocation. Inside that is the space where the organization gets to play, and organizations have to try to maximize that. Through the things they do, they might actually expand the bit given to work or vocation, but they should never assume that bit’s all of it. And then the data, when it came in, gave us a really interesting understanding of how that outside circle—the whole point around individual purpose—just how variable that is.

Maybe one of the biggest insights is that you know how a company can help an employee most? Help them figure out what their purpose actually is. Maybe if there was one blinding insight, it was that: how hard a time many—particularly newer—employees have in describing purpose with any kind of specificity.

The business case for helping employees find purpose

Diane Brady: Well, it is hard. It does feel, Naina, like a personal responsibility. I think of these self-help books about finding your purpose, and it’s all about how you frame your role in the workplace. What’s the responsibility of my employer in giving me purpose?

Naina Dhingra: Well, first I think we need the company to actually understand that there is a business case for this. That was actually one of the other things that Bill and I were debating. Bill was like, “I’m a CEO. Why do I care about this stuff? Sounds a bit fluffy—send people into the woods to think about the meaning of life. Why are we going to convince a CEO that they should care about this?”

One of the really interesting pieces that we found in the research is that nearly seven out of ten employees are reflecting on their purpose because of COVID-19. Those employees who say that they live their purpose at work are six and a half times more likely to report higher resilience. They’re four times more likely to report better health, six times more likely to want to stay at the company, and one and a half times more likely to go above and beyond to make their company successful.

Nearly seven out of ten employees are reflecting on their purpose because of COVID-19. Those employees who say that they live their purpose at work are six and a half times more likely to report higher resilience. Naina Dhingra

So the business case here is that when you help your employees find and live their purpose at work, they’ll do better and are more likely to want to stay, as well as more likely to want to go above and beyond. In fact, we found that as a result of COVID-19, half of American employees are reconsidering the work that they want to do.

Diane Brady: Bill, I’m going to ask you about this. Let’s say I am a CEO. I care about my people. So how do I give them a sense of purpose? Is it how I define the job description? I’ve given them all these benefits. I’ve tried to be compassionate. But here’s a survey saying I’m not doing a good job.

Bill Schaninger: What they do, though, is they create an opportunity for that person to live their purpose through the portion of their waking hours that’s allocated to work. I’m not trying to play word games or draw a fine line there. I just think agency matters.

Individuals have purpose. Organizations don’t give that to a person. The organization as an entity, as a group of people collectively trying to do something, may have a stated, shared purpose. And you’d like to believe that alignment matters there. In fact, a good portion of the research we continue to do is about moving from the attractiveness of individuals seeing the stated purpose of the organization to getting a sense of whether or not that’s real, seeing how they could fit in, and then whether or not they can realize that in their daily activities—and whether or not that firms up a sense of belonging.

So organizations can be a conduit. They can make their purpose visible. They can clearly show a link between what they’re asking a person to do and the stated purpose. But the individual alone has agency in deciding what their purpose is and whether or not it aligns with the company’s.

Diane Brady: One thing I want to make sure that I’m not mistaking, because I think often we do, is the difference between passion and purpose. Naina, having a passion for what we do seems to be a bit overrated. Is it quite different from feeling a sense of purpose in what we do?

Naina Dhingra: That’s an interesting question because this is why, at the start, we were talking about the definition of purpose, since one can have a purpose and have the ability to articulate it. But then there’s also that sense of actually being on purpose. And that sense of truly being on purpose, I would say, often does come when somebody has a real passion for work. When you ask somebody if they feel like they’re doing something in line with their purpose, they might say, “Yeah, it’s because I’m doing something I’m passionate about.”

You know, one of the things I’m superpassionate about is working with people who I get to apprentice and help grow. And I have passion for that and I feel alive when I do it. That’s me fulfilling my purpose. And so I think there are a lot of different words that we can use. But, ultimately, what we’re trying to do is say that employers really have a role in helping people reflect on what that purpose is. And part of that reflection is identifying those areas where people feel alive, they feel passionate, they feel energized. And recognizing those areas will help people reflect on what that sense of purpose is and how to find more purpose in their day-to-day work.

Aligning organizational and personal purpose

Diane Brady: So does the organization’s purpose matter, Bill? That is the one thing leaders can control. What difference does it make in aligning that with the individual’s purpose?

