What Makes Work Meaningful? The Giftedness Model Explains the Top 2 Ingredients

For a business owner, making money is your bottom line. Having your employees feel like their work is meaningful helps you do that.

The first benefit of having work be meaningful is to keep your workers happy, retained, and engaged which leads to making money and minimizing costs. Thankfully, it also means that you are adding goodness into the world.

So, how do I make my work more meaningful? The Giftedness Model explains.

meaningful work space

The Giftedness Model for Meaningful Work

The Giftedness Assessment looks at the patterns behind stories from which a person found a great sense of satisfaction, success, meaningfulness, joy, or accomplishment. These patterns, called "innate motivating factors" (IMF) are the building blocks for a person's motivation, performance, and purpose.

The 1st Ingredient to Meaningful Work

The first ingredient to what makes work meaningful is one's ability to exercise his or her IMFs to accomplish the task(s).

For example, I was once working with a woman who had anxiety about her recent promotion. She was finding her performance being limited and she was going home feeling deflated. After working with her, I found that one of her IMFs were something like, "To always be a catalyst for other peoples' growth," kind of like a mother hen watching her chicks become all they could be. Her new promotion, however, removed her from the weekly interactions with her team so she didn't have a good way to watch them progress. This sucked out her energy. She didn't feel that her work was meaningful. So what did she do? She negotiated with her employer the job description to be able to include a closer relationship with her "chicks" so that she could exercise this particular IMF. It worked, they agreed, her performance got better, and she was able to sleep at night again. She was able to find meaningfulness in her work by exercising one of her IMFs and the company benefited from that.

Application for employees: What are your IMFs? Need help defining them? How can you, if at all, utilize one of your IMFs in order to do your job? Do this, and we promise that you will find more meaningfulness in your work.

If in the rare case that your job absolutely does not coincide with your giftedness ("your unique combination of innate motivating factors"), then, yes, it's time to polish your resume. But if this is the case, you have already been feeling all the dissatisfaction and would love something new. We can help you with that, too.

Application for business owners: Do you know your employees well enough to know their giftedness, intrinsic motivations, preferred work, and unique contributions? View how we can help then contact us as this is our wheelhouse. We'll get you there! Once you do, then think of ways that you can motivate each employee through this simple, but deep process:

1. Write down in one column on paper the employee's giftedness, IMFs, or strengths (not just what you want them to be, but what they actually are according to the employee).

2. Write down the job duties in another column.

3. Figure out ways that each job duty could be accomplished by utilizing one of those IMFs.

Do this and you will find this person taking more initiative, being more innovative, and performing better. Oh yeah, they'll feel more purpose, too.

Exercising our IMFs to do our job is what makes work feel meaningful.

The 2nd Ingredient to Meaningful Work

The second ingredient to what makes work meaningful is connecting each person's job or tasks to the greater picture.

When a person doesn't see how a job or task supports the mission of their company, then they think that it's useless and/or mundane. I think of the folks who have to do reporting. Oftentimes, reports feel that they take too much time for little or no reward. However, when you can connect it to the fact that reporting is one of the foundations for company's validation to the general public which in turn enables the company to fulfill their mission, then reporting becomes more bearable.

Your company's Mission Statement, however, isn't the only source of the greater picture. Most people want to make a difference in the world, however that might look to them. They want to feel that God has a purpose and will for their lives. Therefore, connecting their work in the world to an ultimate purpose is the key for meaningful work. That might look like a direct correlation to missional work, non-profit work, or ministry. It also might look like an employee who works well ("as unto the Lord" Col. 3:23) just for the sake of them being able to provide for their family. The point is that ou work starts to feel meaningful once we connect it with the greater picture. Don't unplug the lightbulb from the source of energy.

In Conclusion

There are a few different theories about meaningful work, but The Giftedness Model offers the most realistic advice, as we've seen it work.

Much of this model presumes that you understand what giftedness is and that you already know the actual giftedness and innate motivating factors for each of your employees.

Click here to launch your company (or yourself if an individual) into a lifelong journey of living out your giftedness, purpose, and meaningful work.