How does work help you fulfill your life purpose? We know that work helps people fulfill their life purpose in very different ways. We need to understand that as employers and we need to understand that as employees. One of the questions that we ask in our survey that goes out nationwide to full-time employees on a regular basis. We work with Harris poll and we've got this wonderful set of data where we ask people in a few sentences, please describe how work helps you fulfill your purpose. Here's what we're finding. First of all, 50 percent could not answer the question. Fifty percent of full-time employees, when asked, how does work help you fulfill your purpose? They couldn't answer it. In other words, they really don't feel fulfilled through their work. Half the people who are spending remember, the majority of their waking hours doing something called work and they can't answer how that work is actually helping them fulfill their purpose. That's sad. That's something maybe we can help, so we'll try. Twelve percent said money and you might expect that. I'm working for the dollar, I'm working for money, I'm working for pay. These are some of the words they used. I make money to help pay the bills, I make money for my family because it helps my family. This is just simply a word cloud of the things that people are saying. Here's some actual statements. It pays my bills, work helps me fulfill my purpose by earning an income to support my family, by providing the means, by getting my paycheck each week because it helps me take care of the things I need, because it gives me the room to do what I love, etc. This is related to money, that's why I am working. That's fine. Twelve percent of people who could state something said that's what I'm doing. Seventeen percent said it's related to personal growth. Here's a simple word cloud of the people who wrote down how work is helping them fulfill their purpose. These are the words they used. It helps give me a purpose, it helps make something about me that's important. For example, work helps me fulfill my purpose by being engaged, giving my best, and pursuing advancement, and it also distracts me from whatever I have going on. Another person says skills, I enjoy what I do and I'm good at it to become a successful person. There's a common theme too among those and that's really personal growth. Part of this to another dimension of personal growth is that it's occupying my time, it's giving me something to do, it gets me out of the house. You see it, it helps me clear my mind a little bit. All of those things are important too, so I don't just want to be sitting around watching TV. I want to be exposed to real people, I want to be talking to co-workers or customers, I want to be doing something, I want to perfect something. Personal growth, 17 percent of the reason, when asked, how is work helping you fulfill your purpose? Sixteen percent talk about their clients or society. I am helping other people. What are some of the statements that they made? Knowing that I made a difference in the customer's day is what matters. Wow, awesome purpose. I can help others begin their own healing process, probably a type of clinician. My work directly improves other people's lives. I always know when I've been successful in helping a client, it's nice to be able to know the end result and to be able to stay in touch with people long term by letting me help others meet their needs. I'm very dedicated and go extra miles to do the best work that I can. My purpose is to help others. You really see how some people are very focused on their clients, on society, making a better world, 16 percent. Then we have the team and the organization, five percent. I'm here for my co-workers, for my team, for my company, for this organization. It makes me feel like invaluable member of the team, makes me feel like I'm part of the team. I help other employees and clients achieve success. I know I'm a part of growing the business and my opinions are heard. I enjoy and find satisfaction in helping my co-workers and the citizens that I serve. You see, these people are very focused on team and organization. Now, it's interesting to me that it's only five percent. Because if you talk to senior leaders in an organization, they will hope that everybody on their team, everybody in their organization would say it's about the organization. But we have to realize that's not the case, it's just simply not the case. People may work for money, they may work for personal growth, they may work for their clients and customers, they may work for the team and organization, or they may have no purpose whatsoever for working there. That's really important to understand. I think it's one of the most important things that we could ask a person. > Now, by the way, there's a fairly new survey that's been conducted with over two million employees around the United States taking a look at jobs that might have purpose. This is done by Payscale. I have no affiliation with Payscale, but I was looking around for surveys that looked at purpose and jobs. You can go yourself here. You can go online and take a look at these data. It's really fascinating to me. I pulled the data down and I start analyzing it myself. They ask a couple of really fascinating questions of these two million plus employees. Does your work make the world a better place? In other words, do you feel that your work has some degree of purpose and meaning to it? They also asked a simple question, how satisfied are you in your job? Good question. We might want to take a look at purpose and satisfaction in jobs. Here's what we found. On this x-axis going across, we looked at the people, jobs and these are specific jobs. Every dot is a different job. In fact, they had 504 different job classifications in this and every dot is a different job and within each job, they could look at the percent of people who had that job who felt that they had a high purpose, that they were doing something meaningful for the world. They also could look at the jobs that people had the most satisfaction. Ideally, you want to take a look at the upper right-hand side because