Why We Work

The False Rationale

For more than two centuries, we have absorbed, as a society and as individuals, some false ideas about our relationship to work. It is a long-accepted tenet of economics, buttressed by some theories from psychology, that if you want to get someone―an employee, a student, a government official, your own child―to do something, you have to make it worth his or her while. People do things for incentives, for rewards, for money. You can see this view operating in the "carrot and stick" approach that has dominated efforts to solve the world's recent financial crisis. To prevent a financial meltdown from happening again, people argued, we needed to replace the "dumb" incentives that led to it with "smarter" ones. We had to get incentives right. Nothing else really mattered. This idea animated the inventor of the free market, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, he wrote that:

It is in the inherent interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner that authority will permit.

In other words, people work for pay―nothing more and noth- ing less. Smith's belief in the power of incentives led him to argue for organizing work by dividing labor into simple, easily repeated, essentially meaningless units. As long as people were getting paid for what they did, it didn't matter very much what their jobs entailed. And by dividing labor into little bits, society would gain enormous productive efficiency. In extolling the virtues of the division of labor, Smith offered a description of a pin factory that has become famous:

One man draws out the wire, another straits it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head ... I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed.... They could make among them up- wards of forty-eight thousand pins a day.... But if they had all wrought separately and independently... they certainly could not, each of them, make twenty.

As we will see later, Smith's view of human beings was far more subtle, complex, and nuanced than what is captured in the quotes above. He did not believe that "man at work" told the full story, or even the most important story, about human nature. But in the hands of Smith's descendants, much of the nuance and subtlety was lost. More than a century later, Smith's views about work guided the father of what came to be called the "scientific management" movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor used meticulous time and motion studies to refine the factory, as envisioned by Smith, so that human laborers were part of a well- oiled machine. And he designed compensation schemes that pushed employees to work hard, work fast, and work accurately.

Not long after that, Smith's view was echoed in the thinking of the major figure in the psychology of the mid-twentieth century, B. F. Skinner. Skinner's studies of rats and pigeons engaged in simple, repetitive tasks, over and over again, for rewards of food or water, provided the mantle of scientific rigor and a theoretical rationale for the workplace innovations developed by Taylor. Skinner showed that the behavior of animals could be power- fully influenced and precisely controlled by manipulating the amount and frequency of the rewards the behavior produced. Just as Taylor found that piecework (a fixed payment for each task completed) produced high performance in the factory, Skinner found that the pigeon equivalent of piecework produced high performance in the laboratory.

You might ask why anyone would choose to work in Smith's pin factory, putting heads on pins, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. Smith's answer was that, of course, people wouldn't enjoy working in the pin factory. But they wouldn't enjoy working anywhere. What Smith was telling us is that the only reason people do any kind of work is for the payoffs it produces. And as long as it produces adequate payoffs, what the work itself consists of doesn't matter.

Adam Smith was mistaken about our attitudes and aspi- rations regarding work. But as capitalism developed in his shadow, under the sway of the "incentive theory of everything," a mode of work evolved in which all the other satisfactions that might come from it were neglected or eliminated. And so it came to be that all over the planet, people trudged off to work each day with little expectation of meaning, engagement, or challenge. Because there was no reason to work except for the paycheck, they worked for the paycheck. So it came to be that Smith's mistaken idea about why people work became true. I don't mean to suggest here that work was bliss prior to the industrial revolution. By no means. But the work of farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers, hard though it may have been, offered people a fair amount of discretion, autonomy, and vari- ety in what they did each day. It gave them a chance to use their ingenuity to solve problems as they arose and to develop more effective ways to get their work done. All that opportunity was left behind when people walked through the factory doors.

Making False Ideas True

You might agree with Smith. You might believe that for most people, by their very natures, work is about pay and nothing more. Only the "elite" want challenge, meaning, and engage- ment, and can expect it from their work. Aside from being more than a little arrogant, this view is incorrect. Many people who do what we think of as mundane jobs―janitors, factory workers, call-center employees―care about more than the wage. And plenty of professionals work just for the money. What people come to seek in work largely depends on what their work makes available. And the conditions of human labor created by the industrial revolution, and perpetuated thanks in part to theories from the social sciences, have systematically deprived people of fulfillment from their work. In doing so, they have deprived people of an important source of satisfaction―and produced inferior workers in the bargain.

