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Meaningful Work has a Price
Employment Satisfaction in Civil Society Compared to Society at Large
By Michael C. Gilbert, February 20th, 2007
On January 31, 2007 we completed a survey of the readers of Nonprofit Online News (NON) and others on the topic of work life satisfaction. With a total of 433 respondents, we acquired a base of fairly useful data. This is the first of several reports from that survey. (Read the second report: "Making the Most of Our Time", and the third report: "The Role of Personal Practice in Work Satisfaction")
In order to make a useful comparison between work life satisfaction in civil society with society at large, we chose six questions from the 2006 Pew American Work Life Survey and administered them verbatim to the respondents of our survey. For the purposes of the numerical comparison, we removed the respondents from outside the United States, since the Pew survey was strictly American. Subsequent reports concern themselves with the entire population of respondents, both inside and outside the U.S.
A. Job and Career Satisfaction
There were two simple questions related to the aggregate opinion of the respondents about their jobs and their careers. The questions, which originated with the Pew survey, were: (1) Overall, how satisfied are you with your job? (2) How satisfied are you with the kind of work you do?
The fascinating problem with this question is that there are two independent variables being measured: (1) The actual circumstances of people's work are filtered through (2) the standards that they have for their work. It would be a challenge to control for the latter, of course, and it leaves us with a range of interpretations for our results. This applies just as much to the career question as to the job question.
There are two interesting conclusions to draw from these results:
Conclusion #1: People working in civil society are no more and no less satisfied than those working in the broader economy. Not one of the four options for answers to the question "How satisfied are you with the kind of work you do?" varies in a statistically significant manner between the Pew Survey and the NON Survey. In both cases, over 90% of respondents are either completely or mostly satisfied with the kind of work they do.
There are several interesting things going on here.
As any career coach will tell you, there is a big difference between being dissatisfied with work and actually saying so. There's a profound cognitive dissonance at work that encourages many people to avoid naming their dissatisfaction. It's impossible to tell how much, if any, of that dissonance affects these results, although it's unlikely that it would affect one set of respondents and not the other.
This dissonance is served by the fact that Pew chose a four point scale rather than a larger number. Omitting a midpoint is a common tactic to avoid having large numbers of responses cluster in the center. It forces meaning out of the results. But it would be very interesting to see what a six point scale would do. Would large numbers migrate to a "barely satisfied" response?
Equally interesting is the moving target described earlier, concerning the standards against which respondents assess their work circumstances. Is there reason to believe that respondents in civil society have a different, possibly more demanding set of standards than the population at large? Quite possibly. The reason lies in the answer to the third question in the survey.
But there is a second conclusion to consider before we get to that.
Conclusion #2: Barely half as many people who work in civil society are completely satisfied with their job as those who work in society at large. Although roughly the same number of people are in some fashion satisfied with their job (86% in the NON Survey and 89% in the Pew Survey), only 15% of civil society respondents are completely satisfied compared to 28% of society at large.
From some perspectives, this is a counterintuitive result. Given the thousands of people who regularly enroll in workshops that might help them get a nonprofit job, the tens of thousands who buy books on the subject, and the millions who dream of being rich so they could do good works, you might think there would be a higher proportion of people in the sector who would be completely satisfied. But such is not the case.
The two independent variables in this question present us with a range of explanations. We have no reason to believe that working conditions in civil society are worse than in the rest of the economy. It's entirely possible that workers in civil society, having opened the door to the role of their values in the workplace, are substantially more demanding about the standards that would allow them to say they were completely satisfied.
B. It's Not Just a Job
The answers to our third question do much to reveal the dynamic driving the earlier responses about job and career satisfaction. We asked: Here are two different ways of looking at your job. Some people get a sense of identity from their job. For other people, their job is just what they do for a living. Which of these best describes the way you usually feel about your job?
The dramatically different responses lead us to:
Conclusion #3: The vast majority of people who work in civil society see their job as part of their identity, compared to society at large, in which nearly half of all workers see their job as just a way to earn a living. This is definitely the anticipated response. Although by no means does it have a monopoly on meaningful work, it's clear that such meaning is one of civil society's defining characteristics.
