This Conversation Hour is an opportunity for researchers, consultants, coaches, and organizational leaders to: 1) discuss the state of meaning-centered approaches within organizational development settings; and 2) generate collective insights on how we can strategically promote meaningful work toward more humane and sustainable organizational development.
Corporations still predominantly use Gallup’s Employee Engagement Survey as a proxy for productivity. Yet the employee engagement rate in the US has been steady over the past decade at around 31%; worldwide, around 13%. Given the situation, corporations are in search for a replacement measure of employee productivity, and a big shift toward “employee wellbeing” and “happiness at work” are taking place. However, we are still missing the happiness-counterpart in wellbeing, or “meaningful work.” Fortunately, the corporate world now shows its readiness to try meaning-centered approaches to manage human productivity.
We will examine three models. Models will be chosen from the Askinosie Chocolate Model (Askinosie & Askinosie, 2017), the Conscious Capitalism Model (Sisodia, Henry, & Eckschmidt, 2018), the Elements of Meaningfulness Ecosystem (Bailey & Madden, 2016), the Holistic Development Model (Lips-Wiersma & Morris, 2011), the Meaningful Work Model (Chalofsky, 2010), the Meaning-of-Work Theory for High Performance (Modica, 2007), and the Positive Professionals Model (Brafford, 2017).