Meaningful Work

There is a pattern playing out in boardrooms right now that should give every people-centred leader pause.

Across earnings calls for S&P 500 companies, executives used the phrase ‘performance culture’ 633 times in a single year. One major global CEO recently instructed his organisation to open every meeting by reciting a mantra about volume growth, margin expansion and profit in hard currency. The intention was to align everyone around what matters. It had the opposite effect.

This is a stark reminder of what happens when organisations mistake instruction for inspiration, and metrics for meaning. It won’t work — it never does — and the reason is simple: you can’t manufacture meaning. You can only create the conditions for it to develop.

We’ve spent more than a decade helping organisations understand and channel this insight. We’ve seen what becomes possible when work is genuinely meaningful, and what gets left on the table when it isn’t.

The world has shifted considerably in the years since we made meaningful work the heart of our purpose. AI is reshaping what work looks like. Automation is changing who does what. Societal anxiety has reached fever pitch. And the case for making work more meaningful — for people and for performance — has never been stronger or more urgent.

This is what we believe, and it’s what the evidence shows.

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How do we define meaningful work?

Meaning comes from the journey, not just the job.

Ask people to describe meaningful work and they reach for the obvious examples — the doctor, the teacher, the lifeboat crew. Last summer, a colleague described the week his friend spent as a senior leader at the RNLI during a heatwave. Eighty-six lives saved. Twelve lost. It wasn’t a relaxing week. But the meaning was undeniable.

And yet, meaning isn’t reserved for the organisations whose impact is immediately visible; it’s available to any organisation that creates the right conditions.

Two dimensions work together.

The first is individual. Meaningful work is work where you can see your contribution, feel valued for it, and sense the difference it makes. It’s the experience of doing something worthwhile — not just completing tasks but playing a part. That sense of fulfilment, of being in the right place doing the right thing, is what separates engagement from something deeper.

The second is organisational. When the strategy, the direction and the purpose are genuinely clear — and when people can see where they fit within that — meaning scales. Pride becomes collective. The sense of ‘we’re in this together’ becomes a real force, not a values poster.

Meaning also isn’t static. It develops as work evolves, as generations shift, as priorities change. What matters is creating an environment where meaning can thrive and grow — because you can’t hand it to people fully formed. You create the opportunity. They find the meaning.

“Meaning comes from the journey, not the job. Organisations have a duty of care to make sure the conditions are right for that journey to be worthwhile. And a duty to performance, too — the two pull in the same direction. It is not an accident that brands that endure and outperform over time tend to place people at the heart of their strategies”

There’s one more dimension worth naming: opportunity. Meaningful work is also about fairness — about organisations that believe people have potential and create the conditions for that potential to be fulfilled. The organisations that take meaningful work seriously tend to be the ones that also take social mobility, meritocracy and human development seriously. These things are connected.

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What can the science of motivation teach us?

What humans need from work hasn’t changed — even as work itself has.

Decades of research in motivation science converge on a consistent finding: what truly moves people at work has very little to do with what organisations spend most of their time on.

The self-determination theory framework — and the work of researchers like Daniel Pink — identifies three core drivers of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery and purpose. When people have meaningful control over how they work, when they can see themselves growing and progressing, and when they feel connected to something beyond the immediate task — performance follows. Naturally, sustainably, and without the need for incentives or mandates.

What most organisations get wrong is focusing almost entirely on extrinsic motivators: pay, perks, status. These matter — pay especially. But beyond a certain threshold, they stop moving the needle. What people need is to feel that their work is purposeful, that they’re trusted to get on with it, and that they’re getting better at something that matters. Those needs haven’t changed across generations. What’s changed is the environment in which people are trying to meet them.

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The AI question

Automation and AI are reshaping work at a pace that is, for many people, unsettling. The risk isn’t just job displacement — it’s meaning displacement. Creativity, problem-solving, genuine human connection: these are the things that give people a sense of pride and fulfilment in their work. They’re also, not coincidentally, the things that AI is not yet able to replicate. The organisations navigating this well are the ones being deliberate about what they’re asking humans to do — and why. They’re protecting and amplifying the human elements of work, not eroding them in pursuit of efficiency. That’s not sentiment. It’s strategy.

