essay on the world of work

The World of Work is Rapidly Changing IELTS Essay

The world of work is rapidly changing and employees cannot depend on having the same job or the same working conditions for life. Discuss the possible causes and suggest ways to prepare people to work in the future.

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. You should write at least 250 words.

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This essay was asked on Recent IELTS Exam 20 January 2022 India Question Answers

The World of Work is Rapidly Changing IELTS Essay – Model Essay 1

These days, people’s workplaces are constantly changing and evolving to meet the demands of modern society. Furthermore, the roles and responsibilities of jobs are also undergoing changes to adapt to new ways of working and living. This essay will discuss the possible reasons for these changes and suggest some ways that people can better prepare themselves for their future careers.

Firstly, due to the developments in hi-tech machines and artificial intelligence, millions of people all around the world are losing their jobs and being replaced by automated processes. For example, millions of factory workers have lost their jobs because they have been replaced by machines that are able to do their job quicker and more effectively. Furthermore, as a result of the ever-increasing desire to cut expenses and increase profits, many jobs are being outsourced to countries where the wages are lower. For instance, when a person calls a tech support helpline in an English-speaking country, they will most likely be connected to someone in another country, like India or the Philippines, where the wages are lower.

However, there are a number of ways that people can prepare for changes in their workplaces in the future. Firstly, students preparing to leave high school need to be advised about the sustainability of the career path they are choosing. To illustrate, autonomous vehicles are predicted to replace most delivery and taxi driver jobs in the very near future, so this is not a job that someone should expect to have for a very long time. Furthermore, while some jobs are being replaced by technology, many jobs are simply incorporating technology into their process, and therefore people will need to be able to keep up to date with these changes. To help achieve this, specific courses could be designed to help educate people on the use of modern technology in their workplaces.

In conclusion, although there are many changes in the workplace these days, educating people to carefully choose their career and to keep up to date with modern technology, is the key to avoiding any major problems.

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The World of Work is Changing Rapidly Essay – Model Essay 2

It is irrefutable that the work scenario is altering at a fast pace. Working conditions are also different and the process of job-hopping is very common. This essay shall delve into the possible causes for these changes and suggest ways to prepare for work in the time to come.

To begin with, the development of science and technology has changed the structure of work. For example, people no longer need to do some heavy work by themselves. Instead, they can use machines. Secondly, competition has become intense and people have to constantly update themselves with the latest materials and methods. Sometimes they cannot compete with the new techno-savvy workforce and so have to change jobs out of compulsion.

Furthermore, we belong to an era of consumerism. Being surrounded by so many choices, people today want to buy new things and for that, they do multiple jobs. In addition, the 24/7 society of today provides us the opportunity to work day and night. For instance, in earlier times, there were very few jobs which were round-the-clock jobs. But, today, globalization has brought in a multitude of options of working day and night. The line between day and night has become dim and people have become workaholics.

There could be many suggestions to prepare for work in the future. People should have a set goal in their mind and get training accordingly. Moreover, it is important to draw a line somewhere. The stress and strain of the fast modern workplace is leading many to nervous breakdowns. In the developed countries, a new term called downshifting has already come where after a certain stage, people are saying ‘no’ to promotions and showing contentment with less. We should also realize that if we stick to one job, then also life can be more stable and we can enjoy our leisure also. ieltsxpress

To put in a nutshell, I pen down saying that, although work conditions are different today and we have a need to update our knowledge regularly, we can plan our life in a meticulous way and have a balance between work and leisure.

Also Check:   There is a General Increase in Anti-Social Behaviour Essay

IELTS Writing Task 2 on Jobs – Model Essay 3

In today’s modern world, people tend to change jobs more often than before and don’t want to work permanently in one environment. I would like to explore the sources of this issue and suggest several solutions for future work.

Firstly, due to the global recession, many employers have to downsize and restructure their businesses. This leads to a number of redundant employees being forced to leave their jobs and find other ones. Another reason is that, as living costs are getting higher and higher, people want to earn as much money as they can to meet their needs. Hence, they seek better opportunities and well-paid jobs everywhere, every day. Some also look for new challenges. Last but not least, thanks to new technology, people nowadays are able to access information more easily, including information about job recruiting.