The lesson here is that just how important material incen- tives are to people will depend on how the human workplace is structured. And if we structure it in keeping with the false idea that people work only for pay, we'll create workplaces that make this false idea true. Thus, it's not true that "you just can't get good help anymore." It is true that you just can't get good help anymore when you only give people work to do that is deadening and soulless. What it takes to "get good help" is jobs that people want to do. And we'll see that this aspiration for good work is not "pie-in-the-sky" idealism. It is well within our grasp.

It should be said that over the years, management theory and pract ice have gone through periods in which the diverse motives people bring to the workplace have been acknowledged―even celebrated―and managers have been encouraged to structure the work lives of their employees so that engagement and meaning in work are possible, both for the good of the employee and for the good of the organization. Douglas McGregor's "Theory Y" was an especially influential effort along these lines a half century ago, and Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda published an important article documenting how such ideas about management have waxed and waned over the years. But somehow, ideas like these have never stuck. The unorthodox, attention- grabbing practices of Google and other high-flying Silicon Valley companies may give the impression that assembly-line drudgery is a thing of the past. But like gravitational force, the notion that people work only for pay has repeatedly brought loftier hopes about what is possible in the workplace back down to earth* Over the centuries, Adam Smith's ideas about human nature have proven extremely resilient indeed.

Ideas or theories about human nature have a unique place in the sciences. We don't have to worry that the cosmos will be changed by our theories about the cosmos. The planets really don't care what we think or how we theorize about them. But we do have to worry that human nature will be changed by our theories of human nature. Forty years ago, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that human beings are "unfinished animals." What he meant is that it is human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society that surrounds us. That human nature is more created than discovered. We "design" human nature, by designing the institutions within which people live. So we must ask ourselves just what kind of a human nature we want to help design. If we want to help design a human nature that seeks and finds challenge, engagement, meaning, and satisfaction from work, we have to start building our way out of a deep hole that almost three centuries of misconceptions about human motivation and human nature have put us in, and help foster workplaces in which challenge, engagement, meaning, and satisfaction are possible.

When Work Is Good

Confronted with evidence that so few people in the world get satisfaction from their work, we need to ask why. Two ready explanations come to mind. First, many of us believe that only certain kinds of jobs permit people to find meaning, engagement, discretion, and autonomy, and opportunities to learn and grow. If we take this view, good work is just going to be the province of the few―lawyers, doctors, bankers, teachers, software developers, company CEOs, and so on. For everyone else, work will be about the paycheck. It's just the way things are. Us and them. Alternatively, we might take the view that pretty much every job has the potential to offer people satisfying work. What stands in the way is the incredible efficiency associated with routinized, assembly-line type work. Assembly-line work can be done by people with low skill and little training, and it is responsible for the explosive economic growth we have witnessed since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Unsatisfying work is just the price people pay for a society in which affordable cars, cable TV, cell phones, and computers are the norm. Adam Smith certainly articulated this view when he talked about the growth of productivity that accompanied the division of labor in the pin factory.

So either satisfying work is not for everybody, or unsatisfying work is the price we pay for material prosperity, or both. Both of these answers to the "why" question are plausible. But both of these answers are wrong.

Cleaning Hospitals

Luke works as a custodian in a major teaching hospital. In an interview with researcher Amy Wrzesniewski and her collaborators, who were studying how people structure their work, Luke reported an incident in which he cleaned a comatose young patient's room―twice. He had already done it once, but the patient's father, who had been keeping a vigil for months, hadn't seen Luke clean the room and had snapped at him. So Luke cleaned it again. Graciously. Why? Luke explained it like this: Luke: I kind of knew the situation about his son. His son had been here for a long time and... from what I hear, his son had got into a fight and he was paralyzed. That's why he got there, and he was in a coma and he wasn't coming out of the coma... Well... I went and cleaned his room. His father would stay here every day, all day, but he smoked cigarettes. So, he had went out to smoke a cigarette and after I cleaned the room, he came back up to the room. I ran into him in the hall, and he just freaked out... telling me I didn't do it. I didn't clean the room and all this stuff. And at first, I got on the defensive, and 1 was going to argue with him. But I don't know. Something caught me and I said, "I'm sorry. I'll go clean the room."

Interviewer: And you cleaned it again?

Luke: Yeah, I cleaned it so that he could see me clean it...I can understand how he could be. It was like six months that his son was here. He'd be a little frustrated, and so I cleaned it again. But I wasn't angry with him. I guess I could understand.

