Not long ago an associate was sharing the story of a difficult season one of her coworkers had experienced. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was wondering how she was going to make it through all of the treatments required to come out of that experience with a whole healed body that is cancer free.
She recanted how the team had rallied around their coworker supporting her with extra hours, sharing vacation time so she could get all of her treatments, helping with trips to the doctor and so on. This story reminds me of the sessions I taught in the Customer Service Academy. It’s called the power of meaningful work. Sometimes it’s not the job that we do, but it is the relationships and the connections we make in the course of doing that job.
Looking back over my own life, I remember many times when I wasn’t crazy about the job I had, but I loved the people that I worked with. And those relationships gave me a reason to keep going to that job until a new and better opportunity appeared. That is the power of meaningful work.
Others will tell you that sometimes life gets hard. You experience a divorce, you have an illness, you have challenges with your children and so on. But having a good job to go to where you connect with people you enjoy working with can be a catalyst for keeping ourselves going. They can inspire us to get up each day and put one step in front of the other until the difficult season has passed. That is one of the purposes of a job. It is to experience the joy of doing meaningful work with people who matter.