If you want to design a job so that people love their work, make it rewarding at every time scale.
Rewarding work at a moment to moment or hour to hour scale looks a lot like flow – a state of effortless concentration and timelessness, when you get totally lost in what you’re doing. The associated feeling is joy – much more commonly seen on the dance floor, but just as desirable at a job. Flow comes about when people are given challenges that stretch their capacities slightly beyond their current abilities.
Rewarding work on a day to day or week to week scale looks like progress and meaningful relationships. The associated feeling is satisfaction – knowing you’ve made something substantial that clearly moves the project forward. Think of watching a house change color wall by wall as it’s repainted. Give someone a clear way to see their results of their actions and you give them a way to feel satisfied.
Rewarding work on a month to month or year to year scale looks like the knowledge that you are contributing to something worthwhile. The associated feeling is pride. Time is life and life is precious; no one wants to waste theirs on something meaningless. This is where a vivid and well-communicated vision makes all the difference.
A note: different scopes are interconnected. Flow leads to clear progress. Clear progress is meaningful.
I’ve used this framework to diagnose my lingering dissatisfaction with my job. It turns out my job hits mediocre (but not actively bad) at every scale.
My immediate work is most often predictable and slow, interspersed with cryptic blockers that take a lot of effort to deal with. On one end, I can spend hours effectively writing instructions for a machine to copy data from one form to another. On the other, I can spend hours staring at something going wrong and not knowing why. Occasionally, I get sweet spots of challenge, usually when we’re starting a new project and laying out the design.
The progress we make on a weekly basis feels grindingly slow to me. I’ve spent a week building a new form for a website. The bright spot is that my team has a surprising amount of chemistry and I get a lot of satisfaction from the people I work with.
The long term picture of my work is most satisfying – making working conditions better for factory workers by improving the quality of data for factory audits. This picture is soured by the fact that I’m working for a large multinational whose practices I don’t trust. Good data is necessary, but it will only be impactful if they choose to use it well.
There’s a strange kind of gratification that comes from knowing exactly what I dislike about my current job, and a complementary hope that with this knowledge, I will know how to find something better next time.
Thanks to Early Readers: Sean Langhi
The Pragmatic Philosopher 