One of my suggestions for this problem is that if we can create a comfortable working environment and build strong relationships between colleagues; and between managers and workers. These will make employees find it harder to leave. To archive this, courses such as leadership training and communication skill training should be carried out to help supervisors lead their team efficiently without causing any stress, and help employees fit inconveniently. ielts xpress 

By the way of conclusion, I would like to state that change job is one the remarkable signs of technological times and soft skill training courses possibly help people adapt to the working environment instead of finding a way to escape it.

The Workplace is Changing Rapidly – Model Essay 4

Work culture lately has been dynamically transformed, mainly due to improvements in technology like transport and communication. Job security has become a dicey issue as employees now need to keep themselves updated with the advancements around them. This essay shall further explain the reasons and offer probable solutions. ieltsxpress.com

In the last two decades, we have seen a remarkable spread of technology in all wakes of life. With easy access to the Internet and computers, work has become faster and easier. Innovation of office tools is encouraged everywhere so as to not let anything hinder the growth of trade and commerce. With each task becoming effortless, manual intervention at many places has been reduced. Ergo, rising insecurity is seen among employees. Additionally, employees are expected to multi-task in their jobs making it more difficult for older workers to sustain.

The remedial measures for such a situation are very few as of now. First of all, state-of-the-art employee training centers to help the employees stay well-versed with the high-tech upgradations. To solve this problem from an earlier level, universities should start imparting practical training in their curriculum, with the know-how of current on-the-job scenarios to prepare potential workers better. All this needs to be done as the employees losing their jobs also lose financial security for their families, and it is very difficult to start again from ground zero.

To conclude, I’d say we should accept the ever-changing technological advancements as they’re unlikely to stop. Better would be to equip ourselves and become flexible accordingly so as to welcome such developments.

How The World of Work is Changing – Model Essay 5

It is indeed true that the world has been increasing by loops and bound for a long time and very few employees can handle obstacles in their near future. Because it has some reason. However, to my notion, employees need some specification training for it.

There are various reasons behind why it has increased, first and foremost, in globalization time every company wants to grow fast. Secondly, important roles are being played by studying on the contemporary world. that is why every employee ought to be cognizant of every field. so that he/she can do everything for their job. Moreover, technology has changed every life completely. for instance mobile, internet and computer are very prominent in the work field. it helps the employee to make their job easy. Finally, in today’s time, we can see a person living in India and working for a company located in us.

on contrary, every problem has a solution there is some way which can help employees for their job. to start with they must be taught English because English is a basic requirement for learning any new thing. Moreover, they must be friendly with their peer group members. in addition, management skills, internet, and computer knowledge must be important. these all things give help them in their upcoming time.

To sum up, I firmly believe that there are ample chances in today’s work environment. However, by following some training. we can prepare employees for the near future growth and make spectacular culture.

Ideas for World of Work

Also Check:   It is Impossible to help all people in the world IELTS Essay

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Essays About Work: 7 Examples and 8 Prompts

If you want to write well-researched essays about work, check out our guide of helpful essay examples and writing prompts for this topic.

Whether employed or self-employed, we all need to work to earn a living. Work could provide a source of purpose for some but also stress for many. The causes of stress could be an unmanageable workload, low pay, slow career development, an incompetent boss, and companies that do not care about your well-being.  Essays about work  can help us understand how to achieve a work/life balance for long-term happiness.

Work can still be a happy place to develop essential skills such as leadership and teamwork. If we adopt the right mindset, we can focus on situations we can improve and avoid stressing ourselves over situations we have no control over. We should also be free to speak up against workplace issues and abuses to defend our labor rights. Check out our  essay writing topics  for more.

5 Examples of Essays About Work

1.  when the future of work means always looking for your next job by bruce horovitz, 2. ‘quiet quitting’ isn’t the solution for burnout by rebecca vidra, 3. the science of why we burn out and don’t have to by joe robinson , 4. how to manage your career in a vuca world by murali murthy, 5. the challenges of regulating the labor market in developing countries by gordon betcherman, 6. creating the best workplace on earth by rob goffee and gareth jones, 7. employees seek personal value and purpose at work. be prepared to deliver by jordan turner, 8 writing prompts on essays about work, 1. a dream work environment, 2. how is school preparing you for work, 3. the importance of teamwork at work, 4. a guide to find work for new graduates, 5. finding happiness at work, 6. motivating people at work, 7. advantages and disadvantages of working from home, 8. critical qualities you need to thrive at work.