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There’s also a relationship between meaning and adaptability that often goes unacknowledged. When people have a stronger sense of meaning in their work, they are more likely to embrace change — not because they’ve been told to, but because they understand why it matters. Purpose is the platform for resilience. You can do change to people, or you can create the meaning that makes people want to come with you. The first is faster in the short term. The second is the only one that sustains.

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What’s the commercial case for investing in meaningful work?

Meaning is the engine of high-performance culture.

The connection between meaningful work and business performance isn’t a hypothesis. It’s a finding  replicated across our Cracking the Culture Code research series (2017 – 2024) spanning more than 6,000 organisations across 27 sectors.

Our research shows that alignment — the degree to which people, brand and customer strategies connect — is the hallmark of high-performing organisations. And alignment, at its core, is what meaningful work produces: clarity about what the organisation is trying to do, why it matters, and how every role contributes. When that alignment is present, organisations don’t just perform better — they sustain that performance through change, disruption and uncertainty in ways that less-aligned organisations cannot.

The data on personal accomplishment is striking. Employees whose work gives them a feeling of personal accomplishment are 2.58 times more likely to recommend their organisation as a great place to work — 88% versus just 34% of those who don’t feel that sense of impact. And OC Tanner’s research found that personal fulfilment had the most decisive impact on an employee’s choice to stay in their job, do great work, and define their organisation as a great place to work — more than any other factor measured. Fulfilment isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the most powerful retention lever available. And it maps directly onto two of the six signatures in our own Cracking the Culture Code research: Personal Growth and Meaningful Work & Impact — the felt sense of developing and of knowing your role makes a difference.

The data is also clear on purpose: employees motivated by their organisation’s purpose are 93% more likely to recommend its products and services. McKinsey found that 63% of people want their employer to provide more opportunities for purpose in their day-to-day work — and that the starting point should be helping employees find more personal meaning in the work they already do. The cost of not investing in this is measurable: in attrition, in disengagement, in the slow erosion of a culture that no longer knows what it’s for.

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The two levers that move the needle most

Our Cracking the Culture Code research identifies a clear progression. The step change from low to mid performance comes from the People dimension — specifically from people feeling genuinely valued. The step change from mid to high performance comes from the Brand dimension — specifically from clarity of vision. If you want to move an underperforming organisation, start with making people feel valued. If you want to move from good to great, invest in vision clarity. Both are levers that a meaningful work strategy directly addresses.

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High performance, in our view, isn’t a culture you mandate. It’s an outcome you create the conditions for. The S&P 500 executive who uses the phrase ‘performance culture’ 633 times a year may risk describing what they want to happen versus owning and elevating the efforts being placed to drive performance. For example, a leading F1 team doesn't say that they are driving a high-performance culture; they talk about the mindsets, processes, performance goals and key activities that will create winning high-performance outcomes.

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“Organisations that think about the difference they make, and the work they design, are more likely to get sustainable outcomes.”

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How does a people experience strategy go further than employee engagement?

Engagement measures the surface. Experience shapes the whole.

Employee engagement has been the dominant framework in people strategy for the better part of two decades. It has produced a lot of surveys, a lot of dashboards, and — at a national level across major Western economies — very little progress. Engagement scores have been broadly flat or declining for years, despite the effort invested in improving them.

The problem isn’t that engagement doesn’t matter. It does. The problem is that engagement is a signal, not a system. It tells you how people are feeling at a point in time. It doesn’t tell you why, and it doesn’t tell you what to do about it in a way that changes the underlying conditions.

A people experience strategy goes further. It treats the organisation as a dynamic system — one where every interaction, touchpoint and moment shapes how people experience their work. It looks holistically at what life at work feels like — not just job satisfaction, but the full texture of being part of this organisation, on this team, in this role. And it connects those experiences to the outcomes the organisation is trying to achieve.

The shift from engagement to experience is also a shift in ambition. Engagement asks: how do we make people feel better about work? Experience asks: how do we design work so that meaning, trust and belonging emerge naturally? The first is a repair job. The second is architecture.

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In practice

A major energy provider made a bold choice: to give every customer-facing employee the autonomy to resolve any customer problem on the first call — including the ability to credit an entire bill. No scripts. No escalation chains. Real people with real authority, trusted to do the right thing.

The results spoke for themselves. Internal experience scores rose. Customer satisfaction followed. The brand became known for something genuinely different in a crowded market: human service that worked.