Nothing about this interaction is built into Luke's work as a custodian. Look at his job description:

Operate carpet shampooing and upholstery cleaning equipment

Operate mechanical cleaning and scrubbing equipment Strip and wax floor surfaces

Maintain entrance area by performing such duties as sweeping, salting, and shoveling

Clean grounds and area by performing such duties as picking up paper or trash

Unplug commodes, urinals, and sink drains without dismantling the fixture

Wet mop floors and stairways

Collect and dispose of soiled linen

Operate vacuum cleaning equipment

Clean and wax furniture, cases, fixtures, and furnishings

Clean minors, interior side of exterior glass, and both sides of interior glass

Clean toilet rooms and fixtures

Stock restroom supplies

Dust Venetian blinds while standing on floor or stool

Clean patient bedside equipment

Make beds and change linen

Collect and transport waste materials to central location

Wet mop small areas of floor or stairs to clean up such items as spilled liquid or food

Replace burned-out incandescent lightbulbs

Move and arrange furniture and furnishings

Collect and transport soiled linen to central location

Luke's job description says nothing about responsibility or care for patients and their families. He has a long list of duties, but not a single item on the list even mentions interacting with another human being. From this description, Luke could be working in a shoe factory or a mortuary instead of a hospital. If Luke were doing the job laid out by the job description, it would have been reasonable for him simply to have explained to the patient's father that he'd already cleaned the room, and perhaps to have brought in a supervisor to mediate if the father remained angry. Luke might have ignored the man and just gone about his business. He might have gotten angry himself. But Luke was doing a different job than his official description would suggest. That's what Wrzesniewski and her col- leagues found when they conducted in-depth interviews with Luke and other hospital custodians. The researchers had asked the custodians to talk about their jobs, and the custodians began to tell them stories about what they did. Luke's stories told them that his "official" duties were only one part of his real job, and that another central part of his job was to make the patients and their families feel comfortable, to cheer them up when they were down, to encourage them and divert them from their pain and their fear, and to give them a willing ear if they felt like talking* Luke wanted to do something more than mere custodial work.

What Luke sought in his work was shaped by the aims― what Aristotle would call the tellos―of his organization. The telos of the hospital―promoting health, curing illness, relieving suffering―was embedded in Luke's approach to his job. The amazing thing Wrzesniewski and her colleagues discovered about Luke and many of his coworkers was that they understood and internalized these aims in spite of their official job description, not because of it. The job they were actually doing was one they had shaped for themselves in light of the telos of medical care. Ben, another custodian, told the researchers how he stopped mopping the hallway floor because a patient who was recovering from major surgery was out of his bed getting a little much-needed exercise by walking slowly up and down the hall. Corey told them about how he ignored his supervisor's admonitions and refrained from vacuuming the visitors' lounge while some family members, who were there all day, every day, happened to be napping. These custodians shaped their jobs with the central purpose of the hospital in mind.

Job crafting is what Wrzesniewski and her colleagues called it. Luke, Ben, and Corey were not generic custodians; they were hospital custodians. They saw themselves as playing an important role in an institution whose aim is to see to the care and welfare of patients. So, when Luke was confronted by the angry father and he had to decide what to do, he could not look the answer up in his official job description because the rules that defined his job said nothing about situations like this.

What guided him was the aim of the job he had crafted.

What is it that enabled Luke to do work like this? First, Luke's job gave him broad discretion when it came to social interac- tions with the patients. He didn't have a supervisor looking over his shoulder every minute. Further, the challenge of getting these social interactions right was engaging. Meeting the chal- lenge demanded empathy, good listening, and the perceptive- ness to know when to stay in the background and when to come forward, when to joke and when to comfort. Having the skills to do this work well made Luke's day. And it likely helped to make the patients'days better as well.

Finally, Luke believed in the purposes of the enterprise of which he was a part. A belief like this helped make his work meaningful. Yes, Luke and his colleagues were custodians. But they were custodians in a hospital―a place where staff struggles to cure disease and alleviate suffering, and where every day, as people go about their jobs, lives hang in the balance. As Peter Warr, a professor of work psychology, has pointed out, to be satisfied with our work, we typically need a belief in the purpose of what we do.

Amy Wrzesniewski's research systematizes the aspects of work that help people find meaning and satisfaction, even in occupations like hospital cleaning, that don't seem to lend themselves to it. She calls work that has such characteristics a "calling" and distinguishes it from work that is a "job" or a "ca- reer." People who see their work as a "job" enjoy little discretion and experience minimal engagement or meaning. People with jobs see work as a necessity oflife, they work for pay, they would switch jobs if given the chance to earn more money, they can't wait to retire, and they would not encourage their friends or children to follow in their footsteps. They are the embodiment of Adam Smith's ideas about people's attitudes toward work.

