We’re living in a period of constant transition. Here’s how the Meaningful Work Inventory can help you stay sane.
Change is in the air—and we’re not just talking about that crisp autumn breeze.
The nature of work itself is transforming rapidly. In just a few years, we’ve seen the rise of AI-assisted technologies, a “new normal” of remote work holding its own against “return-to-work” mandates, a 4-day work week trialed in various countries and organizations, and waves of layoffs in the tech sector. Yet amid these seismic shifts, individuals are not merely adapting to major changes outside of their control; they are planning moves of their own. In the spring of 2024, new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn showed that 46% of professionals were considering changing jobs in the next year, according to a survey of 30,000 individuals across 31 countries.
We’re living in a period of accelerated change. For many people, the very concept of work—what it can be, and what it means to us—is being actively reworked. Fortunately, there’s the Meaningful Work Inventory (MWI), a unique workplace assessment tool we offer that can help you stay sane throughout these bizarre times. The goal of the Inventory is to allow the user, or Explorer, to honestly appraise their experience of meaning in their current worklife. While the MWI can be taken at many different times during your career, it’s a particularly wonderful companion for reflection and personal exploration throughout periods of uncertainty, change, and transition.
And while it’s easy to imagine the MWI being useful for individuals experiencing a kind of “meaning crisis” at work—people who may feel stuck, isolated, burned out, unappreciated, or experience moral conflict— the Inventory can be just as empowering to people who are already feeling pretty good about their career direction. In this piece, we’ll share some surprising use cases and ideas for navigating your next transition with help from this tool (MWI as job interview prep? Why not!) But first, let’s look more closely at transitions themselves: what are they, and what we can learn from them?
Understanding career transition
A change in your worklife is one thing, but it can trigger something more impactful: a transition.
Hang on, you’re thinking. Aren’t change and transition the same thing? Not according to William Bridges, an expert on change and transition and the creator of the Bridges Transition Model. In his definition, “change” is external and concerns what happens to you, while “transition” is internal; a psychological process with three identifiable stages: Endings, Neutral Zone, and New Beginnings.
Dr. Gail Townsend, an organizational development specialist and MeaningSphere’s cultural and business advisor, has already written a helpful piece on our blog on navigating transition using the Bridges model that is well worth bookmarking. In her piece, she emphasizes the importance of the Neutral Zone in particular, which she describes as “the in-between time when the old is no longer part of one’s life and the new is not yet fully in place.” Endings and beginnings may be more readily understood by our goal-oriented, clarity-seeking work selves. Yet this ambiguous middle section warrants a closer look, Townsend argues.
The Neutral Zone is a generative space, if a little terrifying. It's that moment when you’ve graduated college but aren’t sure yet what career path you’ll take. It’s when you’ve moved to a new city and have yet to establish a daily routine, build a social calendar, or identify your favorite places. The Neutral Zone is that formless time when you've finished a big project but have yet to start another. It takes place after a layoff pushes you into being open to new careers, or when you are struggling with the question of re-entering the workforce after being a stay-at-home parent.
According to Townsend—and Bridges’ work—it’s important not to rush through this moment, however uncomfortable it may be.
“With this ambiguity,” Townsend writes, “creativity and emergent ideas occur. Psychological nurturing is also a component of this stage.”
How the MWI can help in each phase of transition
There’s no right or wrong time in your transition—or your career, for that matter—to take the Meaningful Work Inventory. Using the MWI can yield different insights depending on where you are in your transition. Here are some potential benefits to be had in varying situations, according to experts on meaningful work, careers, and the Inventory itself.
Situation 1: You already find your career to be meaningful (and you want to keep it that way!)
Let’s say your work is going really well, and you’re feeling fulfilled and happy. Using a tool like the MWI to assess the meaning in your worklife may seem totally counterintuitive. However, there is unique value in taking a snapshot of your worklife at this time.
Dr. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma created the Map of Meaning, the groundbreaking framework on which the Meaningful Work Inventory is built. In this framework, meaningful work is not a static goal but the result of an ongoing balance between the defining tensions in our lives—chief among these being the tension between our aspirations and the realities we live in. The design of the Map—and the Inventory—reflects the idea that the aspects that make our working lives meaningful are interdependent and continually in flux.
In a video interview, Lips-Wiersma offers the example of a work environment in which individuals derive meaning from the great teamwork they had: “If you wanted to change something else--say, at that moment, we really want to get people to develop their talents more. Well, forget the teamwork. ... you've let one go in order to push the other.”
Identifying what made the work meaningful in the first place—the teamwork—could have allowed for a better-informed decision.
“Even when things are going well,” Lips-Wiersma concludes, “I think if you can't articulate and capture what is going well, then it's so easy to lose it, even with the best intentions.”
Melissa Bennett, a career counselor and one of our MeaningSphere Guides, also notes how quickly our circumstances can change, despite our best efforts.
“We don't often ask for change. Change often finds us,” she says.
