Meaningful work

After reading about Bullshit Jobs, a rant about meaningless jobs, I wanted to find a concise, useful definition of meaningful work. Surprisingly, I found none that were concise and generic, which motivated this short article.

The first assumption is that meaningful work comprises activities that contribute to society. There is not one uniform “society”, but rather an aggregate of people who share a common spatial, cultural, or social context.¹ Each society values different aspects of life – material, social, or environmental – and thus defines “contribution” differently.²

Societies might value, for example:

1. Outcomes that improve human well-being - those directly addressing aspects of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
2. Outcomes that create economic value - producing goods or services people need or want (Menghwar and Daood 2021).
3. Outcomes that promote sustainability - preserving or enhancing the capacity of future generations to thrive.³

The second assumption is that people in a society (as customers, directly or indirectly) pay for goods and services that enhance these valued aspects. To make this abstract notion of societal value more operational, we can borrow from lean manufacturing – a discipline that rigorously distinguishes between value-adding and wasteful activity from the customer’s perspective:

Value can only be defined by the ultimate customer. It is only meaningful when expressed in terms of a specific product (a good, a service, or a combination) which meets the customer’s needs at a specific price and at a specific time. – (Womack and Jones 2003)

In lean thinking, all work is categorized as either value-added (directly transforming a product or service in ways the customer values) or non-value-added (supporting or wasteful activity that does not directly add value). Obviously, the value a product or service generates must outweigh its cost, which can be visualized as follows:

This diagram illustrates two ways in which work can create societal value. First, by reducing waste, meaningful work lowers the cost of producing valuable goods or services, making them more accessible to society. Second, by developing customer value, meaningful work enhances the usefulness of those outputs, thereby increasing their benefit to society.

In this view, these two directions - cost reduction and value enhancement - describe the full spectrum of how work can be meaningful.

Meaningful work can be defined as work that directly adds value to society or reduces the cost of products and services that add value to society.

And now, back to my bullshit meaningful job.