People who see their work as a "career" generally enjoy more discretion and are more engaged. They may even enjoy what they do. But their focus is on advancement. They see themselves as following a trajectory that leads to promotion, higher salary, and better work.

It is people who see their work as a "calling" who find it most satisfying. For them, work is one of the most important parts of life, they are pleased to be doing it, it is a vital part of their iden- tity, they believe their work makes the world a better place, and they would encourage their friends and children to do this kind of work. People whose work is a calling get great satisfaction from what they do.

What, then, determines how people think about their work? To some degree, it depends on characteristics of the person. That is, differences in the way people approach their work are explained by the attitudes they bring to their work―who they are, not what the work is. After all, not every hospital custodian is like Luke, Ben, and Corey.

But the kind of work one does is also a major factor. It is easier to find meaning and engagement in some kinds of work than in others. Take discretion, engagement, and meaning out of work and people feel less "called" to it and get less satisfaction from doing it. As they get less satisfaction from doing it, they do it less well. As they do it less well, their supervisors take even more discretion away.

Wrzesniewski's interviews with hospital custodians revealed, again and again, that their greatest source of satisfaction came from their interactions with patients. That is when they felt the most useful, the most important, the most skilled. And having staff members like Luke is a precious resource. What a gift for the patients, the hospital, and the custodians themselves that there are employees who want to be a part ofthe caring mission of a hospital, who are willingto learn how to do it well, and who take great satisfaction and pride in their work. "Making a patient smile can make my day," one custodian explained to Wrzesniewski.

Carlotta, a colleague of Luke's, told Wrzesniewski about her custodial work in a unit of the hospital where people recovered from various brain injuries and were often comatose for ex- tended periods oftime. Carlotta took it upon herself to change the pictures on the walls in these patients' rooms as a subtle means of cheering them up by hinting that they are making progress. As Carlotta described it: "Sometimes I'll change the pictures on the wall, like every week, 'cause our patients stay for months and months and months... so they know they're getting that much closer to being home." Carlotta was clear about the joy this kind of effort brought hen

I enjoy entertaining the patients. That's what I enjoy the most. And that is not really part of my job description. But I like putting on a show for them, per se. Dancing if there is a certain song on. I get to dance and if a talk show is on, I get to talk about that talk show or whatever. That's what I enjoy the most. I enjoy making the patients laugh.

But Carlotta not only knew when and how to make a patient laugh, and took joy in doing so. She also knew when care in- volved a strong hand and a brave heart, and this too made her work a source of satisfaction. Carlotta explained:

One of our patients was in distress and he was a quad [quadri- plegic], and I just happened to be there when he was stressing out, and so I pushed the button [for staff assistance] and I told them to get in here. *.. They were drawing his blood in one arm and trying to stick an IV in the other and he wasn't into needles ... so I stayed with him while the nurses did what they had to do because he was sliding out of his wheelchair, he was getting ready to pass out, you know, and so the nurse wanted to take his blood pressure and he wouldn't let her because he was kind of upset with them, and I explained to him, I said, "Well, listen, I'm going to give you five minutes to kind of calm down, but they have to take your blood pressure to make sure everything else is going all right, and I will stay in here with you." So that's what I did, I stayed there with him and let him calm down and I told the nurse, "Come on in and take his blood pressure."... From that point on I think we were buddies for life I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Luke and Carlotta were not actively encouraged to craft their work into callings. Meaningful and engaged work emerged because they wanted to craft their jobs into callings, and―and this is key―because it was not forbidden.

Why would anyone forbid people to work the way Luke and Carlotta work? One reason is efficiency. If custodians just put their heads down and go about ticking off the items in their job descriptions, they'll get "more" done. As a result, the hospital can employ fewer of them, and give them more rooms to clean. The hospital will save money.

A second reason is the desire on the part of managers for control. If custodians simply go about performing the items in their job description, then supervisors control what they do by controlling the job description. But if they start freelancing― deviating from their scripts to step into the breach when help is needed, then control moves from the manager to the managed. Many years ago, economist Stephen Marglin wrote an import- ant article called "What Do Bosses Do?" in which he argued that a central and often unacknowledged consequence of the assembly-line division of labor is that it takes control of the job away from the person who is doing it and gives it to the boss― the person who constructs the assembly line.

