The craft skills of past generations could point the way to more meaningful work in our high-speed, high-tech lives

With the holiday season upon us, many people's idea of a gratifying job will be one that allows them to disappear off to the hills for a fortnight unshackled by mobile phone, BlackBerry or laptop. For others, the converse will be true: knowing the office can reach them at any time of the day or night with urgent news or pressing decisions to be made will fill them with the sweet, satisfying sense of just how indispensable they are.

One person's meaningful job is another's idea of hell, or so I thought, until a quick straw poll of a few friends recently revealed some interesting similarities between what gets each of them out of bed in the morning.
A teacher spoke of the satisfaction of seeing the light of recognition dawn on a child's face after struggling with a difficult new concept; a psychiatric nurse described the positive feelings of being needed. The freelance journalist enjoys the fact that people seek her out for her specific services; the shop assistant enjoys the interaction with customers and providing good customer care. The GP likes to help people feel better, but also gets a kick out of making tricky diagnoses. And the company director enjoys problem solving-identifying what needs fixing, convincing people of the need for change and then persuading them to help him do it.

Two or three generations ago, earning a wage sufficient to feed your family would have been the primary criterion of a decent job. And money is still the most obvious form of recognition and reward. But no one in my survey mentioned it. Many of our forbears would have been astonished that their descendants would seek the kind of fulfilment—even enjoyment—they looked for only on high days and holidays.

Yet, ironically, employers who want to make work more meaningful for their staff need to look to past generations and models of work for clues. According to Richard Sennett in his new book, The Craftsman, being allowed to develop a skill to a high degree and practise it well creates the kind of engaged employees that no amount of fashionable leadership courses could ever hope to achieve.

Sennett describes craftsmanship as the desire to do a job well for its own sake. It is, he says, "an enduring, basic human impulse". Craftsmanship, he argues, is more than cold technique: it is the sum of personal expression, physical experience and thought. And craft skills don't just serve traditional artisans such as carpenters and stone masons, but also computer programmers, doctors, and teachers.

It may be up to employees themselves to find meaning in what they do, as a new report from The Work Foundation, Inwardness: The Rise of Meaningful Work, concludes. As employees attempt to make their mark on the world, writes the author, questions shift from "what does work mean to me" to "does my work have meaning?"

But organisations need to create the conditions in which meaningful work can thrive, including giving employees choice and control over their working hours and environment, factors that, according to The Work Foundation, rank highly in what employees deem to be "good work".

British organisations currently have too many managers, a large number of whom are promoted reluctantly and given little support to do a largely thankless task. Trying to turn them all into leaders is a vain attempt to provide job satisfaction by proxy. But allowing some to practise leadership as a craft skill could reignite their desire to do a job well, and might even arrest the upward spiral of executive pay.

Firms should also remember that it is very easy to destroy meaning-not least by letting competition, targets, bureaucracy and the pressure for quick results compromise most people's natural desire to do a good job.
The company director I spoke to as part of my straw poll did admit he would love a gong for his services to industry, but since I threatened to stop talking to him if he pursued that line of thought, the subject hasn't cropped up again.

What I initially saw as his vanity is, in effect, the same desire for recognition for a job well done that most employees feel, however they express it.