Your WHY @ Work Report ~ Part 1
The Six Dimensions of Purpose@Work
Given that many of us spend over 50% of our waking hours at work (approximately one-third of our entire lives is spent working), it’s important to be doing work that is personally meaningful and fulfilling, and satisfies our reasons—our purpose—for working.
YourWHY@Work self-assessment is a tool for doing just that. It allows you to generate insights into your reasons for working in two ways:
It helps clarify your personal reasons for working—your purpose at work. It does this by helping you better understand your motivations for working and uncover the aspirations that you have for work.
It allows you to reflect on your current employer’s contribution to your worklife and how satisfied you are with the level of support the organization provides towards you fulfilling your purpose at work.
Having completed the self-assessment, your answers to the questions in the six dimensions (described below) have been scored from two perspectives:
How important to you personally are each of those dimensions at work?
How satisfied are you with how well your current employer supports your needs in each dimension?
Purpose defined
What do we mean by purpose? And why is purpose so important at work?
As the term is used here, purpose is a higher-level psychological construct that provides a self-organizing aim which stimulates your goals and actions at work, directs choices and decisions, manages behaviour, and provides a sense of meaning.
Your motivations and reasons to work are wrapped up in your purpose. The reason that purpose is so important in life is that it provides an overall sense of direction, like a North Star or meta-intention, for how you live your life. Knowing your purpose allows you to find work that you find engaging, meaningful and fulfilling.
Simplifying your motivations
Your worklife, like many areas of your life, is complex. It touches upon your essential needs for security and living a good life. It is influenced by the conditions in which you were raised and the expectations that you feel have been put upon you by family and society. It reflects your likes and dislikes, as well as your skills and abilities, your life experience, and your current work situation. What a bundle of complexity that is!
Capturing that complexity as a single number, or even a group of numbers, is a simplified generalization of your overall worklife. Nevertheless, YourWHY@Work score is useful as an indicator for personal reflection to gain insights into what really matters to you at work, what areas of work you’re satisfied with, and what areas you’d like to see change.
Introducing the Six Dimensions of Purpose
YourWHY@Work self-assessment is based on Greater Meaning’s Six Dimensions of Purpose. The dimensions are a generic framework that describe six levels of motivations in life. These levels of motivation can be used to review, analyze and inform all aspects of your life, including your worklife.
The Six Dimensions of Purpose are depicted as a pyramid because they form a hierarchy. Lower levels of the pyramid, such as survival and cultural purpose, generally support and enable higher levels.
In this way, the six dimensions can be viewed as a “growth hierarchy” or “developmental hierarchy” because the lower dimensions are more fundamental to understanding and articulating the reasons why we do what we do in life.
A summary of the characteristics of each dimension is shown here:
As we grow and develop into our fuller potential, we increasingly have more nuanced, sophisticated reasons for doing what we do. The six dimensions provide a framework for decision-making and life planning as they tap into the underlying motivations for doing what we do.
Applying the six dimensions to your worklife
The following image identifies the primary characteristics of each dimension within the context of work.
Take a moment to read the characteristics and consider each one in turn. You will likely intuitively understand how each dimension fits within your overall worklife. A more detailed description of each dimension is provided later in this report.
For YourWHY@Work, you can use the six dimensions to assess and uncover your reasons for working, as well as seeing how well those reasons are being supported by the organization in which you work.
The Three Tiers of YourWHY@Work
A simplified yet powerful way to think of the six dimensions is as three tiers that constitute your worklife—job, career and calling—as shown in the following image.
These three tiers indicate how you might be motivated to work.
For example, your primary motivation for working might be to have a job that pays the bills and provides the necessities of life. But once you have a job, you might want to develop your skills and abilities, make new friends at work, take on new challenges, and contribute to others in ways you hadn't considered before. So your motivation for working might change and develop over time through the tiers of the purpose pyramid.
All the six dimensions and three tiers are valid reasons for wanting to work. None are inherently better or worse than any other. All have value to your worklife. There is no right or wrong in the purpose pyramid, only “what-is”. And you might be perfectly satisfied with where you’re at.
We all have our own particular reasons for choosing the work that we do and where we do it. Work is just one aspect of life, though certainly an important one. Your motivations for doing what you do, and not doing what you don’t do, are embedded in your overall life circumstances and the choices you make. No one but you can decide what’s appropriate or best.
The Six Dimensions of Purpose@Work simply recognizes the fact that we all have multiple reasons for working. YourWHY@Work self-assessment helps you to clarify and understand those reasons.