So, in the service of efficiency and control, a manager could beat the improvisations of Luke and Carlotta out of them. Their work would be much impoverished, and the hospital would run less well, as a result.

Making Carpet

You might think it's relatively easy to find meaning and purpose in your work―regardless of the job―if you're working in a hospital that is saving lives every day. Judging from my own experience observing how invisible custodians and other "dirty workers" are to those around them, I don't think it's easy at all.

But let's suppose it is. Would you say the same thing about people who work in a factory that makes carpet?

About twenty years ago, Ray Anderson, the late CEO of the immensely successful carpet manufacturer, Interface, had what he described as an epiphany. Here he was, with more money than he or his heirs would know what to do with, when he realized that his company was poisoning the environment. Carpet making is (or was) a petroleum-intensive industry and Interface's environmental footprint was huge. Anderson wondered what good it would do to leave his grandchildren great wealth if the price of accumulating that wealth was an uninhabitable planet So Anderson resolved to transform every aspect of Interface's operations, mov- ing to achieve a zero footprint goal by 2020. He assumed that the development of new production processes and a commitment to pollution control would cost money―a lot of it. But he was willing to sacrifice the bottom line to achieve a social good.

So Interface began a journey to change what it makes, how it makes it, and what it does with its waste. As of 2013, it had cut energy use in half, shifted to renewable energy, and cut waste to a tenth of what it was. How much profit was sacrificed? None at all! Interface employees were so motivated by the opportunity to work for the common good, and challenged by the need to find innovative modifications of the production process, that their work became much more effective and efficient. And the company; realizing that its new mission would demand creative partnership from top to bottom of the organization, flattened its hierarchy and gave employees much more discretion and con- trol over what they did. The strength of the company's shared vision encouraged collaboration and cooperation. Progress toward sustainability required creative solutions. So a culture that encouraged openness and allowed for failure emerged. In the company's words:

The evidence of a successful, lasting cultural change at Inter- face can be found in the great number of innovations conceived of and implemented by employees on the shop floor. Interface employees are connected to something bigger than making carpet. Sustainability has inspired and empowered associates with a committed sense of higher purpose.

The result of Anderson's vision, twenty years out, is a company that remains extremely successful and is populated by employ- ees who are eager to come to work every day. He documented the transformation of Interface in his 2009 book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose―Doing Business by Respecting the Earth. You don't need to be working for an organization that saves lives to find meaning and purpose in what you do. You just need to be doing work that makes people's lives better.

Cutting Hair

It's true that the people who work at Interface don't save lives, but they are on a mission to save the planet. Few of us can find such a noble calling in what we do. What about people whose work is not globally impactful―restaurant servers, plumbers, roofers, welders, hairdressers, and office workers? Here, too, it is possible to find enormous meaning and satisfaction in what you do. When Amy Wrzesniewski was studying jobs, careers, and callings, one of her samples of employees was a set of administrative assistants working at a college. She found that roughly a third of them viewed their work as a calling; they were providing key logistical support for faculty who were working to shape the minds of the next generation. What could be more meaningful than that?

Mike Rose interviewed people with everyday, blue-collar jobs in The Mind at Work. His chapter on hairdressers is particu- larly eye opening. To be sure, hairdressers need to acquire a set of technical skills―for cutting, coloring, and styling hair. And many, perhaps most of them, see what they do as requiring a fair amount of creativity. But what makes the job meaningful, I think, is the skill they acquire in interacting with clients. What does a client mean when she says she wants this haircut a little "fresher"? How do you talk a client out of a haircut that looks great on the long, angular face of the model whose photo she has brought in but will look terrible on the client's pumpkin-shaped face? How do you help clients feel good about their appearance- confident as they leave the shop to face the world? The hairdress- ers Rose interviewed were proud of their technical skills and reveled in the complexity of such a seemingly simple act as cut- ting hair. But they were also proud of their ability to understand, talk to, and manage people. This was an essential part of their job. And doing it well could make a big difference to the quality of the lives of the people they served.

"It's important to hear my client," said one stylist. "The con- sultation is the most important moment of the haircut." "Don't assume you know what they want," said another stylist, "be- cause they may not even know what they want." Another stylist pointed out that a client will say, "I want an inch off," then show you two inches with her fingers. Appreciative clients say things like this about their stylists: "She listens." She "respects what I want" She "sees what I mean." Stylists who love their work love its technical complexity and room for creativity. But also "I just like making people happy.... People leave my chair happy because of what I did for them. You really don't get that out of too many jobs, you know, that you're gonna affect people like that." Another stylist observed that "This is a business that is unlike most; there's something very nurturing about it. It is one of the few places in our society where you have permission to touch people. It's so intimate. We humans have a need for connection."

