The benefits of serving others at work

You know the person at work who’s always calling out others’ mistakes, performatively overworking, and bragging about never taking vacations? There’s a wonderful name for this, popularized on TikTok: the corporate pick-me. 

The pick-me is manipulative, approval-seeking, and competitive. No one wants to be called a pick-me, much less work with one. But this workplace archetype persists for a reason. Too often, the world of work encourages us to think selfishly, pump up our resumes with hyperbole, and have a pitch ready for interviewers about why we’re the “best” candidate. By the time we’ve landed the coveted position, it’s hardly surprising if we’ve started to see our colleagues as competitors—not collaborators. 

From the often-gladiatorial nature of the hiring process, to glowing biographies of ruthless CEOs and entrepreneurs, to doleful adages like “Nice guys finish last,” we’ve been given the message that selfishness is a necessary part of building a career. Meanwhile, traits like kindness, altruism, and generosity are treated as liabilities. However, a growing body of research shows the opposite: selfless and communal behavior benefits both individuals and organizations. Research has also found that being a selfish jerk, to use a scientific term, won’t actually give you a career advantage (more on that later). 

Most importantly, practicing acts of service to others is one of the key ways we can make our work meaningful. Within the Map of Meaning* framework, Service to Others is one of four integrated pathways through which humans can create meaning in our work and lives. Here on the MeaningSphere blog, we’ve been exploring each of these pathways in-depth to uncover insights about navigating the world of work with more humanity. So far, we’ve talked about Integrity with Self and Unity with Others. This time, we’re unpacking Service to Others—and what it looks like in today’s workplace. 

How do you interact with your colleagues—are you finding ways to help someone who is overworked, offer mentorship to someone who’s new, or lend a listening ear to someone who’s having a rough day? Or are you too focused on “the mission” to pause and attend to the less glamorous needs of those around you?

What does Service to Others really mean? 

Every day, we have the ability to make small, meaningful actions that have an immediate benefit to the people around us—whether that means taking the time to help a team member prepare their presentation, offering a colleague a ride, or just holding the door for someone carrying a load of packages. These day-to-day actions are what we call Service to Others. They can be practiced no matter what line of work we’re in, on or off the clock. 

Ideally, small acts of service are aligned with a bigger mission, purpose, or vision for the future—what the Map of Meaning refers to as “Inspiration.” And yet we should be careful not to confuse the two. If you’re lucky enough to work at a company or institution with a noble, human-centered mission, you might be tempted to think, “Well, I serve others every day!” But zoom in a bit: Your role may be contributing to a cause you believe in (if so, that’s great!), but what kind of impact are you having on others in your day-to-day duties? Are you able to see this impact firsthand, or is it a bit more abstract? How do you interact with your colleagues—are you finding ways to help someone who is overworked, offer mentorship to someone who’s new, or lend a listening ear to someone who’s having a rough day? Or are you too focused on “the mission” to pause and attend to the less glamorous needs of those around you? 

When we interviewed Dr. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, creator of the Map of Meaning framework, she explained the difference between serving a noble “purpose” and serving others. 

“Service to Others is more about that immediate contribution that you make,” she said. “That feeling of, ‘Today, I helped.’ For example, ‘Today I worked in a community garden that will help someone have better quality food.’” 

By contrast, she went on, “The purpose is much more in terms of, ‘Can we change the food system to make it more healthy, more local, etc.?’  But you don’t achieve that overnight. The day-to-day stuff is making a difference…That’s the daily meaning that you feel.” 

Lips-Wiersma’s academic focus is on ethics, meaningful work, and sustainability. (The Map is based on her qualitative research she conducted as a doctoral candidate at Auckland University of Technology, where she is now a full-time professor.) Now, a growing body of research from other disciplines supports her findings about the link between wellbeing and doing good for others. 

It’s our work that provides us with the setting to use our talents, abilities, knowledge, or expertise to directly benefit others in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Sometimes work is the medium through which we help others.

The growing case for kindness 

Thanks to recent research, we now know that performing acts of kindness is associated with reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression and that prosocial activities such as mentoring others or volunteering positively affect brain and cardiovascular health. It turns out that the “feel good” effect of serving others has measurable health benefits, such as reduced blood pressure. Simply put, small acts of service are good for you. 

They also tend to have a bigger positive impact on others than we realize, according to another piece of research. In one experiment, people made small gestures, such as writing a note to a loved one “just because” or giving away a free cupcake to a stranger. Both the giver and receiver were asked to rate how “big” the act seemed. Consistently, researchers found that the receiver rated the “bigness” of the kind gesture higher than the giver did. This suggests that seemingly small efforts go a long way toward improving others’ happiness—another thing to feel good about. 

Another benefit of kind actions is that they are contagious. Human beings are social creatures, and when we see others displaying supportive behavior, we can be motivated to follow their example. If someone surprises us with a random act of kindness, we tend to go about the rest of our day in a more generous and agreeable mood. This effect is especially powerful in environments where, let’s say, people from different backgrounds and temperaments are brought together and asked to collaborate eight hours a day, five days a week. 