Bill Schaninger:  Well, look, the data here was surprisingly strong. This would be one of those points where Naina could easily say to me, “I told you so.” When someone is looking for the time they spend at work to have purpose and needs alignment between the organization’s purpose and their own, it’s a multiple win in terms of good outcomes, of employees wanting to stay and feeling like it’s a good place to work and for their intention to stay and strive. And it has this huge uplift when you have a great alignment between the organization’s purpose and the individual’s purpose. What was interesting was the context where the person wasn’t looking for the organization to provide it, but the organization was doing a great job of helping people be on purpose.

I think the language that Naina was using there really matters. Being on purpose maybe sounds a little bit like being on brand. It’s where you’re not creating credibility problems. You’re not creating discontinuities between what you say and what you do. Where you’re truly living credibly and honestly and authentically. Even when a person didn’t initially say, “Oh, I need this from my employer,” when the employer was doing it, there was still an uplift. So then you had to say, “Well, what about the alternative?”

Well, that’s where it gets a little scary. If a person showed up believing the organization stood for one thing and they really needed the organization’s purpose to line up with their own, and then the organization violated this, it was just that, a violation. It had significant downticks in the person’s willingness to stay, their engagement, their involvement. You’d see a direct link to performance. Also, for most people, that creates so much dissonance that they usually leave.

Diane Brady: So hypocrisy is worse than having no stated purpose at all?

Bill Schaninger: Well, right. You could say, “Hey, this is transactional.” There’s huge portions of the gig economy and other places where some companies have basically tried to marginalize employees and say, “Oh look, they’re their own contractors.” That’s economic exchange, not social exchange. I’m certain for some people that’s OK, but you shouldn’t try to pass it off for what it isn’t.

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Why businesses should develop an authentic organizational purpose.

Diane Brady: There’s a lot of focus right now on wellness, Naina, and what we can do for employees, with the recognition that certain groups—working mothers and others—have really suffered during this pandemic and have opted out of work. What are some of the levers that you can use in this situation, since we can’t give people a sense of purpose other than giving them space to reflect? Is there anything else that can be done to heighten the engagement and make it easier for people to feel purpose in what they do?

Naina Dhingra: Well, let me build on what Bill was saying—this idea of what companies can control and this idea that there’s actually an incredible unlock that happens when an individual sense of purpose is lined up with the company’s sense of purpose. We’ve found employees are five and a half times more likely to say they’re fulfilling their purpose at work if that purpose is aligned with their company’s.

The individual alone has agency in deciding what their purpose is and whether or not it aligns with the company’s. Bill Schaninger

So where companies can start is understanding that you’re not getting anywhere unless you have an authentic organizational purpose. This is a time in which there is tremendous change going on in the world. Having an authentic organizational purpose is about spending real time reflecting on the impact a company has on the world. It’s not just about nice corporate-social-responsibility contributions and making big statements. It’s actually about engaging your employees on what that impact is. And what we found is that employees who say their organiza­tions spend real time reflecting on the impact they make on the world are five times more likely to be excited to work for the company.

These reflections and dialogues are one of the things that we’re most excited about really helping our clients with, and helping ourselves at McKinsey as well. There’s an opportunity to really pause and reflect on the individual’s sense of purpose and how that links with the company and what the company is trying to do for the world—especially at this moment, when there are so many things going on in the world that really demand business to make a greater contribution to society.

Diane Brady: You know, as we’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking, “What’s my sense of purpose?” I can articulate a couple of different things that drive me, and I certainly feel purpose in what I do. But I’d be curious to know, since you are both on the front lines, how would you articulate your own sense of purpose? Bill, I’m going to go to you first.

Bill Schaninger: Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, throughout this conversation I was reflecting on the distance between my mom and me. My mom was a teen parent. She was barely 17 when I was born and had both of her kids by the time she was 20. She was a good student through school—and likely would’ve gone to college and then had kids. At that time, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, she didn’t go to college. In fact, she was actually kicked out of high school. But as soon as I was, I don’t know, six or something, so my sister would’ve been three, my mom had a real desire to go get a job.