The lesson is both simple and radical: when you treat people as trusted adults, explain the business to them and give them the tools to solve problems, you don’t need to manufacture

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How do customer-centric cultures create the conditions for meaningful work?

When people know who they serve and why it matters, work becomes meaningful.

One of the most powerful and underused levers for creating meaningful work is deceptively simple: connecting every person in the organisation to the difference their work makes for someone else.

For frontline teams, that connection is often direct and visceral. The crew member on a cruise ship who knows that the moment a guest first sees the ship from the gangplank is one of the most significant moments of their holiday — and that they are personally responsible for making it extraordinary. The contact centre agent who resolves a problem for a customer in a moment of genuine stress. These people can see the impact of their work. That visibility is a powerful source of meaning.

For people who are two, three or four steps removed from the customer, the connection is less obvious — but no less real. The work is still ultimately in service of someone. The role of the organisation is to make that visible: to bring the customer to life for teams who don’t interact with them directly, and show how each function feeds into the experience the customer ultimately has. Customer-centric cultures orient everyone — regardless of function — around a shared purpose: to make things better for the people they serve. That orientation, consistently held, is one of the most reliable paths to meaningful work we have seen.

“Meaningful work is about knowing that you serve somebody and make a difference. It could be as simple as that.”

There’s also a powerful dynamic that emerges when the employee experience and the customer experience are designed together rather than in parallel. When the things that matter most to your people are aligned with the things that matter most to your customers, you get something that neither strategy produces alone: a culture in which serving others well feels natural, because the conditions for good work and the conditions for great service are the same conditions.

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How do leaders and managers create the conditions for meaningful work?

Leaders connect the internal world of their people to the external impact the organisation wants to make.

Leadership is the most powerful variable in meaningful work. Not because leaders can manufacture meaning — they can’t — but because they set the conditions that either allow it to flourish or quietly prevent it from taking hold.

The leaders we’ve seen do this well share a common orientation. They are clear about why the organisation exists and what it’s trying to achieve. They connect that clarity to the work of their teams — not through slogans, but through conversation, through the goals they set, through what they celebrate and what they challenge. They coach rather than direct. They create the psychological safety that allows people to learn, to try, to contribute more than their job description requires.

The management layer often suffers from underinvestment, despite being the single most powerful influence on how people experience their work. Our Cracking the Culture Code research is consistent on this: the scores that most strongly predict high performance are about what line managers do every day. Whether they help people understand how their work connects to the bigger picture. Whether they recognise contribution. Whether they create an environment where people feel trusted and valued. Research from Harvard Business Review found that only 40% of employees across organisations know what their company’s goals are. The gap between strategic intent and lived experience is most often a management gap. Every people leader is, in effect, a culture leader. The ones who understand that — and are developed accordingly — make the biggest difference.

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What undermines meaning — and how quickly it happens

Meaning is harder to build than it is to destroy. Micromanagement removes autonomy — one of the core drivers of intrinsic motivation. Lack of clarity about direction removes the line of sight that makes work feel purposeful. Inconsistent values, rewarding the wrong behaviours, tolerating disrespect — these things erode the culture of meaning faster than any programme can rebuild it. The question for leaders isn’t just ‘what are we doing to build meaning?’ It’s ‘what are we doing — perhaps without realising it — that’s getting in the way?’

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There is also a generational responsibility in play here that leaders are increasingly aware of. Young people entering the workforce right now are doing so into a landscape of genuine uncertainty — about job availability, about the future of work, about what a career can look like. The leaders who take meaningful work seriously are the ones who recognise their role not just as performance managers, but as architects of opportunity. That matters, and it’s worth saying plainly.

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What are ‘moments that matter’ — and how do we design them?

When the people experience and the customer experience are designed together, something shifts.

Not all moments in the employee journey are equal. A handful of them — the first day, the first performance conversation, the moment someone feels genuinely seen by their manager, the moment they understand for the first time how their work connects to something larger — have a disproportionate effect on how people experience their work overall. These are the moments that matter.

Designing them well is both an art and a discipline. It starts with understanding which moments carry the most weight — and that requires listening at a level most organisations don’t reach through annual surveys. It requires getting close to the lived experience of people in different roles, at different stages of their journey, and understanding what shapes their sense of belonging, purpose and pride.

