April 2006 – Meaning at work

Sometimes I feel a need to make things happen, if not for myself, then for other people. I cannot think of any other way of explaining why I enlisted my wife on a crocodile-trapping expedition in Africa. It had been a long winter and she seemed a little jaded with her work. She needed a change of scenery, I thought.

Two of the people she met on the project were employees of HSBC bank that has sponsored hundreds of its staff in the past few years to undertake similar projects all over the world organised by Earthwatch International, an environmental charity.

I joined the charity as a trustee some years ago. I liked the way it was assisting environmental science, not simply by providing direct finance but also by channelling volunteer labour to help scientists collect data in their research.

Most volunteers, like my wife, join a project in the same way that someone would book a holiday, picking one out of a brochure or from a search of the web site. In effect they pay to work. Increasingly in recent years, however, large employers have been attracted to the Earthwatch model, using its projects to deliver new and often challenging experiences for their employees.

The project studying Nile crocodile populations in the Okavanga delta in Botswana, needs volunteers to catch crocodiles in order to carry out various tests. One of the bank employees, a fraud investigator called Jill who works in Chicago, had rarely travelled abroad; rarely, in fact, had the opportunity to take more than a week away from work.

How do you measure the value for someone who lives and works in a city of spending time in a wilderness? On one night foray on the river every member of the group switched off their head torches and looked at the stars. “The only stars I see in the city are the winking lights of aeroplanes heading for O’Hare airport,” said Jill.

It is difficult to assess the benefit of such an investment in employees that is not, after all, directed at any obvious work-related skill. But Jill and her colleagues have enjoyed a unique experience that, for two weeks in a long career, allowed them to step back from their jobs and their domestic lives, regaining a sense of proportion about the way that their work relates to the world in which they live. Indeed, one condition of their involvement is that staff members will use the experience to do something of environmental value in their own community.

Some companies recognise this value in offering sabbaticals to employees but too often these are available only for so-called “high value” employees. The Earthwatch experiences, on the other hand, were made available to the entire 218,000 workforce of HSBC worldwide.

One important area where I think they do help staff is to help people extract a sense of meaning from their work. It’s not uncommon for people to work for years before they sit back and wonder how they came to be in a job.

Some have a strong sense of vocation from an early age. But many have only a vague sense, guided often by their performance at various school subjects. In my father’s generation, growing up in the depression years before the Second World War, the big prize for most young people was any kind of a job that offered some training, prospects and, most of all, stability.

Today that vision has changed. Training is still valued but it is the intrinsic work experience that is underpinning many job searches. The chance of a high salary remains a big draw but many applicants seem to understand that this often involves a trade-off, often in time and sometimes in satisfaction.

A big change since my father’s youth is the growth of what John Kenneth Galbraith called The Affluent Society in a book that nearly 50 years ago began to question the advantages of wealth that he described as “the relentless enemy of understanding”.

He wrote: “The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn’t enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and he will be correspondingly less certain of their remedy. Also, until he learns to live with his wealth, he will have a well-observed tendency to put it to wrong purposes or otherwise to make himself foolish.”

Galbraith described the expanding professional-based middle class as the “New Class”. He was ahead of his time in recognising that the members of this new class were growing more concerned that their offspring should find interesting and rewarding work rather than work aimed solely at maximising their income.

Looking at the Faustian relationship with work and pay accepted by some who enter City-based careers it might be concluded that his ideas remain ahead of their time. The difference today is that Galbraith is no longer alone. A new book, The Challenge of Affluence, by Avner Offer, a professor of economic history at All Souls College, Oxford, is examining the meaning of affluence in a western society characterised by “abundance and novelty”.

His premise is that “affluence breeds impatience and that impatience undermines well-being”. I plan to examine his ideas in greater depth in next week’s column. His argument that abundance and novelty cause harm, displacing and devaluing “the stock of pre-existing possessions, virtues, relations and values,” is important in the context of employee relations and the way people seek meaning in work.

“The paradox of affluence and its challenge,” he writes, “Is that the flow of new rewards can undermine the capacity to enjoy them.”

Too much work today, it seems to me, is focused on that flow of new rewards related to work, neglecting the capacity of people to make the most of their financial rewards other than investing them in possessions. Employers need to focus more on work experience and meaning for employees if they seek to retain commitment and to mould their organisations in a way that is aligned to the needs and values of a changing world.

This is why the opportunity to involve people directly in some of the biggest environmental and social issues of our time should not be overlooked. Companies cannot afford to live and trade in a vacuum. There is business in the business of the world.