How I Always Manage to Make My Jobs Feel More Meaningful

No matter what job you have, it needs to be meaningful to you.

Your work should be fulfilling. It should reflect your unique values and personality — and it should instill in you a sense of purpose and mission. In the end, you should value your job for more than its monthly paycheck.

Because when work lacks such meaningfulness, it can feel dull. Draining. And you will feel as if you will have wasted your time.

But any job — no matter the job — can be made to feel meaningful.

I managed to do so, as a cleaner, waitress, office person, and retail worker.

Source: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The terms used in this article were retrieved from the book Sensitive by Jenn Granneman and Andre Sólo.

Job Crafting

Making your job meaningful means making it yours.

It means tying your identity and life purpose to your current job. It means making those precious hours count — and not waste away. It means crafting your job to fit your sense of fulfillment.

Job crafting involves turning a tedious job into a meaningful one.

Coined by Amy Wrzesniewski to teach people how to become fulfilled in their vocations, it explains why (in her research) even hospital janitors have found great meaning and satisfaction in their otherwise mundane jobs.

Based on the crafting tools below, you can make similar improvements too.

Source: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Cognitive Crafting

The main thing holding you back is your perspective.

Your job might hold negative value to you precisely because you are focusing on its constraints rather than its opportunities. To move forward, you ought to change the very understanding you have of your situation.

Cognitive crafting means restructuring the way you perceive your job. This includes two mental shifts, as Sensitive authors Jenn Granneman and Andre Sólo write:

• Step 1: Acknowledging the fact that you have the power to craft your job
• Step 2: Changing the way you see your work tasks to fit a narrative that affords you meaning and a sense of purpose

These are things I did to cognitively craft my jobs:

• Using my monotonous cleaning routine to think of new article ideas
• Seeing each interaction with a customer as an opportunity to brighten their day (or make a new connection)
• Thinking about my office work tasks as serving an important end goal for each employee and client involved

If you do this, any task — boring or menial as it may be — has the potential to become personally fulfilling to you.

Source: Joan Tran on Unsplash

Task Crafting

There is always room outside your job description to improvise.

Task crafting means adjusting your actual work tasks in a way that feels meaningful to you. It involves putting extra care into certain areas of your job, or removing certain tasks entirely.

By doing this, you can go beyond your job description — go beyond the stale demands and expectations of your superiors — and craft your own job. Your procedures might even inspire or satisfy your coworkers and earn you more autonomy at work.

Yes, you might have to consult your boss to see whether your changes are compatible with your job description. But there is no reason to assume that you cannot tweak some of the things you do and focus on at work.

These are ways that I task crafted my own jobs:

• Turning my cleaning routine into a workout session by changing the order and speed of the tasks, without compromising the end goal
• Taking the same route polishing and waiting tables, to make sure each customer was left satisfied before the end of my round
• Using my creativity and aesthetic eye to make sure the store displays and bookshelves always looked beautiful and appealing to customers

In the end, task crafting allows you the freedom to fulfill your demands in a unique and personally stimulating way.

Source: Van Tai Media on Unsplash. (Image cropped.)

Relational Crafting

All jobs involve people.

And a healthy and happy work environment can be the deciding factor for your enjoyment in a specific role. Even the most mundane job becomes fun when it is done alongside friends.

Relation crafting involves creating meaningful bonds with coworkers, clients, and customers. After all, work success relies on how secure and trustworthy each person in the process perceives the others to be.

This is how I created meaningful connections across my various jobs:

• Seeking to leave a strong impression on each customer, and remaining proactive and patient with them to increase trust and commitment
• Increasing morale by serving as a motivated role model, making people laugh, and asking them questions to get to know them better
• Communicating various concerns to my boss or coworkers to get their help or opinion on difficult tasks

Relationships make or break a system — and you can make sure it thrives.

Source: Taylor Franz on Unsplash

Mastering Specific Skills

Any one of your coworkers can fulfill the criteria of your job.

Therefore, the way to stand apart and earn commendation, is to do things your way — to develop a specific skill or area of expertise. You choose what aspect of your job you want to master. As long as it makes your job more fulfilling, you are good to go.

Here are the skills I mastered:

• Developing a specific routine for scanning and filing documents into an information database — becoming known as “the registration machine”
• Ignoring the standard procedure and instead interacting with our customers the way no one else would, with the intention of having a unique conversation with each one that came to the store
• Approaching the least popular tasks with enthusiasm and thorough commitment, earning the respect and admiration of those around me

In the end, mastering a skill that is entirely your own is important, because it takes a very special person to do a very special thing in a non-special job.

Source: Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

Knowing Your Limitations

Every job has its limitations.

Based on your role at work, you will have certain pressures keeping you from crafting your job to the fullest. However, as long as you know what these limitations are, you will be able to select the strategies that work.

Nonmanagers have less autonomy within their jobs, because they need to carry out certain tasks and demands. If you are not in a managerial or leadership position, Granneman and Sólo suggest that you focus on:

• Making tasks or procedures more effective or rewarding
• Establishing social bonds and creating a healthy work environment
• Showcasing your strengths and contributions
• Building trust through commitment and performance

Leaders and managers may have more freedom to make their own decisions at work, but they also have more pressure in terms of keeping their team on track to achieve important goals within set time frames. If you are in one such role, Granneman and Sólo suggest that you focus on:

• Delegating work in an effective way
• Creating opportunities to free up your time or try out new initiatives
• Finding ways to communicate your results, needs, wants, or questions across job levels or in work meetings whilst saving time and resources

Therefore, despite your unavoidable limits, you can push your boundaries.

All in all, no matter how unfulfilling or boring your current job is, you have the power to make it your own.