A good portion of that job was just that there needed to be something more to her life than being a housewife and a mom. It didn’t mean she didn’t love us or didn’t love my dad. But she needed something for her. Some sense of freedom. Some sense of belonging to something outside the home, not being defined by it. And so for her, a lot of it really had to do with freedom and, to some extent, contributing to the family economics. But mostly it was about freedom and autonomy and being able to enjoy something. So she ended up becoming a bookkeeper—you know, accounts payable, accounts receivable—and then, over the course of 20 years, ended up running a plumbing-supply house, being the general manager. A rather phenomenal arc, honestly.

Diane Brady: Definitely!

Bill Schaninger: But a lot of that was under this basic idea of freedom and then enjoyment. But I think in her case, there was also some gender-norm busting, if you consider the ’70s and early ’80s. Now, in my own case, it’s almost entirely that I get unbelievable enjoyment out of being good at something or being believed to be good at something. Being part of a place that has such a really great institutional reputation like McKinsey.

You know, in many conversations, Naina and I anchor on this one phrase: “We’re not going to make stuff up.” Anybody can make stuff up. We’re going to make sure that what we say is right. That is core to my purpose. I would have been an academic had I not come to McKinsey. I’d be a professor somewhere, teaching about behavior and HR and management. The firm has really allowed me to tap into my professional purpose, which is advancing the cause of the human condition at work. Why do people behave the way they do at work? Why do leaders behave the way they do at work?

That was the first decade of my McKinsey career. After I got elected partner, I started feeling a greater and greater need. And my own personal situation improved and changed, obviously. A huge portion of it was, “Boy, I’ve got to do something for the kids who are like me.” And then it went from having the freedom, the ability to choose whether I worked or not, to things like caring and equality and security. Taking care of the ones I love, expanding beyond my immediate family to making sure my mom had a house and was set up, taking care of my godchildren. But then I started looking around where we were living, and certainly here in the Lehigh Valley, in Pennsylvania, it was just, “Well, how can I help kids who were like me?”

And McKinsey helped facilitate that, either through not-for-profit boards or what I do with—well, frankly, excess income. Do you fund scholarships? Do you fund summer programs? So if I compare and contrast the difference between my mom and me, a lot of this purpose, for her, was that she loved being part of something that was outside the house that she could be good at, have competence at, and get the reward of doing what she felt she could maximize to do more.

For me, I was afforded the luxury of always being told I was going to be the first one to go to school and make something of myself, in air quotes, and then I landed at McKinsey. And Naina and I were talking about an organization being able to help a person define their purpose. My purpose, initially, was rather narrow. It was that McKinsey was going to be two or three years. I’d get the stories and hightail it back to academics.

Diane Brady: Your initial purpose.

Bill Schaninger: Right. Initially, the purpose was just to make me a better academic, a better professor. I didn’t count on loving it so much. I didn’t count on realizing that, wow, we can really help change these organizations—change the quality of the professional and personal lives of the clients we’re working with. And I’m sure when you talk to Naina, even 30 seconds in, there’s stories of some of the clients she’s serving. She’s personal friends with many of them. Many of them have had these pivotal moments in their careers and their lives where she’s helped them.

At least for me, I didn’t count on how much I was going to get enjoyment and satisfaction and personal pride out of helping our clients. And then, eventually, it just became doing not-for-profit work, helping large civic institutions try to help make everybody’s life better. And so this arc, I think it can change over time. I think it usually starts with some version of freedom or caring or sustaining the people around you and can migrate. And when an organization plays it right, it helps people through that progression, and it helps them see broader opportunities so that when they excel, everybody can excel.

Diane Brady: It’s very interesting to think about the recognition of purpose and where somebody is in their career. Naina, I’m curious. What’s your sense of purpose?

Naina Dhingra: You know, I was listening to Bill’s story, and the way I would describe myself is truly as an accidental consultant who, in my heart of hearts, is still the 20-year-old AIDS activist, almost getting arrested at the Republican National Convention. You know, throwing stones in different areas of big protests in Washington, DC. I grew up as a Sikh. Religion was very important in my family. And one of the tenets of Sikhism is equality and social justice and this desire to fight against things that are not right.

That was a huge part of my upbringing and really followed me in my 20s, which were about being a social-justice activist. I somehow found myself at McKinsey, in our Nonprofit Practice, and very much described my sense of purpose as about equitable healthcare. I was working a lot on issues of AIDS in Africa, malaria, tuberculosis, and very much felt McKinsey was a place for skills training to help me fulfill that purpose. I would be able to fulfill that sense of purpose outside of McKinsey, but I needed greater skills.

