Relationships and Meaningful Work
No matter how good leaders get at the business of sense-making their ability to influence their people is not absolute. They set the table, but it is the nature of the job, the conversations, and interpersonal relationships that make work meaningful to the employees, stakeholders, and strategic partners that are gathered around that table (Robertson, O’Reilly, & Hannah, 2020). Chance encounters will play a role, but decisions about who sits next to whom will directly impact the conversational flow and the likely topics of discussion. This structure plays a major role in who can interact, but it is the relationships themselves that determine the quality of the conversation around the table.
Interpersonal relationships play a tremendous role in creating a sense of meaningful work. In turn, employees’ perception that they are engaged in meaningful work is a major factor in many important business outcomes such as employee engagement, motivation, turnover, burnout, and productivity. Research is only now beginning to unpack the types of relationships that are most effective at fostering the perception of meaningful work and the mechanisms through which they function.
As organizations continue what may be the greatest natural experiment in remote employment ever conducted in response to the Coronavirus, many organizational leaders fear that they will lose touch with their employees, see less productivity, and struggle to maintain their organizational culture and identity over distance. In a post-Covid reality, many leaders can no longer rely on proximity and chance encounters (the propinquity effect) to create the relationships that support employee perceptions that they are doing meaningful work in their organizations. Understanding the relationship between organizational structure, interpersonal relationships, and meaningful work is more important than it has ever been.
Social network theory provides a useful lens to examine this challenge. For social network theorists, relationships are defined “as a function of the types of exchanges that occur between two or more people, and the psychological strength of those relationships” (Robertson, O’Reilery, & Hannah p. 597). Meaningful work has two fundamental building blocks:
The extent to which the work is understood by the employee to have a one or more purposes beyond financial compensation and
The extent to which the employee feels that purpose is something that they feel is significant.
Skilled leaders situate their people’s efforts in a larger context and play a direct role in connecting labor to a higher purpose through the organization’s mission, vision, and values. However, as individuals assess the significance of that purpose and its connection to their specific duties, their social network and interpersonal relationships play a much larger role. “When the resources available via one’s social network contribute to… purposeful actions… this [facilitates] the conditions that produce and maintain meaningfulness of work” (Robertson, O’Reilery, & Hannah p. 600).
So how can leaders be intentional about growing their people’s sense of purpose and significance? By focusing on three pathways to building meaningful work:
1. Contribution:
Good leaders constantly speak to and reinforce the positive impact and social significance of their team’s activities. They build consensus and shared commitment toward causes that are bigger than any one person. They provide high quality tools to accomplish this work and assemble the best experts and related resources to equip their team to do it. While this pathway is likely to feel the most comfortable for leaders due to its familiarity, great leaders reach beyond their comfort zone.
2. Individuation:
Create opportunities for employees to build and practice their professional competence and autonomy through work-related achievements and professional mastery. Look for ways to allow employees to realize their professional potential by offering a diverse array of instrumental resources such as advice, information, funds, permissions, training, mentoring, and other sources of professional development. Consider using tools like the KeyHubs survey to identify the key employees that others look to for guidance and professional resources on the job. These influential employees should be recognized and better equipped to play the role that they have already assumed within the firm, especially when they fall outside of the formal management hierarchy.
3. Unification:
Create a sense of belonging and social identification within your organization. Create and protect opportunities to engage in harmonious and psychologically close relationships, especially while physically distant. Setting aside time on the agenda for personal check-ins and idle chit-chat is not time wasted, it is an investment in the cohesiveness of your team. Consider a buddy system or creating cross functional support groups in which individuals are explicitly charged with giving and receiving peer feedback and providing social support while on the clock. Implement systems such as peer-to-peer reward programs that highlight employees when they embody the shared attributes (values, attitudes, ideas, beliefs) that your organization aspires to.
Equip employees to be intentional about the social network they want to build within your organization. Give them explicit authorization and encouragement to network within the organization. Challenge them to articulate the type of relationships that would be authentically rewarding for them to develop, and reward them when they do. Intentionally create opportunities for cross pollination so that your people do not get stuck in networks or organizational silos that do not produce relationships that they value. Actively encourage and reward middle managers and team leads that proactively introduce their people around the organization and clear the path for their team to make connections outside of their functional area.
Organizational practices influence the network ties that employees develop. This is especially true for remote workers and distributed teams as remote organizational connections are rarely made by accident. Understanding the connection between these organizational ties and meaningful work gives leaders powerful insight into strategies that they can use to keep their team engaged and thriving over distance. Keeping socially distanced organizations social is not easy. But it is critical for building meaningful work and prosperous organizations.
Let’s get to work.