“For a host of reasons—some for a higher salary, others for improved benefits, and many in search of better company culture—America’s workforce is constantly looking for its next gig.”

A perennial search for a job that fulfills your sense of purpose has been an emerging trend in the work landscape in recent years. Yet, as human resource managers scramble to minimize employee turnover, some still believe there will still be workers who can exit a company through a happy retirement. You might also be interested in these  essays about unemployment .

“…[L]et’s creatively collaborate on ways to re-establish our own sense of value in our institutions while saying yes only to invitations that nourish us instead of sucking up more of our energy.”

Quiet quitting signals more profound issues underlying work, such as burnout or the bosses themselves. It is undesirable in any workplace, but to have it in school, among faculty members, spells doom as the future of the next generation is put at stake. In this essay, a teacher learns how to keep from burnout and rebuild a sense of community that drew her into the job in the first place.

“We don’t think about managing the demands that are pushing our buttons, we just keep reacting to them on autopilot on a route I call the burnout treadmill. Just keep going until the paramedics arrive.”

Studies have shown the detrimental health effects of stress on our mind, emotions and body. Yet we still willingly take on the treadmill to stress, forgetting our boundaries and wellness. It is time to normalize seeking help from our superiors to resolve burnout and refuse overtime and heavy workloads.

“As we start to emerge from the pandemic, today’s workplace demands a different kind of VUCA career growth. One that’s Versatile, Uplifting, Choice-filled and Active.”

The only thing constant in work is change. However, recent decades have witnessed greater work volatility where tech-oriented people and creative minds flourish the most. The essay provides tips for applying at work daily to survive and even thrive in the VUCA world. You might also be interested in these  essays about motivation .

“Ultimately, the biggest challenge in regulating labor markets in developing countries is what to do about the hundreds of millions of workers (or even more) who are beyond the reach of formal labor market rules and social protections.”

The challenge in regulating work is balancing the interest of employees to have dignified work conditions and for employers to operate at the most reasonable cost. But in developing countries, the difficulties loom larger, with issues going beyond equal pay to universal social protection coverage and monitoring employers’ compliance.

“Suppose you want to design the best company on earth to work for. What would it be like? For three years, we’ve been investigating this question by asking hundreds of executives in surveys and in seminars all over the world to describe their ideal organization.”

If you’ve ever wondered what would make the best workplace, you’re not alone. In this essay, Jones looks at how employers can create a better workplace for employees by using surveys and interviews. The writer found that individuality and a sense of support are key to creating positive workplace environments where employees are comfortable.

“Bottom line: People seek purpose in their lives — and that includes work. The more an employer limits those things that create this sense of purpose, the less likely employees will stay at their positions.”

In this essay, Turner looks at how employees seek value in the workplace. This essay dives into how, as humans, we all need a purpose. If we can find purpose in our work, our overall happiness increases. So, a value and purpose-driven job role can create a positive and fruitful work environment for both workers and employers.

In this essay, talk about how you envision yourself as a professional in the future. You can be as creative as to describe your workplace, your position, and your colleagues’ perception of you. Next, explain why this is the line of work you dream of and what you can contribute to society through this work. Finally, add what learning programs you’ve signed up for to prepare your skills for your dream job. For more, check out our list of simple essays topics for intermediate writers .

For your essay, look deeply into how your school prepares the young generation to be competitive in the future workforce. If you want to go the extra mile, you can interview students who have graduated from your school and are now professionals. Ask them about the programs or practices in your school that they believe have helped mold them better at their current jobs.

In a workplace where colleagues compete against each other, leaders could find it challenging to cultivate a sense of cooperation and teamwork. So, find out what creative activities companies can undertake to encourage teamwork across teams and divisions. For example, regular team-building activities help strengthen professional bonds while assisting workers to recharge their minds.

