⅔ Of Professionals Don’t Feel Like Their Work Is Meaningful
What makes our work meaningful? For many professionals this question rarely even enters their minds. However, on Blind, the largest anonymous professional network, one user asked the 4 million professionals on the network to share their experiences.
A professional asked the Blind platform “Do you feel like you’re doing meaningful work?”
Key learnings:
- Nearly ⅔ of professionals don’t feel like their work is meaningful
- 93% of Capital One employees do not find their work is meaningful
- 89% of Bloomberg employees do not find their work is meaningful
- 61% of Facebook employees do not find their work is meaningful
- 76% of Amazon employees do not find their work is meaningful
- NVIDIA is the company where employees find their work most meaningful (62%)
See data here.
An engineer at Amazon commented “All software engineers know their work will be refactored away and rewritten in less than 5 years. It’s a strange industry. We all build sand castles.”
A user at Facebook said ““The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads” ?”
A professional in research & design at The AI Foundation shared “Yes, I’m a research engineer and I conduct cognitive research. I would feel satisfied making a scientific breakthrough even if it doesn’t add any economic value.”
An engineer at Lockheed Martin shared “Day to day maybe not so much but the project I’m on right now is overall definitely meaningful and necessary. I‘ve found that what defense/aerospace may lack in TC it usually makes up for in meaningful work and having a sense of pride and ownership in what you work on. It’s one of the reasons why people stay in the industry. You’re not usually just “building sand castles” that will be totally replaced in a couple years like somebody else here said about most SWE work.”
Work is work. It is a paycheck, but it can be more- it can support other facets of our life, like raising a family or pursuing our hobbies.
In March of 2020, Blind, ran a survey and learned that 63% of professionals feel like their work is purposeful. There were over 5,600 responses from our users on Blind.
A purposeful career has a strong message of accountability. Professionals who feel the profound responsibility have a competitive advantage, where “in the future, greater transparency on questions of sustainability will be a persistently important component of every company’s ability to attract capital.” This concept, although novel, is groundbreaking for professionals in traditional private-sector jobs.
Purpose-driven companies and professionals are particularly well-positioned to tackle the world’s biggest problems. Professionals can influence management and other critical stakeholders on the competitive advantages of being a purpose-driven company. These same professionals can be the change agents advocating on how to integrate values into daily work so that they can help transform companies into catalysts for system-level change.
In January of 2018, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, sent out a letter to the CEOs of the companies in which Blackrock is invested. He said, in part: “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential. It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth. It will remain exposed to activist campaigns that articulate a clearer goal, even if that goal serves only the shortest and narrowest of objectives. And ultimately, that company will provide subpar returns to the investors who depend on it to finance their retirement, home purchases, or higher education.”
A professional’s commitment to purpose leads to productivity and innovation that some of its leading competitors would have trouble imitating. Purpose at the heart of the brand cannot be mimicked, and it resonates with consumers. With the emerging trend of sustainability, ethics, and equality, the core of the company’s and how they recruit and operate is shifting. Purposeful work ultimately builds internal cooperation, helps people routinely work together, and grants companies long term growth.