that's where we would want to be. We want jobs that have high purpose and we're really satisfied with the job. Now, there are also, by the way, jobs that have very low purpose and people aren't very satisfied with their job. Then we have people in this diagonal. The lower right would be people with high purpose but not that much satisfaction. The people on the upper left would be people who have high job satisfaction but not real high purpose. Let's just take a look just for fun. Take a look at some of these. Clergymen, so being a religious leader seems to have the greatest purpose of any job, of any classification that they took a look at. Over two million people that they surveyed, clergymen had the greatest purpose and they had among the highest satisfaction of any job. We'll get back to clergy people in just a second. Cartographers, I just put this in because I was fascinated because they had the highest job satisfaction. Of all the jobs, making maps seems to be the most satisfying job of all the jobs that they surveyed. I love that. That's so interesting. They also felt that they had quite a bit of purpose and I would understand why making maps is really important. It really helps improve the world to understand where we are. That's great. The lowest, parking lot attendants. Imagine parking lot attendants where you're driving up, pulling up and maybe you don't have the right amount of money, the change or whatever, you don't have the money. They're always having hassles. Parking lot attendants don't seem to have very high satisfaction in their job. They certainly don't seem to feel that their job is purposeful. That's just an average. I am sure there are parking lot attendants who feel their job has tremendous purpose and very high job satisfaction. Nobody is average. But when you take all of them, put them together, you find that on average, parking lot attendants aren't doing well in this overall survey. Now, gaming supervisors, people who work in casinos, they have low purpose. They don't feel like their job is necessarily improving the world, but they're relatively satisfied with their job. You could think about your job that way too. Do I want a job with high satisfaction? I don't really care if it's purposeful or do I want a job with a lot of purpose to it? Maybe I'm not super satisfied with it, although there are not many people down on the lower right, you notice. Ideally I want some job that's on the upper right side. Become a cartographer, that'd be great. Now, how about money? How does money work into this equation? If you're looking for a job, if you're thinking about work or if you're thinking about changing your job, you're naturally going to be thinking about money probably as well. Let's take a look at purpose and median pay, what your salary is. We're going to start this y-axis that goes up and down here at 0 and go all the way up to $300,000 on average, that's the median pay in this scale with these 504 jobs. We're going to look at purpose. Now notice there is one that stands out way on the upper right. This dot way on the upper right. Can you guess what kind of job that would be that has very high median pay and also has tremendous purpose among the highest purposes of any of the jobs, any of their occupation. Can you guess? Well, here it is. It is a surgeon. Surgeons have very high purpose on average. Once again, this is an average. I'm sure there's some surgeons who feel they live purposeless lives, but in this case, on average, surgeons have tremendous purpose in their life. They make a lot of money on average relative to these other professions among 504 professions. What I'd like to do now since there are not that many people who are professionals that are averaging median pay over about $110,115,000. Now let's take a look at jobs that may be really purposeful, but may not make all that much money. Here we are back to clergy people. Clergymen, clergy women, clergy people, religious leaders have very high purpose. By the way, as we showed before, they're quite satisfied with their jobs, but they don't make all that much money relative to lots of these other professions. Not doing terribly, but it's not great compared to these other professions. Now, I'm going to take the y-axis, which is this vertical axis of median pay. Since there are not a lot of these dots, not a lot of these professions that median pay is over about $115,000 -$120,000. I'm going to cut those people out and I'm going to expand the y-axis up to just start looking. The top median pay is a little more than $100,000. What you find in terms of that group, this is a much, much bigger audience to take a look at group of different professions. One of the highest that has very high median pay relative to most professions, not surgeons, but relative to most professions and has high purpose is optometry. By the way, I'm just giving you examples here. I'm not going to go through every dot, obviously. You can go to that website and find your own profession, or if you're thinking about a profession, go there. It's a really useful site for that, but I just wanted to give you some examples that optometry may be a cool profession that has high purpose and pretty decent pay. That's pretty nice. Software engineer. This fascinated me, because I work a lot with software engineers. What surprised me is that on average, their level of purpose was not very high. Now when you think about it, many software engineers are doing work where they're basically told, write all this code. I need all this stuff coded. They're not really told the why, they're not told the purpose of this software, they're not told what this is going to do to help other people. They're just told, write all this code. Now they make a lot of money on average relative to these other professions, but they don't have very high purpose. Now, if I'm an employer, I want to encourage software engineers to stay, to enjoy their jobs more, to find more meaning and purpose from their jobs, I might talk about the why of the software. Why are you building this software? Then may find greater purpose than through what they're doing in their work. We don't want