Finding a job after receiving your undergraduate diploma can be full of stress, pressure, and hard work. Write an essay that handholds graduate students in drafting their resumes and preparing for an interview. You may also recommend the top job market platforms that match them with their dream work. You may also ask recruitment experts for tips on how graduates can make a positive impression in job interviews.

Creating a fun and happy workplace may seem impossible. But there has been a flurry of efforts in the corporate world to keep workers happy. Why? To make them more productive. So, for your essay, gather research on what practices companies and policy-makers should adopt to help workers find meaning in their jobs. For example, how often should salary increases occur? You may also focus on what drives people to quit jobs that raise money. If it’s not the financial package that makes them satisfied, what does? Discuss these questions with your readers for a compelling essay.

Motivation could scale up workers’ productivity, efficiency, and ambition for higher positions and a longer tenure in your company. Knowing which method of motivation best suits your employees requires direct managers to know their people and find their potential source of intrinsic motivation. For example, managers should be able to tell whether employees are having difficulties with their tasks to the point of discouragement or find the task too easy to boredom.

A handful of managers have been worried about working from home for fears of lowering productivity and discouraging collaborative work. Meanwhile, those who embrace work-from-home arrangements are beginning to see the greater value and benefits of giving employees greater flexibility on when and where to work. So first, draw up the pros and cons of working from home. You can also interview professionals working or currently working at home. Finally, provide a conclusion on whether working from home can harm work output or boost it.

Identifying critical skills at work could depend on the work applied. However, there are inherent values and behavioral competencies that recruiters demand highly from employees. List the top five qualities a professional should possess to contribute significantly to the workplace. For example, being proactive is a valuable skill because workers have the initiative to produce without waiting for the boss to prod them.

If you need help with grammar, our guide to  grammar and syntax  is a good start to learning more. We also recommend taking the time to  improve the readability score  of your essays before publishing or submitting them.

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The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less

By Jonathan Malesic Sept. 23, 2021

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Mr. Malesic is a writer and a former academic, sushi chef and parking lot attendant who holds a Ph.D. in religious studies. He is the author of the forthcoming book “ The End of Burnout ,” from which this essay is adapted.

A dozen years ago, my friend Patricia Nordeen was an ambitious academic, teaching at the University of Chicago and speaking at conferences across the country. “Being a political theorist was my entire adult identity,” she told me recently. Her work determined where she lived and who her friends were. She loved it. Her life, from classes to research to hours spent in campus cafes, felt like one long, fascinating conversation about human nature and government.

But then she started getting very sick. She needed spinal fusion surgeries. She had daily migraines. It became impossible to continue her career. She went on disability and moved in with relatives. For three years she had frequent bouts of paralysis. She was eventually diagnosed with a subtype of Ehlers-Danlos syndromes, a group of hereditary disorders that weaken collagen, a component of many sorts of tissue.

“I’ve had to evaluate my core values,” she said, and find a new identity and community without the work she loved. Chronic pain made it hard to write, sometimes even to read. She started drawing, painting and making collages, posting the art on Instagram. She made friends there and began collaborations with them, like a 100-day series of sketchbook pages — abstract watercolors, collages, flower studies — she exchanged with another artist. A project like this allows her to exercise her curiosity. It also “gives me a sense of validation, like I’m part of society,” she said.

Art does not give Patricia the total satisfaction academia did. It doesn’t order her whole life. But for that reason, I see in it an important effort, one every one of us will have to make sooner or later: an effort to prove, to herself and others, that we exist to do more than just work.

We need that truth now, when millions are returning to in-person work after nearly two years of mass unemployment and working from home. The conventional approach to work — from the sanctity of the 40-hour week to the ideal of upward mobility — led us to widespread dissatisfaction and seemingly ubiquitous burnout even before the pandemic. Now, the moral structure of work is up for grabs. And with labor-friendly economic conditions, workers have little to lose by making creative demands on employers. We now have space to reimagine how work fits into a good life.

As it is, work sits at the heart of Americans’ vision of human flourishing. It’s much more than how we earn a living. It’s how we earn dignity: the right to count in society and enjoy its benefits. It’s how we prove our moral character. And it’s where we seek meaning and purpose, which many of us interpret in spiritual terms.

