Author: Nathaniel Koloc

We live in a time of chronic dissatisfaction in the workplace. Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace study found that as many as 70% of working Americans were unfulfilled with their jobs, 18% to such an extent that they are actively undermining their co-workers. This is a marked increase in workplace dissatisfaction from 2010, when Conference Board found that 55% of Americans were dissatisfied with their jobs.

How can we explain this? Certainly factors like the sluggish economic recovery and stuck wages play a role, but I think the real answer is even more straightforward: It’s not clear how one designs a satisfying career in today’s professional culture, especially if lasting fulfillment (as opposed to salary maximization) is the goal.

At my company, ReWork, we connect talented professionals to meaningful work opportunities at companies that are making substantive social, environmental, and cultural progress. Based on our conversations with over 12,000 professionals and hundreds of hiring managers, we’ve gained insights into what’s lacking in the traditional approach to career planning, and how professionals can create careers with an ongoing sense of purpose. Here’s my advice:

1. See your career as a series of stepping stones, not a linear trajectory.

There’s an implicit view that careers are still linear. Sure, many people accept that the career ladder is broken, but most still attempt to somehow increase the “slope” of their career trajectory.

They wait until they are unhappy, look around for opportunities that seem better than their current job, apply for a few, cross their fingers, and take the best option that they can get. Then, they toil away until they are unhappy again, and the cycle repeats. Though this approach can increase your salary over time, studies show that, once you make more than $75,000, more money doesn’t correlate to happiness or emotional wellbeing.

Most people end up with a career path of somewhat arbitrary events that, at best, is a gradually improving wandering path, and, at worst, is just a series of unfulfilling jobs

The solution to this dismal cycle? Let go of the idea that careers are linear. These days, they are much more like a field of stepping stones that extends in all directions. Each stone is a job or project that is available to you, and you can move in any direction that you like. The trick is simply to move to stones that take you closer and closer to what is meaningful to you. There is no single path — but rather, an infinite number of options that will lead to the sweet spot of fulfillment.

2. Seek legacy, mastery, and freedom — in that order.

Research from authors such as Daniel Pink (Drive), Cal Newport (So Good They Can’t Ignore You), Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman (Startup of You), and Tony Hsieh (Delivering Happiness) shows that there are three primary attributes of fulfilling work:

• Legacy. A higher purpose, a mission, a cause. This means knowing that in some way — large or small — the world will be a better place after you’ve done your work.
• Mastery. This refers to the art of getting better and better at skills and talents that you enjoy using, to the extent that they become intertwined with your identity. Picture a Jedi, or a Samurai, or a master blacksmith.
• Freedom. The ability to choose who you work with, what projects you work on, where and when you work each day, and getting paid enough to responsibly support the lifestyle that you want.

The order is important. People are fulfilled most quickly when they first prioritize the impact that they want to have (legacy), then understand which skills and talents they need to have that impact (mastery), and finally “exchange” those skills for higher pay and flexibility (freedom) as they develop and advance.

People don’t typically have just one purpose. The things you’re passionate about — women’s health, early childhood education, organic food, or renewable energy — are likely to evolve over time. And it’s important to develop a high degree of freedom so that you’re able to hunt down your purpose again when it floats onto the next thing. This means being able to do things like volunteer on the side, go months at a time without getting a paycheck, or invest in unusual professional development opportunities.

3. Treat your career like a grand experiment.

In my experience, people who are successful in finding — and maintaining — meaningful work approach their careers like a grand experiment.

All of the things you think you know about what you want to be doing, what you’re good at, what people want to hire you to do (and at what salary), how different organizations operate, etc. are hypotheses that can be validated or invalidated with evidence — either from the first-hand experience of trying something (including bite-sized projects), or second-hand from asking the right questions of the right people.

The faster and cheaper that you’re able to validate your career hypotheses, the sooner you’ll find fulfillment. You don’t have to take a job in a new industry to realize it’s not for you. You can learn a ton about potential lines of work from reading online, having conversations, taking on side projects, and volunteering.

And a bonus — by doing your homework on what’s actually a good fit for you, you won’t waste your time applying to jobs that you aren’t competitive for. And like any good scientist, you’ll achieve a healthy detachment from your incorrect hypotheses — they are just par for the course, after all.

I use the word “grand” to describe this experiment because the reality is that your career is not just a way to earn a living. It’s your chance to discover what you’re here for and what you love. It’s your best shot at improving the world in a way that is important to you. It’s a sizeable component of your human experience, in a very real way. As such, it should be an adventure, with a healthy bit of magic and mystery along the way.