The lesson from the custodians, the carpet makers, and the hairdressers is that virtually any job has the potential to offer people satisfaction. Jobs can be organized to include vari- ety, complexity, skill development, and growth. They can be organized to provide the people who do them with a measure of autonomy. And perhaps most important, they can be made meaningful by connecting them to the welfare of others.

This last point just can't be overemphasized. Management researcher Adam Grant and various collaborators have shown that just by making salient the potential effects of one's work on others, a work force can be inspired. Consider this example. Many universities employ undergraduates to reach out by phone to alumni and parents of current students and ask for contribu- tions. What could be more delightful than a call from your alma mater, asking for money? Do you pick it up when caller ID tells you who's calling? If you do, do you politely let the solicitor fin- ish her spiel? If, by some miracle, you do, do you actually make a contribution? These calls are annoying and nervy, after all the money you paid in tuition. Now imagine yourself on the other end, spending two or three hours making calls to people who don't want to answer them, and soliciting people who don't want to respond. It's a tough way to make a living, and the success rate of these solicitations is minuscule. But what Grant found is that a tiny intervention, designed to remind callers of the purpose of their calls, was transformative. Grant arranged for solicitors to be visited by a student who owed his life-changing scholarship to phone solicitations just like this. The student was effusive in his enthusiasm for his education and his gratitude to those who made it possible.

Having heard the student, the solicitors went off to do their excruciating jobs. Miraculously, their performance was trans- formed. They made more calls per hour, and got many more con- tributions, than did a comparable group of solicitors who had not heard the student. Same job. Same pay. But inspired by seeing the effects of their efforts vividly portrayed, twice as effective.

Such is the power of giving work meaning and significance. Perhaps it goes without saying that doctors, lawyers, ed- ucators, and other professionals often do work they find meaningful, significant, and fulfilling. But now we've seen that custodians, carpet factory workers, hairdressers, and phone solicitors can find an equal level of meaning and fulfillment. To have a job that you are happy―even eager―to do, it helps if the work itself is challenging, varied, and engaging. It helps if the work gives you the chance to use your skills and develop more skills. It helps if you have discretion over how you do your job. It helps if you feel that you are part of a group, with fellow workers you respect. And most important, it helps if the work is aimed at a goal that is valuable and gives the work you do meaning and purpose. The hospital custodians washed floors the same way custodians in an office building would, but with a higher pur- pose. The same could be said of Adam Grant's phone solicitors.

Whereas good work need not have all of these positive charac- teristics, this last one―a sense of higher purpose―may be close to indispensable.

Though all the hospital custodians interviewed by Wrzesniewski were doing the same nominal job, not all of them were doing it like Luke or Carlotta. So it is possible that if people bring the right attitude to their work, almost any job can provide satisfaction, and if they don't bring the right attitude, no job will provide satisfaction.

There is no doubt that the attitudes people bring to their work are important, but I think there are limits to what an individual can do psychologically to interpret a soulless job as a mean- ingful one. Those people working in Adam Smith's pin factory would have to do quite a psychological number on themselves in order to see their work as engaging and purposeful. That said, often it doesn't take a lot to turn almost any job into an opportu- nity for meaning and engagement. Doing so makes work better for the workers. It also makes work better for the people they serve and for the companies that employ them.

This last fact should give you real pause. If satisfying work makes for better workers, surely market competition would have seen to it that every company organized work to enable employ- ees to get satisfaction out of the jobs they did. If the work envi- ronment at your company was rigid, monotonous, hierarchical, and punitive, a competitor would create a less hostile workplace, nurture more productive workers, and drive your company out of business. We've been doing this market-competition thing for a long time, and you'd think that by now, conditions of work would surely have evolved to produce maximum efficiency.

If you thought that, you'd be wrong. Such is the power of the ideology about people's distaste for work that was handed down by Adam Smith and elaborated on since. Management expert Jeffrey Pfeffer laid it all out in his book The Human Equation. Pfeffer's book was not concerned especially with asking what it takes to create workplaces in which people thrive. He was ask- ing what it takes to create workplaces that succeed―that make for growing, sustainably profitable companies. But based on his analysis of many companies in many different lines of business, what makes for successful companies overlaps substantially with what makes for good work. In his words, a good company nurtures "high commitment" workers, and high commitment workers care about doing their jobs well. Pfeffer identifies a number of factors that effective organizations have in common:

They provide a high degree of employment security, which builds employee loyalty and trust.