The benefits of serving others at work

Most of us have to get a job to earn a living—whether or not that work enables us to serve others.  

But our jobs tend to offer secondary benefits we may not have consciously considered. It’s our work, for example, that provides us with the setting to use our talents, abilities, knowledge, or expertise to directly benefit others in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. This is true of surgeons and schoolteachers, but holds true for waiters and taxi drivers as well. Sometimes work is the medium through which we help others—allowing us to enjoy that day-to-day meaning Dr. Lips-Wiersma described. 

Yet even if service to others isn’t explicit in your job description (say you work in an office adding up numbers all day), you can still find ways to serve those in your orbit. Even if that means holding the elevator for a colleague who’s running to catch it. In fact, such voluntary acts of goodwill while on the job now have a name: Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB). According to the researchers who coined the term, OCB refers to positive workplace behavior that is neither required by one’s job description nor incentivized (i.e., through some kind of reward system). Sticking around to help clean up after a workplace event, asking a colleague how their kids are doing, or offering to take on extra tasks to help an overworked coworker are all examples of OCB. 

When made a part of the culture, these small demonstrations of service with nothing expected in return—whether you call it OCB or just plain human decency—can create a workplace with higher morale, better cooperation, and less stress. Organizationally speaking, workplaces where OCB is the norm have greater efficiency and reduced absenteeism and turnover. But don’t do it for the company bottom line—do it because it matters to you, and makes life easier for others. 

Why being selfish won’t get you ahead 

There’s a persistent myth we’d like to do away with: That nice guys (and gals) finish last. The saying imagines your work life as a competition for scarce resources, in which only the most ruthless jerks will “win.” 

But this simply isn’t true. First, your career trajectory isn’t a race! Second, according to the results of two longitudinal studies, being a jerk doesn’t give you an advantage at work. That research followed a group of “disagreeable” people for 14 years, as they completed college and became established in the workplace. 

The results found that people with “selfish, combative, and manipulative” tendencies (sounds a bit like our corporate pick-me) did not have an advantage in seeking power at work. What the researchers observed was this: while the disagreeable individuals “engaged in more dominant-aggressive behavior, which positively predicted attaining higher power,” they also “engaged in less communal and generous behavior, which predicted attaining less power.” Put together, these two traits canceled one another out. As a result, disagreeableness didn’t confer any advantage in seeking positions of power at work. 

This finding, the researchers wrote, “held up for individuals with long as well as short tenures, those in large organizations as well as small, and those who switched jobs frequently as well as those who did so infrequently.” 

The researchers did find a positive correlation between extraversion and power. Extraverts engaged in both “dominant-aggressive” and “communal and generous” behaviors—suggesting that acting like a boss will get you nowhere unless you can demonstrate to others that you care. 

So, there you have it: nice folks don’t finish last, at least not in the workplace! In fact, being rude might even hold you back. 

Not that it’s, you know…a race or anything. 

Your act of service should reflect what the people being served actually want or need—not just what you think is best for them.

How to start practicing Service to Others at work 

In our piece on another Map of Meaning pathway, Integrity with Self, we wrote that having integrity is not one of those “fake it ‘til you make it” kinds of things. But Service to Others? You can start practicing that right now. The more you engage in acts of service or kindness, the more you’ll notice opportunities to serve, until service to others becomes an intuitive part of your work life. Studies show that volunteering can help us cultivate empathy and that positive personality traits, such as agreeableness, can be enhanced by engaging in tasks—including practicing random acts of kindness. So if you’re looking to nurture those selfless qualities like altruism, compassion, and generosity, start by looking around for ways to be helpful. (On that note, this piece by Verywell Mind provides a comprehensive guide to becoming less selfish and more considerate.) 

There’s one important caveat, which many philanthropic efforts overlook: Your act of service should reflect what the people being served actually want or need—not just what you think is best for them. Understanding how to truly serve can require thoughtful observation and active listening. Let’s go back to that example of the community garden, which Map of Meaning creator Lips-Wiersma invoked earlier to explain the relationship between purpose and Service to Others. 

“Of course you can make more of a difference if you do it with others,” she said of the garden metaphor, “but also if you get much more input from others: What do they actually need? What should you be growing? Because you might decide that spinach is the best thing to grow because it has the most vitamins. But what if people in the community don’t want to eat it?” 

What then, indeed? To avoid letting your efforts go to waste like a lot of unwanted spinach, it’s important to understand Service to Others as one part of a holistic meaning-making framework. We’ve mentioned how acts of service are most meaningful when aligned with something we really believe in (our Inspiration). But serving others can also require building understanding and developing quality relationships (Unity with Others). 

When Service and Unity are integrated, you’ll know if a colleague who’s having a stressful week just needs a sympathetic ear, or if they would like you to help take some of the tasks off their plate. You’ll know which people at your work would love a “surprise” birthday celebration; and who would find the attention mortifying. The more in tune you become with others at work, the better you can serve them. 

And the better you can serve, the more rewarding your own worklife will be.