So if you’re one of the many who find themselves on the path to meaningful work — remember to enjoy the journey, don’t give up, and don’t settle.

What talented people want has changed. They used to want high salaries to verify their value and stable career paths to allow them to sleep well at night. Now they want purposeful work and jobs that fit clearly into the larger context of their career. And that means they want jobs that are sensible parts of an ongoing journey through a series of professional endeavors — not some supposedly linear path toward “success”.

The difficulty is that companies haven’t quite figured out how to provide this. In fact, for all its accomplishments, business in the 21st century has a dirty little secret: Statistically speaking, companies aren’t sure how to hire the right people.

Recruiting, staffing, and hiring-support services is a $16B industry, yet 52% of U.S. employers report having difficulty filling key roles. A 2012 Pricewaterhouse Coopers survey found that 60% of CEOs did not believe they had the talent they needed to be successful, and one in four had to delay or forego market opportunities and strategic initiatives because they didn’t have the right talent.

The consequences of mediocre hiring go beyond lost opportunities. They include accidentally getting the wrong people (meaning the person resigns or is terminated within 18 months), which as any manager who has made this mistake knows, is very expensive. In 2012, Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ Saratoga team found that the combined costs of unanticipated turnover (including lost institutional knowledge, diminished productivity, and direct hiring and onboarding costs) are staggering: 20-200% of the employees’ original salary. For those companies on the high end of turnover (75% percentile), turnover costs are equivalent to nearly 40% of earnings.

The inverse is also true. Studies show that engaged employees are 50% more productive and 33% more profitable. They are also responsible for 56% higher customer loyalty scores and correlated with 44% higher retention rates, leading to great gains in productivity over the long run.

So the question is: How do companies find and cultivate those fulfilled employees?

At my company ReWork, we work with exceptional professionals who want to apply their expertise and skills to the most pressing social and environmental problems of our time. Having achieved mastery and at least some degree of wealth, they crave the one thing most companies still don’t explicitly offer them — purpose.

We’ve heard from associates at all the big management consultancies, analysts at the largest investment banks, developers at the most prominent technology companies, and senior managers from Fortune 50 corporations, and they all tell us the same things. They are not picking their next job based on the size of the paycheck. They are instead looking for a worthwhile mission and promising team to join. And, they are having a frustratingly hard time finding that.

And therein lies the opportunity. Employers who are watching closely see the implication clearly.

Offer purpose and career context, and the talent will come.

Take Moneythink, a Chicago-based financial literacy nonprofit, that pulled in a Fortune 50 business analyst to lead their expansion. Or The Eleos Foundation, a Santa Barbara-based impact investment firm that snagged an ex-Microsoft, Haas School of Business superstar to advance their investment strategy. And iDE‘s Last Mile Loo project, an ambitious vision for beyond-grid sanitation systems, that hired a team of seasoned fundraisers to help them win $100K from the Lipman Family Prize at the Wharton School. The list goes on.

Here’s where your company can start:

Get serious about impact. Determine the positive impact your organization is seeking to make in the world, and do that goal justice. You don’t need to be a social enterprise or a triple-bottom-line firm, but joining the 30,000+ ethical and sustainable brands in U.S. will mean you have a much more compelling purpose to offer, even if it isn’t completely unique.

Warning: You cannot fake purpose. That’s worse than not prioritizing it at all. People can tell the difference, trust me.

Tell that story, and tell it well. Once you know the mission you’re trying to accomplish, tell the world. Call it marketing or communications or storytelling or design, but make sure you’re getting across how much you care about your vision and how you’re working towards it. If you do so correctly, you’ll have their hearts beating before they’ve even heard the details. Things like start dates, vacations days, and even salaries and bonuses are then far less likely to be deal-breakers.

Make talent your #1 priority, period. Attracting, evaluating, hiring, and retaining the best people is serious business. Getting the best people builds a cultural momentum at your firm, making it easier to attract and retain them in the future. At the end of the day, that is how you make systematic progress. That is how you win. If you don’t have a dedicated talent team that is on the pulse of what the most dynamic professionals long for in their work, consider investing in one.

Design your roles for their future, not just yours. Recognize that many people now see each job as just one of many stepping-stones that they’ll visit over the course of their career. The best way to keep them with you indefinitely is to focus on making your stone as attractive and inviting as possible. Decent pay, rewarding perks, and large doses of autonomy (on top of a compelling mission) demonstrate that you take their professional development seriously. What networks, knowledge, responsibility, or skills can your company provide better than others?

Do these things, and you’ll see the most dynamic, effective, and inspired professionals you’ve ever worked with show up on your doorstep. If harnessed correctly they’ll be the best thing that ever happened to your company — and for society.