How to find career fulfilment

Garreth Hanley:
This is INTHEBLACK, a leadership strategy and business podcast brought to you by CPA Australia.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of INTHEBLACK Career Hacks. In this series, we bring you the latest strategies and tips to supercharge your career. Today, we're speaking to Nina Mapson Bone.

Nina has a 30-year career in recruitment and people consultancy and is an expert in meaningful work. Nina has done extensive research into how people find meaning at work and the benefits to employees and the businesses they work for. And in 2023, she published Meaningful Work: Unlock Your Unique Path to Career Fulfilment. Welcome to INTHEBLACK, Nina.

Nina Mapson Bone:
Thanks for having me, Garreth.

Garreth Hanley:
Nice to have you with us. Let's get straight to the point. What is the definition of meaningful work?

Nina Mapson Bone:
Well, interestingly when we looked into it, we found that there hadn't been any research for meaningful work for Australians. So that's when we commissioned some academics to do the research for us.

And they came up with a definition, which is that meaningful work is the important and individual places on their work meeting their current personal beliefs, values, goals, expectations and purpose in the context of their social and cultural environment. Now, there's a lot in that as you'd expect, but it's really about how we as individuals find meaning but in the context of the environment around us.

Garreth Hanley:
Why should employees and businesses care about the idea of meaningful work?

Nina Mapson Bone:
It's really important, isn't it? We talk about it a lot. It comes up a lot in conversation, and it sounds intuitive that it's important to us as individuals. It sounds obvious, right? But the evidence is it is there for us individually. We know that it impacts us positively, impacts job satisfaction, it impacts career development, it lowers your work stress, and it improves your overall health and wellbeing.

So it's definitely good for us as individuals, and you probably feel that in and of yourself when you're engaged in meaningful work. It feels good. But what I find really interesting for meaningful work and being engaged in meaningful work is it's not just good for us as individuals, for the employees. It's really good for businesses too. What's interesting is when organisations have employees who are engaged in meaningful work, they perform better.

They perform better even during times of downsizing or restructuring. So when they have team members who are engaged in meaningful work, their team members have higher engagement levels, they have reduced sick leave, and they have greater commitment to their organisation. So it improves organisation performance for the businesses. So it's better for everybody. And there are even links.

We can link it to some of the Sustainable Development Goals from the United Nations. So there are contributions beyond just individuals and businesses. There are greater contributions to the world at large as well. So I'm very passionate about meaningful work and how it can really contribute to everybody, to communities, to businesses, to individuals. It's really a great thing to get involved in.

Garreth Hanley:
You spoke about individuals as well as businesses. Do different people find meaning in different types of work? And if it's the case, how can someone assess the type of work that will be meaningful to them?

Nina Mapson Bone:
Yeah, it's absolutely true that we're all different. And again, that sounds obvious, but let's take the listeners to this podcast for example. I've recruited accountants for many years of my life, spent five years doing nothing but recruiting accountants. And one of the things that I learned, I'm an HR specialist, recruitment specialist by background, and I had to learn and understand that accountants have meaning in their work in a very different way to me. I get my buzz from working with people, spending my time all day every day with people really engaging and working every day with people.

I'm very much an extrovert, and I had to learn and understand that people focusing on detail and numbers and really working at that level of analytical skills, that need to focus on the numbers that comes from accounting, is a very different skillset to the kind of skillset I had. And I had to really think about the fact that I couldn't put my own belief around meaningful work onto the people that I was interviewing. I had to really take the time to understand what was important to them. And it's part of that realising that path to meaningful work is unique and it does differ by different people.

And so really understanding what it is for you as an individual is quite important. And this was when we looked at what meaningful work was. And this was when I was with Beaumont people. We did some research into it and we ended up building a meaningful work profile tool off the back of the research we did so that people could measure for themselves what meaningful work was.

And that profile tool is free for anybody to use. It's at the website which is meaningfulwork.com.au, and it measures the factors of meaningful work for you as an individual against the various subsets that come up in meaningful work. And it allows you to assess the ways in which work is meaningful for you so that you can see for yourself which areas of work are meaningful and how they might be useful for you to think about and analyse that you can assess how important those different aspects of work are to create meaning for you as you go forward.

Garreth Hanley:
It seems that some self-analysis is the first place to start if you're looking to find meaningful work, would you say?

Nina Mapson Bone:
Yeah, because there are four factors of meaningful work, and they are the individual, the job, the organisational, and the societal. And then there's subsets within those factors. And so the individual is things like your strengths, your values, your belief. The job is the work itself, how engaging it is, what the volume of work is like. The organisational is things like leadership, culture, policies. And the societal is things like how much the culture we've been raised in assigns value to the work we do and how important that is to us. And as you can imagine, Garreth, that's going to be different for different people.

