Transform Workplaces

The Map of Meaning can offer new insights into specific aspects of meaningful work, as well as provide a complete approach to organisational transformation. Start where you can in areas like:

  • career development.
  • motivation and resilience.
  • leadership/management.
  • empowerment and engagement.
  • strategic planning.
  • sustainability.
  • change management.
  • performance review.
  • team building.

Use the Map of Meaning to increase: 

  • your wisdom as a leader.
  • motivation and engagement – yours and theirs.
  • shared purpose organisation wide.
  • co-operation and empathy.
  • fairness and morality.
  • your ability to think in revolutionary ways about business.
  • your ability to hold your organisation to account.

Exercise for organisation-wide thinking

The Map of Meaning helps people think about the purpose and practice of their organisation. It helps define the value of meaningful work to an organisation.

This exercise helps people see and understand the fragmentation of current practices and how this fragmentation strips meaning from work. Use the framework to rethink the practice so that it becomes meaningful.

Take any existing organisational practice: performance appraisal, a change management intervention, internal communication strategy. Ask yourself, or your team, how this practice helps people to experience meaningfulness at work. Go through each of the Four Pathways to Meaning and assess the practice against the criteria. Is there a section that is absent from your work? Does one section outweigh the others? Use this understanding to think about how meaningfulness can be supported by practice. Then widen your inquiry into the Tensions and Inspiration and Reality of Self and Circumstances.

For example, if you are responsible for internal communication you might think about how a news-letter supports people to:

  • maintain their integrity with themselves – write a story about moral challenges in the workplaces and what people could do.
  • experience unity with others – a noticeboard including opportunities for engaging with others.
  • serve others  - news about happy customers and the difference made by our staff.
  • express their full potential – results of a competition for the manager who best enables their staff to contribute.
  • inspiration – something that is genuinely inspiring and moving going on in the organisation or the community.
  • reality – an example of how people meet their current circumstances with inspiration and creativity.

You need to do this sincerely or it just becomes another meaningless duty!

There are many exercises that illuminate meaningfulness organisation-wide in The Map of Meaningful Work. We can run workshops that will help you to understand and create meaningful work and meaningful workplaces. Or you can work with our trained consultants. Please contact us.