Political, religious and business leaders have promoted this vision for centuries, from Capt. John Smith’s decree that slackers would be banished from the Jamestown settlement to Silicon Valley gurus’ touting work as a transcendent activity . Work is our highest good; “do your job,” our supreme moral mandate.

But work often doesn’t live up to these ideals. In our dissent from this vision and our creation of a better one, we ought to begin with the idea that each one of us has dignity whether we work or not. Your job, or lack of one, doesn’t define your human worth.

This view is simple yet radical. It justifies a universal basic income and rights to housing and health care. It justifies a living wage. It also allows us to see not just unemployment but retirement, disability and caregiving as normal, legitimate ways to live.

When American politicians talk about the dignity of work, like when they argue that welfare recipients must be employed, they usually mean you count only if you work for pay.

The pandemic revealed just how false this notion is. Millions lost their jobs overnight. They didn’t lose their dignity. Congress acknowledged this fact, offering unprecedented jobless benefits: for some, a living wage without having to work.

The idea that all people have dignity before they ever work, or if they never do, has been central to Catholic social teaching for at least 130 years. In that time, popes have argued that jobs ought to fit the capacities of the people who hold them, not the productivity metrics of their employers. Writing in 1891, Pope Leo XIII argued that working conditions, including hours, should be adapted to “the health and strength of the workman.”

Leo mentioned miners as deserving “shorter hours in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health.” Today, we might say the same about nurses, or any worker whose ordinary limitations — whether a bad back or a mental health condition — makes an intense eight-hour shift too much to bear. Patricia Nordeen would like to teach again one day, but given her health at the moment, full-time work seems out of the question.

Because each of us is both dignified and fragile, our new vision should prioritize compassion for workers, in light of work’s power to deform their bodies, minds and souls. As Eyal Press argues in his new book, “ Dirty Work ,” people who work in prisons, slaughterhouses and oil fields often suffer moral injury, including post-traumatic stress disorder, on the job. This reality challenges the notion that all work builds character.

Wage labor can harm us in subtle and insidious ways, too. The American ideal of a good life earned through work is “disciplinary,” according to the Marxist feminist political philosopher Kathi Weeks, a professor at Duke and often-cited critic of the modern work ethic. “It constructs docile subjects,” she wrote in her 2011 book, “ The Problem With Work .” Day to day, that means we feel pressure to become the people our bosses, colleagues, clients and customers want us to be. When that pressure conflicts with our human needs and well-being, we can fall into burnout and despair.

To limit work’s negative moral effects on people, we should set harder limits on working hours. Dr. Weeks calls for a six-hour work day with no pay reduction. And we who demand labor from others ought to expect a bit less of people whose jobs grind them down.

In recent years, the public has become more aware of conditions in warehouses and the gig economy. Yet we have relied on inventory pickers and delivery drivers ever more during the pandemic. Maybe compassion can lead us to realize we don’t need instant delivery of everything and that workers bear the often-invisible cost of our cheap meat and oil.

The vision of less work must also encompass more leisure. For a time the pandemic took away countless activities, from dinner parties and concerts to in-person civic meetings and religious worship. Once they can be enjoyed safely, we ought to reclaim them as what life is primarily about, where we are fully ourselves and aspire to transcendence.

Leisure is what we do for its own sake. It serves no higher end. Patricia said that making art is often “meditative” for her. “If I’m trying to draw a plant, I’m really looking at the plant,” she said. “I’m noticing all the different shades of color that maybe I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t drawing it.” Her absorption in the task — the feel of the pen on paper — “puts the pain out of focus.”

It’s true that people often find their jobs meaningful, as Patricia did in her academic career or as I did while working on this essay. But for decades, business leaders have taken this obvious truth too far, preaching that we’ll find the purpose of our lives at work. It’s a convenient narrative for employers, but look at what we actually do all day: For too many of us, if we aren’t breaking our bodies, then we’re drowning in trivial email. This is not the purpose of a human life.

