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Work with a purpose!

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@olebulls
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Salary is important for most jobseekers, but many are lured by jobs that are perceived as meaningful.

One of the first things I learned in the pandemic is that my job is not socially critical. But I earn more than most socially critical jobs. What is the connection between salary and how meaningful a job is (?) then becomes a good question.

I found an article about a study done at the University of Chicago where researchers created their own company that hired workers to work online with data entry for a few days. In this way, they could provide different offers to a random sample of workers where they varied wages and how meaningful the job was perceived to be.

To hire workers in the company, they sent out e-mails with an offer to people who had registered before they wanted the job. The offers varied along two dimensions: how much salary they received, and how meaningful the job was. There were four groups, two groups received $11 per hour, the other two received $15 per hour. How meaningful the job was determined by which clients they had, more specifically what they learned about them. Two of the groups, one with a high salary and one with a low salary, learned more about the clients, including that they included someone who worked for underprivileged children. The message sent out was something like: "We believe these organizations are making the world a better place, and we want to help them with that." The other two groups did not receive this message.

Since the researchers knew how many had received the e-mail with offers, they could see how the various offers affected the proportion who wanted the job. Not unexpectedly, increased wages led more people to the job. More surprising was that a few sentences about some of the clients making the world a better place had an equal effect on how many people wanted the job. Large international companies have probably realized how important it is that what they do appears meaningful. Go to the website of almost any company, no matter what you think about the company's contribution to society, you will most likely find a link to a description of how they work with social responsibility and help make the world a better place.

It is not equally important for everyone that the job is meaningful, but it seems to pay off for employers to hire those who are most concerned about it. Those who were lured with a meaningful job were more productive, both measured by the amount of data recorded per hour and the accuracy of the work. One way to attract just these people is to make sure they have the resources needed to do a good job. An employee who perceives the tasks they are to solve as important and meaningful, but lacks the resources to be able to solve them satisfactorily, can quickly lose motivation.

One might think that it is unfair that the meaningful jobs do not have to "lure" with high wages. It is really like those who contribute to making the world a better place, become the “wage losers”. Some readers may recognize themselves in this. It is difficult to say how important this is in practice, as we do not have a precise measure of meaningfulness, and as there are many other factors that affect wage differences between sectors and companies. Nevertheless, there are several studies that show that there is a tendency for the jobs that are perceived as most meaningful to be the lowest paid.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in the book "The Happiness Hypothesis", argued that happiness has two dimensions: pleasure and purpose*. Although money can give us pleasure, the study from Chicago - and many other studies - suggest that it is important for us to do something we experience as meaningful!

Where do you stand in terms of this? Do you prefer a meaningless job with a high salary or a meaningful job with a low salary?

Cheers -Olebulls

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