And lo and behold, ten years later, somehow I’m here as a partner. And I would say, do I still have that sense of purpose? Very much. Very much. It is a core part of who I am, this idea of equitable healthcare access. But my sense of purpose has evolved and grown through my experiences, particularly my reflecting on what I see as the powerful role of business to help solve humanity’s greatest challenges—as somebody who grew up in non­profits and grassroots campaigns and working with the UN, to then really seeing the platform that business has. And working with a number of clients, in particular pharmaceutical companies, and seeing their passion and commitment toward solving some of the greatest global health challenges of our time. And so I think purpose is something; there is an innate sense of it that I’ve had.

But there is an evolution that happens, based on one’s experiences, the people that one meets—and that’s one of the reasons why, ten years later, I still work at McKinsey, even though many of my same friends working in many of these public-health institutions crack up at the idea that I’m a pharma consultant and management consultant who works on all of these interesting topics. But still, in my heart of hearts I’m really this AIDS activist.

Help your employees find purpose—or watch them leave

Why purpose matters, and how to find it.

Diane Brady: What advice do you have for the two thirds–plus of people out there who don’t feel that sense of purpose, who certainly may be grateful to have a job or may be looking for a job? What can they be doing to ignite a sense of purpose in themselves if their employers are not doing it? Bill?

Bill Schaninger: Yeah, I was just reflecting on your question. It’s a really good one. I’ve often thought that when talking about this, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t forgetting the very real condition for a lot of people, which is that employment is necessary. It’s necessary so they can put food on the table and a roof over the heads of the people they love. I don’t think we should ever look past that or diminish it. I do think there’s an opportunity for organizations when someone arrives at your doorstep because it’s a job. Maybe you have an opportunity by just running the place a little bit better for them to see some meaning in it, to see some purpose in it.

I remember I said to my mom, “Why is it so important to be a bookkeeper? Why would you not want to be at home every day when we get home from school?” And my mom said to both my sister and me, “Look, you just see it as a job. But it’s my job. And I need to know that what I do there, I do really well and I’m good at it.” That stuck with me quite a bit. Because if I’m honest, as a teenager, things came naturally to me and I didn’t necessarily work as hard.

I think she was trying to impart this idea that there is satisfaction in doing something well that’s yours, that you identify with, that you affiliate with. My hope is that by engaging on this, organizations can see an opportunity to really lay out a clear path for people and say, “This is what we stand for here at this place. If you want to join us, we’re going to help you. We’re going to help you make more meaning of it than its being just a job.” Any job can have meaning. Any job can help fulfill performance. It does require the organization to live into it. It requires the organization to be well run.

I think for individuals, it’s important to see through a lens of just how important purpose is for autonomy, how important it is for freedom, for stability, for caring for others, or moving into what Naina was talking about in terms of equality and equity. You may not fulfill all of them but you can certainly fulfill some of them. And I think one of the things we’re seeing is that as people have more time, they have more affinity. They have more belonging. They have more attachment to what the organization is doing and what they’re doing individually. So maybe it becomes a bit of a virtuous cycle and it can be reinforcing.

Diane Brady: Great. Naina, any thoughts that you have for listeners out there who may or may not be feeling a sense of purpose?

Naina Dhingra: I would offer two simple questions to reflect on over a month, every day. When did I feel most alive today? When did I feel most drained? I think reflecting on those two questions over a 30-day period may offer some really interesting insights about how you might feel about what’s going on at work, what’s going on in your life, and help you on a path to reflecting on what that sense of purpose might be.

Diane Brady: I think that’s great advice. I can’t think of a better place to leave than that. Naina Dhingra, Bill Schaninger, thank you very much for joining us.

Bill Schaninger: Thank you; it was a great conversation.

Naina Dhingra: My pleasure. Thank you.

Diane Brady: And thank you to the listeners out there. Whether you have found your purpose or not, you’ll certainly find more information on how to nurture it within your company and nurture it within yourself at McKinsey.com. I’m Diane Brady. I look forward to seeing you next time.

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Penna, 2007. Meaning at Work Research Report cited in Bhatla, N. (2011) To study the Employee Engagement Practices and its effect on Employee Performance with special reference to ICICI and HDFC Bank in Lucknow.. IJSTER 2(8).