And for those of us fortunate enough to have jobs that consistently provide us with meaning, Patricia’s story is a reminder that we may not always have that kind of work. Anything from a sudden health issue to the natural effects of aging to changing economic conditions can leave us unemployed.

So we should look for purpose beyond our jobs and then fill work in around it. We each have limitless potential, a unique “genius,” as Henry David Thoreau called it. He believed that excessive toil had stunted the spiritual growth of the men who laid the railroad near Walden Pond, where he lived from 1845 to 1847. He saw the pride they took in their work but wrote, “I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.”

Pursuing our genius, whether in art or conversation or sparring at a jiujitsu gym, will awaken us to “a higher life than we fell asleep from,” Thoreau wrote. It isn’t the sort of leisure, like culinary tourism, that heaps more labor on others. It is leisure that allows us to escape the normal passage of time without traveling a mile. The mornings Thoreau spent standing in his cabin doorway, “rapt in a revery,” he wrote, “were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.” Compared with that, he thought, labor was time wasted.

Dignity, compassion, leisure: These are pillars of a more humane ethos, one that acknowledges that work is essential to a functioning society but often hinders individual workers’ flourishing. This ethos would certainly benefit Patricia Nordeen and might allow students to benefit from her teaching ability. In practice, this new vision should inspire us to implement universal basic income and a higher minimum wage, shorter shifts for many workers and a shorter workweek for all at full pay. Together, these pillars and policies would keep work in its place, as merely a support for people to spend their time nurturing their greatest talents — or simply being at ease with those they love.

It’s a vision we can approach from multiple directions, befitting America’s intellectual diversity. Pope Leo, Dr. Weeks and Thoreau criticized industrial society from the disparate, often incompatible traditions of Catholicism, Marxist feminism and Transcendentalism. But they agreed that we need to see inherent value in each person and to keep work in check so everyone can attain higher goods.

These thinkers are hardly alone. We might equally take inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s contention that Black Americans would gain political rights through intellectual cultivation and not only relentless labor, or Abraham Joshua Heschel’s view that the Sabbath day of rest “is not an interlude but the climax of living,” or the “ right not to work ” advocated by the disabled artist and writer Sunaura Taylor.

The point is to subordinate work to life. “A life is what each of us needs to get,” wrote Dr. Weeks, and you can’t get one without freedom from work’s domination. “That said,” she continues, “one cannot get something as big as a life on one’s own.”

That means we need one more pillar: solidarity, a recognition that your good and mine are linked. Each of us, when we interact with people doing their jobs, has the power to make their lives miserable. If I’m overworked, I’m likely to overburden you. But the reverse is also true: Your compassion can evoke mine.

Early in the pandemic, we exhibited the virtues we need to realize this vision. Public health compelled us to set limits on many people’s work and provide for those who lost their jobs. We showed — imperfectly — that we could make human well-being more important than productivity. We had solidarity with one another and with the doctors and nurses who battled the disease on the front lines. We limited our trips to the grocery store. We tried to “flatten the curve.”

When the pandemic subsides but work’s threat to our thriving does not, we can practice those virtues again.

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Five key trends shaping the new world of work

Job seekers in companies in regions most affected by high unemployment rates must broaden their horizons beyond a search for employment opportunities to exploring work opportunities. Image:  Alex Kotliarskyi for Unsplash

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Stay up to date:, future of work.

Listen to the article

• There is transformation happening in the world of work, both as a result of the pandemic, and underlying structural shifts.
• Companies are restructuring for efficiency, and recruiting for skills rather than potential, while talent is highly mobile.
• Digital skills are increasingly central to workers' employability.

From the phenomenon of " quiet quitting " to the great resignation , the post-pandemic reluctance of workers to return for the office has been well documented . There are other changes happening as a result of the subsequent economic slowdown: employment offers have been rescinded amidst layoffs in technology companies often seen as beacons of growth, and a STEM skills shortage has led to calls for upskilling and re-skilling programmes in the workplace and a global scramble for talent . But many of the trends we are currently seeing in the world of work predate the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are five shifts that look set to endure:

1. Restructuring companies for efficiency

Changes to industry structures and disruptions to business models have encouraged companies to restructure for relevance and competitiveness. Companies such as General Electric have split while others have responded with mergers, as in the case of Tata Group . Holding companies that have been able to do without job cuts, like Alphabet, are calling for an increase in employee productivity .