This casts our earlier conclusions in a new light, suggesting that the standards to which people hold their jobs and careers play an important role in how satisfied people are. Although deeper cross correlation on these results could help confirm this, the results to both of the earlier questions make a new kind of sense.
Relatively similar career satisfaction can be seen as the result of two forces working in opposing directions. It may be that civil society careers are indeed more satisfying, but that workers in civil society, because their jobs are part of their sense of identity, hold their careers to higher standards.
This dynamic can also explain why people in civil society hold more modest enthusiasm for their jobs, with half as many saying they are completely satisfied. It may be that, once having opened their eyes to the possibility of work as a reflection of their identity, they have a sense of how much better it could be.
C. Career Mobility
There were two questions from the Pew Survey related to career change: (1) Have you ever switched careers - that is, switched from one type of work to another type of work? (2) How likely is it that you will switch careers (again) sometime during your working life?
Conclusion #4: Workers in civil society have substantially more experience with career change than workers in society at large. Although the majority in both groups have changed careers at least once, twice as many people in society at large have never changed careers as compared with people in civil society.
We don't have an explanation for this. Does it reflect the proportion of people who exit the larger economy to seek work in civil society? Does it reflect greater opportunity for lateral movement in the nonprofit sector? We don't know.
At first, the results of the future oriented question about career change are puzzling. But the shape of the curve of the results of each group may be revealing. In civil society, a substantial majority hold moderate opinions about how likely it is that they will change careers, whereas in society at large, a comparable majority hold one of two strong diverging views - that it's either not likely at all or very likely that they will change careers.
Conclusion #5: Civil society is less divided than society at large, insofar as work stability is concerned. Society at large is divided into those who see their careers as relatively stable and those who don't. Civil society, on the other hand, is more uniform, with nearly two thirds seeing career change as either somewhat likely or not very likely.
This is consistent with recurring reports about the mainstream economy. There are entire sectors that are being shattered by the forces of global capital and others that are either not yet subject to those forces or are actually growing. Civil society, on the other hand, is probably much more rooted in local communities. Although it's by no means stable as a sector, it is not divided.
D. Training
The last question from the Pew Survey that we asked of our own respondents opens the door to a wide range of other inquiries that we chose not to pursue in this instrument. We asked: Over the course of your work life, have you taken any special courses or re-training to improve your job skills, or haven't you done this?
Conclusion #6: Civil society has a greater commitment to training than society at large. By a statistically significant margin, people in civil society are more likely to have had training than those who work in the broader economy. Two and a half times as many people in the broader economy have never had any training as compared with people in civil society.
This is not an entirely reliable conclusion. It might be, for example, that people employed in civil society are already likely to have had some kind of training. Or perhaps there is a sampling issue at work, with readers of Nonprofit Online News being people who are predisposed to professional development. But the conclusion is nevertheless consistent with the broadly reported cultures of the nonprofit sector.
It's also consistent with the earlier conclusion about meaningful work and the demanding standards of people in civil society. Whether the sector itself supports professional development or if the people within it demand it, if this work is part of people's identity, then training will be a likely component.
Where to Go from Here
The details of the results of this survey are interesting and suggest a range of additional research, both with the existing sample and with future survey instruments. The six conclusions, drawn here from six questions, should be tested from other angles.
The unimodal nature of civil society career stability is potentially very interesting in the context of the volatile forces of globalization. Civil society has always been part of the relationship and information economies. In these uncertain times, does that make it a source of new models for the economy at large?
The central theme - that work as part of one's identity carries with it higher standards about jobs and careers - can be seen in at least two ways. It is a truism about happiness that expectations shape our sense of well being just as much as circumstances.
At the same time, very few people are likely to retreat to the "it's just a job" model, after having set forth on the path of meaningful work. In a world that is full of suffering, the price of meaning is that we must continue to walk that path, even if it means we are not "completely satisfied". Hunger for change, for justice, for healing, for beauty, is, after all, what civil society is all about.
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