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When Means Are Met, Meaning Takes Precedence

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, who was imprisoned in a Nazi death camp and wrote one of the ultimate tomes on existence (“Man’s Search for Meaning”) once lamented, “People have enough to live by but nothing to live for: they have the means but no meaning.” This is the predicament of modern man. Once we’ve addressed our basic needs in life, what do we strive for?

And, of course, modern man is a worker bee. Business means busy-ness. We toil away to keep up with the financial cost of living, sometimes not recognizing the spiritual cost of living in a world that often is more focused on our means than our meaning. But, we’ve traded the assembly line for the office cubicle, braun for brain, and an increasing number of us expect that the personal transformation we create outside the office can be possible within the realm of the workplace, too. We work 25% more hours per week than we did a generation ago (and that doesn’t even count the emails at home and BlackBerry messages on vacation). So, if we don’t find meaning at work, it will purely be in the crevices of life where we’ll have to find soulful sustenance.

Gurnek Bains, the lead author of Meaning, Inc: The Blueprint for Business Success in the 21st Century suggests, “The creation of meaning directly drives commitment and engagement and this has a tangible and demonstrable impact on business results. Now that other forms of competitive advantage have become commodities, creating a sense of meaning for people will be what makes the difference for most companies in the future.”

According to the authors who interviewed more than 10,000 executives, such “Meaning Inc. companies” as Google, Virgin, Genentech, Southwest Airlines, and Tata understand that the key to raising levels of performance is “to create a sense of meaning that is real as opposed to going through the motions of creating statements of purpose and values.” Not only do such companies regularly appear on lists of best places to work, but shares in those with a ten-year stock history have gone up 600%, far faster than their competitors.

I started my company nearly a quarter century ago and decided that the name of the company should also be its mission statement. Joie de Vivre Hospitality has grown into America’s second largest boutique hotelier based upon our mission of “creating opportunities to celebrate the joy of life.” This compelling credo has even been distilled down to a two-word mantra (“Create Joy”) that is stamped into blue rubber bracelets that many of our employees wear and all our new employees receive during new hire orientation.

But, one learns the difference between a glorified mission statement and a belief system that guides behavior when a company faces a once-in-a-lifetime economic downturn (and we’ve had two of these in the San Francisco Bay Area in the past decade). In late 2001, I was struggling. I had 1,000 employees at the time and I didn’t know how I was going to make payroll. The combination of the dot-com crash, 9/11, and a worsening economy meant that my hotel company, Joie de Vivre, was at risk. About that time, I walked into the local bookstore in search of a business book that would cure my financial woes or at least give me a clue about how to survive. Within minutes, I realized I needed something more serious. I found myself sauntering from the business section to the self-help section of the bookstore (conveniently located next to each other) and that’s where I reacquainted myself with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, one of the most famous psychological theories of human motivation.

I guess a guy who calls his company Joie de Vivre would naturally gravitate to self-actualization. Maslow was famous for being an early leader in the human potential movement based upon his belief that psychology had been too obsessed with worst practices and there’s a lot to learn from best practices in human behavior. He first popularized the wisdom, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail” as it aptly described the psychology profession’s over-emphasis on neurosis in the mid-20th century. Spending the afternoon reading Maslow helped me to see one of the most neglected facts in business: the fact that we’re all human. And, no matter our role in business – as a line level employee, as a CEO, as a customer, or as an investor – we all have a hierarchy of needs of what’s importance to us. As I read more about Maslow, I came to understand that late in his life (I was able to obtain his private journals for the last ten years of his life), he started applying his hierarchy of needs to organizations, and, specifically to business. But, unfortunately, Abe died young at age 62 in 1970 before he could closely look at how his primary theory could shift from the individual to the collective.

During that downturn nearly ten years ago, I decided to start “channeling Abe” to see how his theory could apply to my company. I figured the worst that could happen is we’d go bankrupt, so why not learn something along the way. I synthesized Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from five levels to three key themes: Survival (addressing physiological and safety), Succeed (social/belonging and esteem), and Transformation (self-actualization) which make up what I call the Transformation Pyramid. These themes aren’t just relevant in business, they’re fundamental in life. And, then I looked at how we could apply these themes to our three most important stakeholders in Joie de Vivre: our employees, our customers, and our investors. For the sake of this article, I will focus purely on the Employee Pyramid.

In his research on people who were being all they can be, Maslow came to realize that the deepest motivations were at the top of the pyramid and took on an inspirational quality. At one point in his research on people’s relationship with their work, he interviewed dozens of nurses and asked the question, “Why did you go into nursing?” Although the initial questions were rather superficial, as he dug deeper asking questions like, “What are the greatest moments of reward, or tell me a moment so wonderful it made you weep or gave you cold shivers of ecstacy,” he found the nurses expressing peak experiences that were virtually life altering. And those nurses who were most able to express a peak experience seemed most “called” by their work.