We're all going to react differently to those different aspects, and that's why it is a unique pathway that we need to find to meaningful work. And all of those different traits are going to come together and subsets are going to come together in different ways for different people. So really, taking the time to think deeply about those different subsets and work out which levers we want to pull to create the right combination of those factors to create the right level of meaning is crucial.

Garreth Hanley:
Earlier, you mentioned that it's good for businesses too, and I think a lot of businesses know that having engaged employees who are finding meaning at work is better for them as well. And oftentimes on top of the job title, employers do include requirements, job requirements, but also cultural information in their advertisements. If somebody's looking for meaningful work, is this information enough or should job seekers really be asking some other questions when they're looking for meaningful work?

Nina Mapson Bone:
They should absolutely be asking a significant amount of questions more than what they would see on the job advert. For example, I touched on the organisational factor then as one of the four factors of meaningful work. And whilst there'll be some elements of that in the job description, they might talk a little bit about the culture, which is one of the factors of meaningful work.

They won't, for example, necessarily go into a lot of detail about leadership, which is one of the subsets of the organisational factor. Now, if for you, leadership is a really important factor of meaningful work, and it is one of the most popular factors of meaningful work for a lot of people, it comes up time and time again as one of the most important subsets of the organisational factor, you're going to want to spend a lot of time through your journey really asking about the leadership style. What is it like? How do you gel with your leader? And it's not even that it's one type of leadership that's going to suit everybody.

It's whether that leadership style suits you, because there's lots of different types of styles of leadership, and we often talk about how we manage people. And one person's clear direction is another person's micromanagement, and so you can't get that across in a job description. So really taking the time to understand that for you in a role is crucial to understanding whether that's going to be meaningful for you.

Garreth Hanley:
Would you advise that people do that through the interview process?

Nina Mapson Bone:
Yeah, absolutely. So the great thing when you're applying for work is that there are a number of steps in the process, and it's as much for you to seek information as it is for them to seek information about you. It's a two-way process, so you should absolutely be using that process to find out the information to see if it is right for you.

Jacqueline Blondell:
We hope you're enjoying INTHEBLACK's Career Hacks series. If you're interested in the latest news analysis, policy updates, and business insights, you should check out CPA Australia's With Interest podcast. Join us as we dive into the news and delve into the business issues of the day. We talk to thought leaders from across the accounting, finance, strategy, economic, and business spectrum, and you get their expert opinions. Now, back to INTHEBLACK.

Garreth Hanley:
You touched on the fact that meaning changes between people, but I'm also thinking does meaning change for people over time? If somebody has assessed their meaningful work profile, does it stay the same or does it change? And you have tips for people who have found that their work profile has changed over time and they've lost a sense of meaning or job satisfaction?

Nina Mapson Bone:
Yeah, it does absolutely change over time. This was one of the things that we found in the research that was just fascinating, and one of the things that I touch on in the book is how much it can change over time. And I think one of the things that we struggle to stay on top of, we don't necessarily realise and we don't recognise that those things have changed and it takes us a little while to catch up with ourselves to realise that something has changed.

And so taking the time to reflect on what has changed and have those conversations internally with our bosses or our leaders to see if we can adjust our work and reassess what's happening so that we can create meaning back in our work. Sometimes big life changes are the things that might change what makes work meaningful. Anyone that's been through marriage, children, if you've got things affecting your personal circumstances, might change what makes your work meaningful.

But also things like if you're driven by learning, if you're having achievement drive and you're not getting that stimulation in your work anymore, those kind of levers that you might need to keep looking at to see if you're still getting those. It's important to constantly reflect and see what's changing or what's happening to make sure that you're generating that level of meaning in your work. Even things like whether you need to pay a big mortgage or not can really affect whether money is a meaningful work factor for you or whether that changes over time.

So it's really important to constantly reflect and see what's changing to see what will change your meaningful work factors. Interestingly, in my book, one of the things I do is interview a number of people and share their stories, and you can see through their journeys how their factors change over time. And it's fascinating to look at what the big things are that really influence those things over time. And some things stay the same, but some things absolutely change.

Garreth Hanley:
That term that you use ‘constantly reflect’ stands out. Do you advise that people do regular or semi-regular check-ins or try and build in a sense of meaning into their day-to-day responsibilities at work?