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The Impact of Employee Engagement on Job Performance and Organisational Commitment in the Egyptian Banking Sector

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A hush has fallen over the workplace. At tech startups and banks, in doctors’ offices and law firms, workers are increasingly being asked to keep secrets. These aren’t personal confidences but organizational secrets about clients, proprietary technologies, or business strategies. Sometimes employees are required to keep this information from the public. Other times, they’re asked to keep it from people within their organization and even members of their own team.

Nir Halevy , a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, notes that while organizational secret-keeping has become more common, we know very little about how it affects the secret-keepers. In a new paper , he sets out to find an answer.

Along with Michael Slepian of Columbia University and Eric Anicich of the University of Southern California, Halevy proposes that organizational secret-keeping can increase stress and isolation while boosting a sense of meaning and importance on the job. “It’s fascinating that the same phenomenon can have opposite effects,” he says. “Keeping organizational secrets simultaneously hurts and helps employee well-being — in different ways.” This study is the first large-scale look at how workers are affected by organizational secrets in real-world settings. The results could help employers find ways to help employees reduce the stress of holding on to confidential information.

Organizational secret-keeping is different from holding on to a personal or family secret. It isn’t a choice — it’s a requirement imposed by a superior. What’s more, spilling the beans could come with significant professional, financial, and even legal repercussions. An employee could lose their coworkers’ trust, lose their job, or be sued by their employer.

In many instances, employees may need to keep information from their coworkers, which may disrupt corporate social initiatives like affinity groups or mentoring programs. After all, sharing information is a common way for people to bond with one another.

With this in mind, the researchers hypothesized that the pressure of keeping a professional secret could increase employees’ stress and feelings of isolation. To test this theory, they asked nearly 600 workers in the United States and the United Kingdom whether they have ever had to keep a secret, such as clients’ identities or details about upcoming layoffs. The survey confirmed that organizational secrecy creates stress and isolation and that past secrets can continue to worry employees.

Those harms notwithstanding, having to keep organizational secrets also comes with benefits. The researchers found that secrets were linked to feelings of privilege and status, which helps explain why secrets may make work feel more meaningful. “Although information is often seen as a source of power,” Halevy says, “we found that privileged access to organizational secrets boosts status rather than power. You feel valued and the work feels more meaningful when you get access to organizational secrets. At the same time, you are constrained in terms of what you can do with the information, which explains why you may not necessarily feel more powerful.”

Inside the circle of trust

In another study, the researchers wanted to see if workers would think a job that requires secrecy would be more stressful. More than 770 participants looked at hypothetical ads for jobs in different areas. One version of the ad mentioned the job involved highly confidential information required by law to be kept secret and said that employees would be required to sign non-disclosure agreements. People who read this version were more likely to think the job would involve increased social isolation, status, and meaning — but not more stress. This was another indication that access to organizational secrets makes people feel their work is important.

To test this in the real world, respondents were asked to recall a time they had to keep a secret at work. Once again, the researchers found that secret-keeping was directly correlated with increased stress. However, they also found that compared to an organizational secret that only has to be kept from outsiders, an organizational secret that also has to be kept from some insiders was associated with more social isolation. They also found that keeping a company secret (as opposed to a secret for a friend, coworker, or family member) was linked to increased feelings of social status and perceived meaningfulness at work.

Finally, the researchers examined more than 8,000 responses to a survey of federal employees. Here they found that while keeping organizational secrets increases feelings of both stress and meaningfulness, there was no overall association between satisfaction and the requirement to keep secrets.

Overall, the studies suggest that organizational secret-keeping teeters between causing a sense of stressful loneliness and fostering a sense of pride and purpose. When properly balanced, those conflicting influences cancel each other out. But if they tip too precipitously toward stress and isolation, employees’ well-being will be seriously affected.

Halevy is hopeful that this research will give managers a sense of how to tip the scales in a healthier way. “We would love for leaders to grapple with the isolation and stress that secrecy causes,” he says. He suggests that employers reframe secrecy. Instead of emphasizing the consequences of betraying secrets, they could focus on the meaningfulness and benefits of maintaining secrecy. And, because sharing information can help people bond, Halevy suggests companies create opportunities and time for connection between teams and coworkers who share professional secrets. “Solutions are available,” he says. “It’s important that support comes from within the organization to minimize the harms of organizational secrecy.”