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Making the Most of Our Time
How People In Civil Society Face the Tough Questions of Meaningful Work
By Michael C. Gilbert, May 22, 2007
In early 2007 we completed a survey of the readers of Nonprofit Online News (NON) and others on the topic of life work satisfaction. With a total of 433 respondents, we acquired a base of fairly useful data. This is the second of several reports from that survey. (Read the first report: "Meaningful Work Has A Price", and the third report: "The Role of Personal Practice in Work Satisfaction")
Our survey had thirteen questions. The first six were used as a basis for comparison with the 2006 Pew American Work Life Survey and were reported upon in our first report, entitled: Meaningful Work Has A Price. The next six questions concern themselves with the tougher questions related to meaning in the workplace: Are we pursuing our life's work? How do we know? This report concerns itself with some of the numerical patterns in our sector.
A. Life is Short: The Illuminating Power of Mortality
Few things are as effective at helping people determine what is important to them than the prospect of an immanent death. And yet, work is not a thing that resides only in the moment. We have to look ahead, balance means and ends, and find ways to sustain our work. To approximate the richness of this query and help us get a sense of whether respondents consider themselves to be pursuing their life's work, we posed the same question in two time frames: If you knew you had two years to live, would you continue to do the work you do? And if you only had two months to live, would you continue to do the work you do?
With a two year time horizon, a substantial majority (62.2%) of respondents would continue to do most or all of their current work. How much this takes into account the fact that most people don't have two years of savings or credit available isn't clear from this question alone. More would be revealed by research that explored the tension between resource and mission related reasons for work. (See the Mission-Resource Matrix for an analytical framework.) But even without that resource data, some insight can be drawn from the responses to the second version of this question.
As would be expected, with a two month time horizon, the number of respondents who would continue to do most or all of their current work dropped in half, to 31.1%. For two out of every five respondents, there is no part of their current work that they would want to do in their last two months of life.
B. Two Tools for Reflection: Mission Statements and Personal Practice
When they aren't answering surveys on life and work, what are the tools available to people in civil society for reflecting (at this level) on the topic of their work? We asked about two of the possible tools: mission statements and the broad category of personal reflective practices.
When asked whether they had a personal mission statement or the equivalent, one out of six respondents answered bluntly that they had no statement of any kind that articulated their calling in life. The remainder was roughly evenly split between those who could fumble through one and those who clearly felt they had one.
Personal mission statements are not merely in use by a small number of people who are unusually dedicated to personal development. There are more than enough people who have personal mission statements for civil society organizations to explore the relationship between them and staff and volunteer morale and effectiveness.
It is not clear whether these numbers differ from those in the job market as a whole, since none of these sorts of questions were asked by the Pew Study. It's also not clear from this simple measurement exactly what role such a mission statement might play on people's work life, although the substantial numbers in each category of response will allow for useful cross tabulation later.
Substantially more people - a clear majority of 55% - say they have a personal practice concerning their choices about life and work than said they had a mission statement with the same concern. One third answered in the negative and the remainder didn't know, most likely reflecting the deliberate open-ended nature of the concept of "personal practice".
C. How We Spend Our Time is How We Spend Our Life
If we don't know how we currently spend our time, it's hard to either evaluate what we do or make meaningful decisions to change it. In order to open the door to an exploration of awareness of time spent as a component of worklife engagement, we asked people how well they were aware of where the last year went and where any given week went. Unfortunately, the two questions are not entirely comparable.
Nearly three quarters of respondent were able to claim a clear sense of what they had accomplished in the preceding year, with almost all of the remainder saying maybe. Only just over three percent gave the discouraging response that they had no idea at all. The obvious interesting subtlety at work in this question is that it doesn't actually directly address people's awareness of the time they have spent, but rather (through the use of the word "accomplished") focuses their attention on outcomes.
The second question about people's awareness of time was focused more directly on activities rather than accomplishment (by use of the phrase "where your time goes") and concerned itself with an unspecified day or week. Although a solid majority still say they have a clear sense of where their time went, the proportion is dramatically lower than the number that had the same clear sense about last year's accomplishments. Twice as many have no idea where time has gone and more than a third are uncertain.
Both of the questions about awareness of time spent lay the groundwork for other explorations in this study. There are large enough samples of varying results such that other tests might reveal traits to which this awareness (or lack thereof) may be correlated.
Where To Go From Here
The people who work in civil society bring a diverse range of sensibilities to their awareness and their practices. Although it would be very interesting to compare these arguably deeper measurements of satisfaction and reflection with the labor market as a whole, for now those comparisons are not available.
However, many exciting and potentially powerful comparisons are available, right here in the current data. Does having a mission statement or a personal practice affect work stability or satisfaction? Does awareness of how we spend our time affect how we conceptualize our work or vice versa? These and other questions will be the focus of further reports.
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