They rely on self-managed teams and decentralized decision-making. That is, employees are given a lot of discretion and autonomy. This also enhances trust, in addition to reducing the need for employees whose main job is to watch other employees.

They pay more than the market demands, which makes employees feel valued. But they don'trelyvery much on individual incentives to induce people to work hard. When the company does well, all employees benefit through some form of gain sharing. They're all in it together.

They provide extensive training, both when people start to work and as an ongoing process. This training represents a significant investment in employees, which again builds loyalty and trust And continued training means that em- ployees keep facing new challenges and developing new skills. By way of contrast, Pfeffer reports a study showing that in the automobile industry, Japan spends an average of 364 hours training each new employee, Europe spends 178, and the United States spends 21.

They measure employee performance, but they don't overmeasure employee performance, trusting that their employees will want to do right by the company and, with enough training, will succeed.

They put great emphasis on the company mission, not just in occasional speeches by the CEO, but in day-to- day practices up and down the organization.

Companies that have all or most of these characteristics are industry leaders, across many industries. Companies that rely on performance bonuses and other incentives, on close super- vision, on minimizing individual employee responsibility and discretion, and on saving money on training by designing jobs that don't take much training, lag behind. And Pfeffer suggests something of a downward spiral. A company starts to have trouble, because of low profits, high costs, and poor customer service. This leads to efforts to cut costs and make the company "lean and mean": less training, salary reductions, layoffs, part- time workers, a freeze on hiring and promotion. These changes lead to decreased worker motivation to excel, decreased effort, even worse customer service, less job satisfaction and more turnover, which in turn leads to more trouble for the business.

In short, you take discretion, engagement, and meaning out of work and people get less satisfaction from doing it. As they get less satisfaction from doing it, they do it less well. As they do it less well, their supervisors take even more discretion away. The "cure" makes the disease even worse.

Turning a "Vicious Cycle" into a "Virtuous Cycle" As PfefFer describes it, the knee-jerk response to competitive pressure―cutting staff, speeding up workers, monitoring performance closely―makes the situation worse, by reducing the effectiveness (and the satisfaction) of the workforce. Thus, it creates a vicious cycle, as the more employers do to try to regain their edge, the further behind they fall. By contrast, paying attention to enhancing the character of work creates what we might call a virtuous cycle. When people find engagement and meaning in the work they do, it makes them happy to go to work, and as psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has shown, when people are happy, they work better and they work smarter. Much of Fredrickson's work is summarized in her book Positivity, and her central insight is that when people are in states of positive emotion, they think expansively and creatively. They are in what Fredrickson calls a "broaden and build" mode of engage- ment with the world. When people are in states of negative emo- tion, in contrast, they hunker down defensively, worried about making mistakes or going wrong. Danger gives us tunnel vision.

But when we're not under threat, and get satisfaction from the work we do, our positive emotional state will enable us to do bet- ter work, which in turn will create more positive emotion, which in turn will promote even better work, and so on. Positivity nurtures itself, and an environment is created in which the work just keeps getting better, and the workers just keep getting more satisfaction out of what they do. Everybody wins―the workers, their employers, and the clients and customers.

There is something to notice about the theory of how com- petitive markets work that should make us optimistic that satisfying work is within the grasp of every employee at every organization. Market theory tells us that each transaction is what is called "positive-sum." In other words, both the buyer and the seller of goods or services gains from the transaction. If I wasn't going to benefit from buying the shirt I'm considering, I wouldn't buy it. And if you weren't going to benefit from selling me the shirt, you wouldn't sell it. So in theory, every market transaction leaves both parties better off. This positive-sum structure is in contrast to, say, a poker game, in which every dol- lar that someone wins is a dollar that someone else loses. What this market logic means is that virtually every job that people do can be seen as improving the lives of customers, even if only in small ways. And what that means is that virtually every job that people do can be made meaningful by focusing on the ways in which it improves the lives of customers, as long as it's done right and done well.

We can see the virtuous cycle played out in the story of Market Basket, a grocery chain with stores scattered through- out New England. In 1917, two Greek immigrants, Athanasios and Efrosini Demoulas, opened a small grocery store in Lowell, Massachusetts. Over time, the one small store grew to many large ones, spreading throughout New England, and leadership was passed down to the next generation. Though the business continued to grow and prosper, there was almost continuous acrimony among the family members who owned and ran it.