For example, she continues, if you take the MWI after having been laid off, then your resulting report is likely to reflect a negative experience of work.
“But if you have one already on file from when you were feeling happy, it gives you that ability to be like, “Oh, what was it about the job? Was it the people? Was it the work? Was it the company ethos? It's those sorts of things that I feel like could set you up for success.”
Situation 2: Your worklife is fine...but you wonder if it’s time to mix things up
In her day job, Bennett often helps individuals determine whether it’s a big change they’re after (such as a new career) or if a few smaller changes might be all that’s needed to experience more meaning at work. In this questioning phase, the Inventory could also prove useful, she says:
“There are probably hidden aspects of your work that you are willingly turning a blind eye to,” she points out. “So before you get into that Neutral Zone, [you’re] actually looking at what some of your answers are to those questions, and really having to be like, Oh, yeah, I've been avoiding X,Y, and Z.”
Say your Inventory results show that you like connection with others—yet every day you go into your office and shut the door until 5 o’clock. In this scenario, Bennet says, “I'm gonna go to the water cooler and sit in the lunchroom for half an hour every day. That could make all the difference in moving from fine to good, or great, or excellent.”
Situation 3: You’re actively seeking new opportunities
Let’s say you’ve decided to take the plunge and embark on a transition phase. You’ve left the familiar behind. The Neutral Zone stretches out before you, both thrilling and terrifying.
Dr. Martha Beck, the world-renowned sociologist and author, calls this “being undefined.” Beck, who has developed a methodology called The Change Cycle, identifies an American cultural pressure to skip from ending to beginning without lingering in the messy middle. She articulates this idea perhaps most succinctly in this short video on social media, in which she asserts, “Whenever you go through any kind of big change—gain, loss, sickness, health, whatever it is—you’re going to go through a period of being undefined. You won’t know what you are—and our culture doesn’t like that. It typically tells us, ‘Get control!’ ‘Figure out what you want to be!’ ‘Set some goals!’ I’m not such a fan of that.”
Beck, much like Bridges, emphasizes the importance of resisting the external pressure to rush through this uncomfortable phase. If you can, rather than jumping at the first career opportunity that would lift you out of that middle period into a safely “defined” space, why not use the time to reflect more deeply on what it is that makes you thrive at work? You may find yourself entering your next job interview with a new set of criteria.
As a MeaningSphere Guide with a day job as a career counselor, Bennett offers a unique perspective on how the MWI can provide helpful grounding during a job-seeking period. In her counseling work, she often urges a mindset shift. Where individuals tend to focus on the impression they need to make on potential employers, she asks them to consider whether the job is a good fit for them, the employee.
“They get very caught up in the, ‘I have to answer all of these questions so these people hire me and offer me a job, and I have to do it correctly, and I have to look fantastic!” she says of her counseling work. “And I always challenge every single person I counsel and say, ‘Great. And what are you going to ask of them that is going to ensure that it is a good fit for you?’ And they go, ‘Wait what?’ And I'm like, ‘It’s a two-way street.’”
While MeaningSphere Guides themselves do not offer career counseling—a Guided Discussion is designed to help you explore new perspectives on work and meaning, not to offer career advice—it’s Bennett’s view that the mindset shift enabled by the MWI can have benefits for individuals currently engaged in the job-hunting process, by enabling them to make decisions more broadly about what they need in a work environment.
“Buyer’s remorse is really prevalent in the job market,” she continues. “You can try to eliminate some of that, because you have done your due diligence in putting [the potential employer] kind of to the fire, and saying, ‘You know, tell me how you check in with your employees. How do they receive feedback?’”
Situation 4: You just completed a transition and are looking back
When we speak, Bennett highlights another key moment when the Meaningful Work Inventory could be useful: after a transition, as a kind of personal retrospective.
“One of the things that I think we often don't do enough is check in with ourselves after we've made the transition," she says. “We often kind of think of things as being finite like, ‘I did all this research, I put all this work in, and I've since made a transition. And now I am going to be here for the next 5 to 7 years.’”
But once the dust has settled—say, four months into your “new beginning,” Bennett recommends a look back to ask yourself, in her words, “How am I feeling now that I've actually done all of the work?’”
This look back could have the potential to be very useful as you continue to learn about yourself and hone in on what matters to you at work.
So, when is the best time to use the MWI?
When we put this question to our pool of Guides, the answer was immediately clear: anytime you need! And regardless of what career phase you’re in, our team of Guides are available to help you work through your recent results in structured 1:1 session. Our Guides are trained in using the MWI and its underlying framework, the Map of Meaning, to help individuals find meaning in the world of work. During a Guided Session, you’ll get to talk through the items that matter most to you and develop an action plan for the future.
Transitions aren’t always easy, but they are a feature of our lives, much like the seasons. Why not learn from them? Townsend, the organizational development specialist we heard from at the start, puts it like this: “For individuals to optimally navigate transitions, it is important to appreciate, prioritize, and learn from the space that is in between the seasons.”
Comments