Nina Mapson Bone:
Yeah, I think there's a few things you can do. So I always think to myself daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. It's a DWMQ is a thing that's always sat with me. I know often people use it from a business or an accounting perspective, but I always treat my career in the same instead, is that check in around am I happy with what's happening on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis with my career? I treat my career like a business. So thinking of it that way, you are the only person who is going to be as vested in your career.

You are going to be more vested in your career than anyone else, so you should treat your career like the biggest business you have because it is the biggest business you will ever have. And nobody else is ever going to be as vested in your career as you. So you should treat it more seriously than any other business you're involved in. Treat it with that level of seriousness and invest in it in the same way as you do anything else.

So take that reflection time to think about it. You can take the meaningful work profile tool that I mentioned. You can redo that as often as you like. In my book, which you mentioned earlier, there are a number of self-reflection exercises that you can do in there. So there's all sorts of things you can do to think about these things, but even just taking the time to consider what's changed.

And one of the things that I've always counselled career seekers when I've worked with those over the years is if you're not happy with something, don't knee-jerk react. We see a lot of people that will knee-jerk react, and there's a risk with job hopping. If you leave jobs too quickly, that's not necessarily a good look on your resume either, and maybe take three months to try and fix what's wrong.

Look at the push factors and look at the pull factors to work out what's going on. But if you can't fix it within three months, then maybe that's a sign to start looking. But try and fix what you can internally first, because often it's actually, if you have genuine and honest conversations internally, you might be the person that helps create more meaningful work within your own organisation. And actually, you might help shift the dial within your own organisation that creates more meaningful work for yourself and for others. And that can be a great thing to be a part of.

Garreth Hanley:
Be a good example for others.

Nina Mapson Bone:
Exactly.

Garreth Hanley:
I think the idea of seeing it as a business process is useful as well. Sometimes those things are hard to set up, but once you set them up, the check-ins are reasonably easy.

Nina Mapson Bone:
Absolutely. I have a little thing in my diary every day that literally is my daily check-ins that I do on a daily basis, and some of them are administrative and business, and some of them are those career things that I check in. And same for the weekly, monthly, quarterly, just treat it as part of your process.

Garreth Hanley:
As well as the emails.

Nina Mapson Bone:
Exactly.

Garreth Hanley:
So Nina, I'm thinking about the top three tips you might have for employees and also employers who are interested in finding meaning at work. Do you have any easy tips?

Nina Mapson Bone:
Yeah. I think for employees, my number one tip is think about when you feel really in the flow, what are you doing when work just flies by because that's what gives you meaning, and just find ways to do more of that. That's my number one tip. Number two, we touched on earlier, is just take the time to reflect on what's working and not working so that you can really prioritise your career.

And number three would be to understand that concept we talked about, that meaningful work does change over time. So don't wait too late to find out that it's changed before you do anything. For the employers, I would say that it's really important that you recognise that you can create a meaningful workplace, but you don't have to be everything to everyone. It's about recognising the ways in which you provide meaningful work and really talking to the people you're going to attract. There are certain employers who are going to be listed organisations that provide certain benefits that go with being big-listed organisations and talk those benefits up and attract those people.

You might be a not-for-profit that provides a different type of meaningful workplace, talk up those benefits and attract those type of employees. But really work out what are the meaningful work benefits that you provide and make sure you are pulling on the levers and attracting the levers and really making sure your employee value proposition talks to all of those propositions that you have through the individual, the job, and the organisational factors of meaningful work so that you're attracting the people that are going to really want to be engaged in the meaningful work you provide. Because when you have the alignment of employees that want meaningful work that you provide, that's why the magic happens. And that's why you have higher engagement, higher commitment, reduced stress, reduced sick leave, and outcomes that are better for everybody.

Garreth Hanley:
I think that being in the flow is a really good way for employees to know if they are enjoying what they're doing, that the absence of concern is oftentimes a good indication that you're in a good spot.

Nina Mapson Bone:
Exactly. When you're not worrying about or thinking about what you're doing and you're just doing it and loving it, that's a good sign, right?

Garreth Hanley:
Always. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today, Nina.

Nina Mapson Bone:
You're welcome. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Garreth Hanley:
And thank you for listening to INTHEBLACK Career Hacks. If you're looking for more great career content, please check the show notes or links to CPA Australia career resources and the resources that Nina mentioned in this episode. Until next time, thanks for listening.

If you've enjoyed this episode, help others discover INTHEBLACK by leaving us a review and sharing this episode with colleagues, clients, or anyone else interested in leadership strategy and business. To find out more about our other podcasts, check out the show notes for this episode, and we hope you can join us again next time for another episode of INTHEBLACK.