Law suits proliferated, fights for control escalated, and accusations of sabotage flew. Control eventually devolved into the hands of two cousins, Arthur S. and Arthur T. Demoulas. Though Arthur T. was president of the company, Arthur S. con- trolled a slight majority of the stock, and the conflict continued. But through it all, the supermarket chain continued to thrive. Market Basket now has more than seventy stores and employs more than twenty thousand people.

By almost all accounts, Arthur T. ran the business as if it were still an intimate, family operation. Employees were paid well and participated in profit sharing. But perhaps more important, Arthur T. took an interest in them personally, knowing many employees by name, and making sure he was familiar with their family circumstances. He and his employees, in turn, treated the customers as family, keeping prices low and products whole- some and high quality. Market Basket even lowered its prices by 4 percent, across the board, in response to the economic downturn that followed the financial collapse of 2008 and had devastated the lives of many customers. "Our customers need the money more than we do," Arthur T. said. Market Basket employees worked with dedication, enthusiasm, and a spirit of cooperation, committed to the views that their own work was important and respected, and that they were performing a vital community function.

But all was not well. The family feud continued and in June of 2014 Arthur T. was fired. And then something amazing hap- pened. Many employees responded by refusing to go to work. They did this at the risk of losing their jobs, at a time when no one could take having a job for granted. And customers joined in, refusing to continue shopping at the store. Here were many thousands of working-class people rising up in support of a billionaire. The shelves grew emptier and emptier. The stores became virtual ghost towns. This went on for two months, im- periling the future of the company. Finally, at the end of August 2014, Arthur T. agreed to buy out his rival relatives and was restored as president. After much celebration, employees went back to work, food went back on the shelves, and customers went back to the aisles.

"We keep it as simple as possible for people," Arthur T. said in an interview. "We keep costs low and quality high. We keep the stores clean and offer service with a smile. And if at the end of the day you have some success, then you share that with the associates." Asked to explain the broad support he got from customers and employees alike, Arthur T. said that, "I think so many people could relate to it because it affects everyone. If everyone in the workplace is equal and treated with dignity, they work with a little extra passion, a little extra dedication. I think that's a wonderful business message to the world."

Why do we find stories like this so inspiring? They inspire us because they surprise us. We simply don't expect to find this kind of dedication and commitment from employees who do checkout, bagging, shelf-stocking, product delivery, or deli service―even when we are those workers, ourselves―nor do we expect the people who own supermarkets to prioritize anything but the bottom line. We don't expect this kind of empathy in the workplace. Yet, at Market Basket, it's there. Why? And why is it that so few of us have stories like this to tell about our own work?

In It for the Money

In Jeffrey Pfeffer's telling, supported by the Gallup survey on work satisfaction, the striking thing about good management practices is how rare they are. We may not expect business leaders to ask themselves "How can I make my employees* lives better by restructuring their jobs?" But we surely would expect them to ask themselves "How can I make my business better by restructuring employees* jobs?" As Adam Smith famously imagined in describing the "invisible hand" of market competition, when markets are competitive, we don't need good intentions to improve human welfare; competition among selfish individuals does it for us. If competition will im- prove the lives of consumers of goods and services, as no doubt it has, surely it should also improve the lives of producers of goods and services as well. Good practices should drive out the bad* To some degree, in some occupations, this has happened.

Managers have slowly come to realize that the organization benefits from enabling people to do work that they actually want to do. But it hasn't penetrated very deeply into the bowels of organizations. For the educated elite, work isn't just about money. But for the rank and file, what else is there but money?

Recall Adam Smith:

It is in the inherent interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner that authority will permit.

If you are a business owner who believes Smith's account of the rank and file, then you design a system to manage them based on this belief. Such a system will rely on wages to motivate, and highly monitored, simplified routine, so that laziness and inattention won't have disastrous consequences. And in such a system, Adam Smith will be right. Why else would someone show up at the pin factory every day except for the wage?

The two standard methods for managing disinterested workers are material incentives (wages) and close monitoring of work that has been routinized. Carrots and sticks. What is striking is that, in the analysis that Pfeifer offers, both of these tools have negative effects on employee engagement and work satisfaction. Nonetheless, they are the first tools that employers reach for. This not only prevents custodians and assembly-line workers from having good work, but as it trickles up to higher and higher levels of the organization, it can warp almost any work into bad work.