Maslow wrote, “People do not respond for long to small and self-centered purposes or to self-aggrandizing work. Too many organizations ask us to engage in hollow work, to be enthusiastic about small-minded visions, to commit ourselves to selfish purposes, to engage our energy in competitive drives. Those who offer us this petty work hope we won’t notice how lifeless it is….when we respond with disgust, when we withdraw our energy from such endeavors, it is a sign of our commitment to life and to each other.” Reading Maslow helped me see that the Employee Pyramid was really defined by Money (Survival), Recognition (Success), and Meaning (Transformation).

We all have base needs that need to be met and our work compensation package is the means to that end. But, Gallup has shown in multiple surveys that money isn’t the primary reason people leave a company (in fact, it usually comes in fourth place). People join a company and they leave their boss. Recognition – which addresses people’s Success needs that usually tap into one’s sense of social/belonging or esteem needs – is what creates loyalty in the workplace. But, money and recognition are external motivators for people who have a job or a career. Those who are living a calling – like the nurses Maslow interviewed – have transcended the bartering relationship that defines most employers with employees. They have tapped into an internal motivation that fuels them. They are inspired by what they do. They have moved from just focusing on the tasks they do each day to tapping into the purpose or imagining the impact of their work. That’s when an employee has moved to the transformational peak of the pyramid as they become more focused on that intangible we call Meaning.

Most companies get a little lost in the ether at the top of the pyramid as it’s easier for managers to “manage what they can measure” and it’s simpler to do a benchmark compensation survey than to try to measure meaning. Someday we may have a “Corporate Meaning Index” just like we have a “Dow Jones Stock Index” so that we can quickly scan who is playing at the top of the pyramid and who isn’t. In studying my own company and dozens of other meaning-driven businesses, I’ve come to realize that workplace meaning can be dissected into meaning at work and meaning in work. Meaning at work relates to how an employee feels about the company, their work environment, and the company’s mission. Meaning in work relates to how an employee feels about their specific job task.

I believe that meaning at work is ever more important than meaning in work. When employees believe in the work of the company, the whole Hierarchy of Needs is satisfied. Those employees clearly have their base needs met because they have confidence in the financial viability of the company, which means they have a secure job. Believing in the company’s mission also typically creates deeper alliances among employees because that sense of being part of a connected crew and the pride that comes from that success satisfies our social or esteem needs. Finally, our self-actualization needs can be met by feeling that we are part of an organization making a difference in the world plus there’s a halo effect that may render the work you do day-to-day even more meaningful.

One of the most profound decisions we made during the depth of that last downturn was to start to managing our business based upon meaning and to start measuring meaning in a variety of ways, whether it be questions on our twice-annual work climate surveys or whether it was asking in the monthly staff meetings with our line staff, “What’s the best experience you’ve had in the past month here at work?” The question I like to ask our employees goes something like this, “Most of us think of our job in terms of ‘what am I getting? What if you asked yourself daily ‘what am I becoming as a result of this job?” Helping our employees reframe their work, changing their work tasks to make them more meaningful, and creating a democratic culture in which employees help define our business strategy has helped JdV’s employee turnover drop to one-third the industry average. And we were recently crowned the “second best place to work” in the San Francisco Bay Area, unusual for a service company full of people cleaning toilets in a region full of famous high-tech companies with their plush corporate campuses.

I learned quite a bit about meaning in business during the last downturn, but this downturn has been full of lessons also. During the dot-com bust, my desire to learn tended to be more organizational, but this worldwide Great Recession has led to more personal lessons. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself on an emotional rollercoaster the past couple of years. I’ve had five friends or colleagues commit suicide, primarily due to stresses at work, and, I’ve seen countless companies in the travel and design industries dissolve under the pressure of this relentless economy. My greatest lesson in this downturn has been to create a series of what I call “Emotional Equations” (the title of my next book coming out in 2011) that help remind me how the world works. The most profound equation that I’ve used for myself and for the managers in my company has been DESPAIR = SUFFERING – MEANING and I learned this from reading Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

As teens, we learned algebra and found there were constants and variables in an equation. That’s true in life, too. The constant in a concentration camp, or in a recession, is suffering. There will always be suffering. Yet, the variable in life is meaning, how do we find a sense of meaning, even in the most difficult times? This is a question that I’ve asked myself and those I work with because if you can find meaning in the rubble, you will naturally lessen the despair that you feel. That’s how this equation works: more meaning, less despair. Yet, most of us in a difficult time put our attention on the suffering. Life and business is all about where you place your attention. If Viktor Frankl can live through a death camp by rediscovering the importance of meaning in our lives, we can live through a painful recession by reframing this difficult economic experience as the ultimate wisdom creator.

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