BY MELISSA BENNETT
Editor’s note: At MeaningSphere, we believe that meaning at work matters and that it’s deeply personal. This series highlights diverse perspectives across the 10 core fulfillment areas from our Worklife Fulfillment Indicator. Each piece reflects the author’s own experience, with the goal of sparking reflection and dialogue.
As a career counselor, I spend a lot of time talking with students and alumni about what they hope to find in their work.
The answers vary, but a few themes surface again and again. People want fair pay. They want opportunities to grow. They want supportive managers and colleagues. And almost everyone, in one way or another, wants to feel like their work matters.
Finding a job that will mean something is an admirable goal, but one we rarely stop to define. We spend a great deal of time talking about how to find a job and how to build a career, but much less time talking about what makes work feel meaningful. Often, I think what people really want to know when thinking about their career is this: What difference does my work actually make?
Losing sight of the bigger picture
The surprising part is that the answer isn’t always obvious while we’re doing the work—even in fields where our positive impact seems practically built in (healthcare, for example, or education). The significance of the work doesn’t necessarily disappear, but our awareness of it can. As our attention shifts toward deadlines, meetings, and responsibilities, the larger significance behind those daily tasks can quietly fade into the background.
Years ago, I worked in communications for a food bank during its annual Thanksgiving food drive. My responsibility was to promote the campaign and my attention was fully on execution. Preparing for interviews, coordinating volunteers, sending media advisories, setting up and tearing down event locations; basically, making sure dozens of moving parts came together without anyone noticing the work behind the scenes. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about the families who would eventually receive food during the holiday season.
Most days, it simply felt like a list of tasks.
It wasn’t until the campaign ended, and I saw what had been accomplished, that I realized those seemingly routine responsibilities had contributed to something much larger: thanks to our efforts, many families in need would get to enjoy a warm holiday meal. None of my individual tasks felt especially significant on their own. Together, they helped make the campaign successful.
I’ve come to think that’s how many of us experience our work.
Why we tend to focus on activities over outcomes—and how to shift back!
Early in our careers, it’s easy to imagine that our contributions at work, and how they impact our organization, will feel obvious. Instead, work quickly becomes a series of meetings, deadlines, emails, revisions, and problems to solve. Somewhere along the way, purpose gets buried beneath process.
Ask almost anyone what they do all day, and they’ll describe activities rather than outcomes. An academic advisor schedules appointments. A graphic designer revises layouts. An accountant reconciles budgets. A facilities manager responds to maintenance requests. All of those descriptions are accurate, but they rarely capture why the work exists in the first place or what those daily efforts ultimately make possible.
We experience work one responsibility at a time, so it’s understandable that we begin to mistake the tasks for the whole of our contribution.
Psychologists have long observed that our attention naturally narrows around immediate goals. It’s an efficient way to manage complex work. We prioritize, solve problems, move to the next item, and repeat. That focus helps us get things done, but it can also make it harder to recognize the broader impact of our work.
The power of ‘task significance’
Research on meaningful work reflects the same idea. One concept that organizational psychologists often discuss is task significance—the degree to which people believe their work positively affects the lives of others. What’s striking is that task significance isn’t reserved for a particular profession. It isn’t limited to healthcare, education, or nonprofit organizations. It depends largely on whether people can see the connection between what they do each day and the broader outcomes their work supports.
I think that’s an important distinction.
Meaning isn’t built into a job title or industry. It’s often found in understanding how our individual contributions fit within a much larger picture.
Sometimes all it takes is asking a different set of questions:
- Who benefits from the work I do?
- What would become more difficult if this work didn’t happen?
- What larger goal does my contribution support?
The answers aren’t always dramatic. In fact, they’re usually quite ordinary. But that’s precisely the point. Meaningful work isn’t found only in extraordinary moments or world-changing accomplishments. More often, it’s revealed when we step back and recognize how countless ordinary efforts combine to create something that matters.
It’s one of the reasons I encourage students to spend less time asking, “What do I want to do?” and more time asking, “What do I want my work to make possible?” Those aren’t always the same conversation. Sometimes meaningful work comes from changing jobs. Sometimes it comes from seeing the job you already have through a different lens.
Melissa Bennett is a career services professional with extensive experience in both non-profits and higher education. In addition, she enjoys teaching humanities-based disciplines, including media and feminist theory.