to leave out people and just say, you are a cog in the wheel. We want to say, you're very important. It's not just the money that dictates the importance, it really is the purpose as well, it's the why of your job. Let's take a look at the top jobs that give meaning and purpose from this pay scale survey. Out of 105 occupations, number 1 is clergy. Number 2 is English language and literature teachers. Number 3 are surgeons. Number 4, directors of religious activities and education. Five, education administrators in elementary and secondary schools. Six, radiation therapists. Seven, chiropractors. Eight, psychiatrists. Nine, anesthesiologists. I don't know if I would have expected that, but that's pretty cool. They're very purposeful in their work. That's really neat, because I would have thought, well, they're dealing with patients who largely are asleep, but what a cool idea that anesthesiologists feel that they have great meaning and purpose, as do psychiatrists, as do chiropractors, rehabilitation counselors. Do you see a theme coming through some of this? What we see is that organized religion seems to be a profession that gives people great meaning and purpose. Education is a profession that seems to give people a great meaning and purpose, and health care. Health and well-being is a profession, or set of professions that seems to give people great meaning and purpose. That's really special. If you want to pick the job itself that might help you provide greater meaning and purpose, these are your jobs, religion, education, health care. Those three are the top, anyway. You can go to the website and find others as well, but those are the top overall. How about though the other 495 jobs? That's a lot of other jobs. Are they just being left out? No, we don't want to leave them out. How do we think about finding purpose and meaning in those jobs? Here's what I like to do. I'd like to think about any kind of job and whenever I think about any kind of job, can that job give you more meaning and purpose? Is there a potential for that? There's a classic story of this. In 1962, John F Kennedy and a little entourage was touring NASA. He walked up to a custodian and he said basically, "Hi, I'm Jack Kennedy, what are you doing?" The custodian said, "Well, Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the moon." This person has crafted meaning and purpose from his custodial position. This is amazing to me. By the way, so I was recently talking with Thomas Zurbuchen, who's the director of research at NASA, and by the way, we'll be meeting Thomas Zurbuchen and a little later in this course. But I asked him whether this story was true and he said, "Yeah, that is a true story." I believe that anybody can find meaning and purpose from any job. I know that's a bold statement to make, but I want to unpack that a little bit. Let's start with this custodian. If we looked at this custodian's big goals, one of the big goals might be if I were to presume, to be a guiding spirit of humanity's potential. I'm here to help put a man on the moon. I'm interested in humanity's potential. That becomes his purpose. This custodian might say, my purpose in life is to be a guiding spirit of humanity's potential. I'm just guessing that. How about a person who cleans out septic tanks? That's a tough job. That's a crappy job, so to speak. I talked to one. He was cleaning out my septic tank at our home and I started chatting with him saying why do you work in your profession? Why do you clean out septic tanks? At first he looked at me like I was from Mars. Like, "What are you asking me that question for?" I said, "Well, you know, what you're doing is incredibly important." I'm in a school of public health. What you're doing is removing all the sewage from our water system is one of the most important public health things that we could possibly engage in and it hasn't been through the history of humanity getting the poop out of the water, incredibly important and you do that. Suddenly there's this light behind his eyes that start glowing and he said, "Can I give you my card?" We had a wonderful conversation after that. Let's take this person who cleans out septic tanks. Not an attractive job, certainly a very smelly job as well. Let's take his be goals. Let's presume what his be goals might be. Maybe it's to create and promote healthy spaces. Maybe his job and his purpose is really to be a promoter of healthy spaces. Do you think he would work differently if that was the case, if he felt that that was the case, if he had created and crafted a purpose from his job that almost anybody would say that is not a great job, that is a job that doesn't have a lot of purpose to it. Well, I think you can find purpose from that job. Let's take another person. Let's take a housekeeper in a hotel. This housekeeper is knocking on people's doors and opening them and then their job is to clean everything in the room. Often these rooms are disgusting. Frankly, I've talked to housekeepers and they'll tell you just how vile these rooms are that they have to end up cleaning. It seems like a crappy job, a difficult job. Let's take a housekeeper and asked her what are your be goals? Well, I'm here to create a clean and restful space to people. In other words, she's very interested in the customer, in that client who ends up needing that space. They get in late at night, they're tired, they been traveling all day, they're just ready to hit the sack, go to bed and what they need is a clean and restful space. It is my job as the housekeeper to give that. Imagine how important that is. But let's also assume that this housekeeper has another purpose too and that purpose is to be a supportive mother to her children. Wow, suddenly she has two different purposes. That's great. Her purpose in life might be to be a supportive mother to her children and to be a creator of clean restful spaces for travelers. I would see that as a really powerful purpose in her life at this stage in her life. You see what I'm talking about? We call this job crafting when I'm starting to craft meaning, to craft purpose from the work I'm engaged in, no matter what kind of job.