Have you read?

Hybrid entrepreneurship - 5 reasons to build a venture while still working , what is the optimal balance between in-person and remote working, a new study shows just how beneficial remote working can be.

Despite capital flow to many emerging markets, several industries remain informal, fragmented, and dominated by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) , which create 7 out of 10 jobs. Irrespective of the market, industry and approach, the pursuit of efficiency in companies prioritise retention and hiring of employees with skills and competencies that contribute directly to the bottom line.

2. A shift to skills-based hiring

Faced with the need to deliver short to medium-term results, companies are increasingly hiring for skills backed with experience, and less for potential. This has led to a decline in graduate recruitment . Many employers are eliminating degrees from their hiring criteria in favour of skills assessment. Only 11% of business leaders “strongly agree” that students are graduating from higher education with the necessary competencies. This has led to calls for higher education reform .

Young people entering the world of work have to embrace work-integrated learning opportunities available as internships, placements, and apprenticeship programmes to provide relevant experience in developing their skills. More than four in five employers believe internships can prepare graduates to succeed in their companies.

3. The mobility of talent

The global war for skilled talent has led to massive opportunities for some workers to move across jobs, industries and countries. The normalization of remote work accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and powered by digital technologies for collaboration has made it possible for top talent to glide across jobs or be in multiple jobs at a time. Research predicts that today’s youngest workers will hold twelve to fifteen jobs in their lifetime .

Therefore, individuals and companies must evaluate their work opportunities from a broader and global lens, shifting to a mindset of career mobility and the development of transferable skills for a lifetime of numerous job opportunities. At the same time, the future looks likely to hold higher trade tariffs and tighter border controls, and we have yet to see what this means for worker mobility.

4. The rise of 'work' and the decline of 'employment'

The rise of platform companies has fundamentally changed the rules of employment . Companies such as Uber have created work opportunities for around 5 million drivers worldwide without signing a single driver employment contract. The gig economy has opened up opportunities for individuals and companies to access a diverse and global pool of talents to get tasks done on demand - as well as undermining many of the structures that have underpinned employment security.

This has changed how organizations approach recruitment, with a move away from human resources departments managing employees, and towards talent strategy teams exploring how to meet human resources needs. Analytic tools to measure performance enable a holistic view of talent management in the workplace. Job seekers in companies in regions most affected by high unemployment rates must broaden their horizons beyond a search for employment opportunities to exploring work opportunities. Regulators in industries dominated by platform companies need to push for benefits to be tied to work opportunities, not just employment, to protect the interest of workers.

5. The central importance of digital skills

The digital transformation of industries has brought about massive shifts in the world of work. Organizations across all sectors, from agribusiness, finance and manufacturing to media, are evolving into technology companies . In this context, 'employability' is not just about 'soft skills' such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking and emotional intelligence. As digital platforms in AI applications, robotics, and the Internet of Things make inroads into the workplace, employability skills will be increasingly centred around using these digital technologies at work.

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Ethics and the Future of Meaningful Work: Introduction to the Special Issue

• Original Paper
• Open access
• Published: 17 April 2023
• Volume 185 , pages 713–723, ( 2023 )

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• Evgenia I. Lysova 1 ,
• Jennifer Tosti-Kharas 2   na1 ,
• Christopher Michaelson 3 ,
• Luke Fletcher 4 ,
• Catherine Bailey 5 &
• Peter McGhee 6  

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The world of work over the past 3 years has been characterized by a great reset due to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving an even more central role to scholarly discussions of ethics and the future of work. Such discussions have the potential to inform whether, when, and which work is viewed and experienced as meaningful. Yet, thus far, debates concerning ethics, meaningful work, and the future of work have largely pursued separate trajectories. Not only is bridging these research spheres important for the advancement of meaningful work as a field of study but doing so can potentially inform the organizations and societies of the future. In proposing this Special Issue, we were inspired to address these intersections, and we are grateful to have this platform for advancing an integrative conversation, together with the authors of the seven selected scholarly contributions. