Now in its sixth year, MeaningSphere, LLC is old for a startup. But this is no ordinary startup story—and Jeff Westphal is no ordinary founder.
Since 2019, MeaningSphere has been asking big questions about how people create meaning in the world of work: first through research studies, and later by developing and testing a series of online tools geared toward self-reflection and self-knowledge.
Now, those years of effort are beginning to bear fruit, with the launch of two new products: The Worklife Fulfillment Indicator and the Worklife Fulfillment Builder. Looking back on the company’s evolution, Westphal regards the long incubation time as well worth it. The way he tells it, MeaningSphere didn’t start just six years ago, but 30. That’s when a simple question from a trusted mentor transformed the way Westphal thought about meaning, purpose, and work.
Our story begins with that pivotal moment in Westphal’s career.
An epiphany starts with ‘why’
The year was 1992. Westphal was 30, and vice president at Vertex, Inc.—his family’s business—when he had an awakening.
“A wise mentor just kept asking me why,” he recalls. “You know, ‘What purpose do you have in mind? What’s the end you imagine?’”
Westphal remembers struggling with these questions. He knew the value of hard work, sure. He’d grown up in greater Philadelphia working physical jobs—from landscaping, to moving furniture, to making hoagies. After attending college and venturing into the professional world of advertising, Westphal eventually made the choice to work for his father at Vertex.
In the world in which Westphal had been raised, people worked because things simply needed to be done, or to fulfill their needs and wants—like the bicycle he bought himself as a child. But when his mentor asked him “why,” these kinds of answers didn’t seem sufficient.
“I was doing ostensibly pretty well in my career, right?” Westphal says. “But I didn’t have the answers to my mentor’s questions. To me, [it was]: More sales. Get more done. Beat the competition. That’s what I was driving like crazy to do,” he recalls.
But his mentor wasn’t buying it.
“He’s like, ‘Why are you doing that?’” Westphal recalls. “I’m like, ‘What do you mean, why am I doing that? Isn’t it obvious?’ And after he asked me enough times, I had a major epiphany. I realized that the company mattered way more than revenue growth. I realized that, wow, this business is way more than just a business. And these people are way more than employees. And I’ve got a role to play that’s way more than, you know, whether we win the next deal or whether I make more money.”
The moment changed the trajectory of his life, he says: “I knew then that I would devote the rest of my life to helping other people see and feel the sense of purpose that I saw and felt, thanks to that mentor.”
Finding purpose at Vertex: ‘It might as well be meaningful tax software’
Vertex, founded by Rainer “Ray” Westphal in 1978, makes transaction tax accounting software. It’s a respectable and necessary line of work—and under the leadership of this particular father and son, highly profitable. But it’s not the kind of thing you’d associate with words like meaning and purpose, and Westphal was already keenly aware of this.
“Everybody can’t work at the Peace Corps,” he quips. “Somebody’s got to make the tax software.”
Westphal realized that by asking himself the repeated question why, he could locate what it was about the work that truly mattered to him: for example, the opportunity to build relationships and to help others develop their skills. Now, he wanted to create a work environment in which others were encouraged to ask the same questions, and to connect their day-to-day work with a bigger purpose.
“And so for the 20 years that followed, as I became president and CEO, everything about the company was centered around, ‘Why are we here?’” he recalls.
Westphal implemented several key changes at Vertex. At the heart of these changes was a new imperative to make decisions with, and not merely for, the people who would be affected by them.
He invited employees into months of thoughtful dialogue, redefining the company’s mission, vision, and values. He met with customers and used their insights to shape the company’s vision for the future. As new hires came in, he established a practice of meeting with them in small groups. They discussed the reasons why—beyond financial drivers—the business existed, and why those employees chose to work there.
If they were going to make tax software, he reasoned, “it might as well be meaningful sales tax software.”
At first, Westphal’s collaborative methods were met with resistance from some of his colleagues. But they didn’t appear to hurt the company’s bottom line. In fact, Vertex’s financial performance soared in those years. When Westphal retired in 2017, the company’s value had grown 20-fold during his tenure as CEO, he says. To him, it was proof that a meaning-first approach to work could drive real economic growth.
The early days of MeaningSphere: Asking the big questions
With his years as a CEO behind him, Westphal took a year off to think and rest before rushing into something new. The decision allowed him to quietly reflect on how he might put his insights to work in a new way. He had ideas for a book, philanthropic projects, and some motivational speaking. But it wasn’t long before another, more ambitious plan began to take shape: a platform where people could learn a crucial skill not taught in public schools and universities. Namely, how to identify what really matters to them about their work.
So after that year off, he says, “I engaged a director of market research that I knew very well, to just test my observations about how meaning-blind the working world seemed to be. Was there any quantitative validity to that?”
The results of that research, conducted by Dr. Theresa Bolmarcich, painted an intriguing picture of the state of personal meaning in the workplace—and an opportunity for a new platform to make a difference. The first study Westphal commissioned examined employee perceptions of their company’s higher “purpose,” and measured how much this perceived purpose impacted the employees’ wellbeing.
Unsurprisingly, those who believed their employer had a positive social impact tended to rate their own jobs as more “meaningful,” as determined by their positive response to statements like “My work makes the world a better place” and “I find my work rewarding because I believe I help others.”
However, employees with no such perceptions of their companies’ positive social impact were strongly divided in their responses. While a sizable contingent (36%) reported very low levels of “job meaning,” another 29% reported an above-average experience.
To Bolmarcich, this early finding suggested that it’s possible for employees to create meaning at work regardless of where that work took place.
Encouraged, Westphal began to commission more research into the topic of personal meaning at work. He also invited a few other professionals to collaborate and share their perspectives. These included Dr. Hadley Williams, an organizational psychologist and former researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health.
“I brought together a group of people who I knew shared my values, complemented my skills, and we started to have biweekly talks,” he says. “And after two years, in 2019, we actually founded MeaningSphere as an enterprise.”
These collaborators would include Dr. Gail Townsend, an organization development specialist who had honed her skills at W.L. Gore & Associates, LLC, better known as the makers of GORE-TEX waterproof fabrics. W.L Gore was a pioneer in their emphasis on human-centered collaboration and, to put it plainly, being a great place to work. Westphal was confident Townsend would bring a wealth of expertise to the conversation.
The founder and his collaborators already knew they wanted MeaningSphere to provide something other than skills assessment, career coaching, or job search tools. They knew their primary interest wasn’t in making employees more productive for their bosses or in helping jobseekers climb the corporate ladder. Instead, they wanted to provide users with the space to reflect on the same questions Westphal’s mentor had posed to him all those years ago: Why am I doing this? What’s the end goal? What difference will it make? And why is that important?
Collaborating with the Map of Meaning International
MeaningSphere’s goal is to empower people to create more meaningful worklives. But what actually makes work meaningful? And what do we mean when we talk about meaning? These sorts of questions can easily make your head spin. Fortunately, there are people who have spent decades researching this very topic. One of them is Dr. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, creator of the Map of Meaning framework.
Based on qualitative research, the Map of Meaning comprises four pathways and three tensions through which human beings create individual and collective meaning. Initially conceived as a research framework, the Map is now used by individuals and organizations around the world.
When Williams saw the Map of Meaning referenced in a management journal, his interest was piqued. Right away, he could see the potential applications for MeaningSphere, Westphal recalls.
It was the beginning of a longstanding partnership between the Map of Meaning International (the charitable trust, co-founded by Lips-Wiersma, that stewards the Map of Meaning) and MeaningSphere.
Now, The Map of Meaning is the foundation of MeaningSphere’s core offering: the Worklife Fulfillment Builder.
Bridging the meaning gap: The Indicator and the Builder
MeaningSphere’s research, and Westphal’s own leadership experience, have both shown one thing to be true: that most people care a great deal about the meaning of their work. Yet most of our educational institutions don’t take meaning into account when preparing us for the world of work. At schools and universities, the focus is on acquiring the right skills and knowledge to succeed in a career—not on understanding the various factors that make our work meaningful.
Westphal hopes MeaningSphere’s tools will empower people to bridge that gap. Where other career-centered assessments focus on identifying the roles or industries a person might excel in (based on their skills or personality), MeaningSphere’s offerings empower the individual to reflect and discover what brings them purpose, fulfillment, and motivation at work.
A free, interactive online tool, the Worklife Fulfillment Indicator can be completed in just two minutes. This offering allows the user to break down their experience at work into ten Worklife Fulfillment Areas: things like “Connection,” “Autonomy,” and “Impact.” Once completed, users get an honest snapshot of what’s going well at work, and what can be improved upon.
“[The Indicator] is a simple and easy to use tool to diagnose your own level of worklife fulfillment and identify areas where you may want to further explore,” Westphal explains.
The Worklife Fulfillment Builder was developed for those who want to take their exploration a bit deeper. The Builder introduces the well-respected Map of Meaning framework to a new audience and helps them apply its wisdom to their current worklife. After learning more about the pathways and tensions of the Map of Meaning, users respond to 31 statements about their current work situation. The Builder then maps their experience (quite literally!) onto the Map of Meaning model, allowing them to visualize the areas of their worklife in which they experience the most meaning. From there, the tool provides individuals with helpful guidance for taking the next steps to improve their working life.
Both experiences have been thoughtfully designed with the goal of guiding users’ reflections and sparking insights that otherwise would not have come to the surface.
Given the opportunity to pause and take stock, many people realize they’ve lost sight of the “why” they started their careers with, says Westphal. To that end, MeaningSphere’s offerings can provide vital tools, space, and permission to connect back to that forgotten source of motivation, joy, and even love for what they do.
Westphal’s “ultimate dream,” as he describes it, is for working people at large to experience this type of mindset shift—from talking about what they do to why they do it.
“Then they can begin creating a thoughtful plan that’s actually going to be more fulfilling for them and their families,” he concludes. “When we achieve that level of critical mass, I think we’ll have effectively become the bridge from a more meaning-blind, meaningless working world to a more meaningful, fulfilling working world.”
Having made this grand pronouncement, he laughs and reaches for an idiom to bring it all back to earth.
“And then, Katie, bar the door, as they say.”