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In practice

Working alongside a world-renowned luxury travel brand, we were helping to develop the customer experience at the same time as the employee experience — by design, not by coincidence.

The moment a guest first walks up the gangplank and sees the ship is one of the most significant in the entire customer journey. Everything is invested in making it extraordinary.

We flipped the question: what is the equivalent moment for a crew member joining for the first time? The answer was sobering. They arrived after the longest possible journey, received a health and safety briefing for several hours in their second language, and were then expected to step straight onto service — smiling, present, delivering the very experience the brand had promised its guests.

By redesigning the employee onboarding experience to mirror the care taken with the guest experience — connecting people to the brand before they arrived, managing expectations of life on board, creating moments of genuine welcome — the quality of service improved. People who feel proud of where they work deliver differently. When they were also given the opportunity to experience the ship as guests themselves, the empathy they brought to their roles was

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The principle at work here is straightforward, even if the execution isn’t: the experiences you create for your people and the experiences your people create for your customers are not separate strategies. They are the same strategy, seen from different angles. Organisations that treat them as one — that design the people experience with the same intentionality they bring to the customer experience — consistently outperform those that don’t.

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Where do we start?

Meaning can’t be manufactured. But the conditions for it can be created.

The organisations that have made meaningful work a genuine reality tend to have done a small number of things consistently well. None of them are complicated. All of them require clarity, honesty and a willingness to pause before reaching for the next initiative.

The first move is to step back and simplify. Most organisations are more cluttered than they realise: competing messages, legacy frameworks, accumulated programmes that have outlived their purpose. What are we saying to people about why we exist, what we’re trying to deliver, who we’re delivering it for, and how every role contributes? The organisations that have turned things around tend to have boiled those things down ruthlessly. Simplicity is not dumbing down. It is one of the most powerful gifts a leader can give their people.

The second move is to get the facts. Too much culture work is built on filtered listening — what leaders choose to hear, or what people feel safe saying in focus groups. Data and evidence, gathered holistically and coming at the organisation from multiple perspectives, is harder to argue with. The best diagnostic processes combine quantitative insight with genuine frontline voice, and an outside-in perspective — the voice of the customers and partners you ultimately exist to serve. All three matter. None is sufficient alone.

The third move is to understand what’s getting in the way. Leaders don’t spend enough time asking what’s preventing good work from happening — not what needs to be added, but what needs to be removed. The barriers to meaningful work are often systemic: unclear direction, misaligned messages, processes that make it harder than it needs to be to serve customers well. Removing barriers is often more powerful than adding programmes.

And the fourth: make it everyone’s agenda. Meaningful work isn’t an HR initiative. The alignment between internal culture and external brand — between what you say to colleagues and what you say to customers — is a leadership team responsibility. The organisations that get this right own culture and people metrics collectively, not by function.

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The ripple effect

We spend a significant portion of our lives at work. If that work can be even a little more meaningful — if people can go home having done something that mattered, having been seen and valued, having contributed to something beyond themselves — the effect ripples outward. Into families. Into communities. Into the organisations themselves, which become more resilient, more adaptable, more capable of sustained performance.

That’s the pub conversation we all recognise — the pride someone feels when they describe where they work and what they do. It’s not just organisational narrative. It’s personal narrative. And nothing beats it.

“Nothing replaces that pride that people can feel at work and the way that makes others feel. Making the conditions for more pride to happen is a good thing — surely.”

This is why meaningful work is at the heart of everything dragonfish does. Not because it’s a nice idea, but because the evidence is clear, the need is urgent, and the upside — for people and for organisations — is transformational.

The world has shifted. AI is changing what work looks like. Society is anxious. Leaders are under pressure to chase short-term returns. Against that backdrop, the organisations that choose to invest in making work more meaningful aren’t being idealistic. They’re being strategic. They’re building something that will still be standing when the noise dies down.

That’s the opportunity. And it’s available to every organisation that’s willing to start.

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See also:

‍Pillar 1: Organisational Culture Transformation →  

‍Pillar 2: The Alignment Advantage →  

‍Pillar 3: Leadership & Management Capability →

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dragonfish is a pioneering culture and performance consultancy. Our purpose is to help people and organisations unlock potential and make work more meaningful.

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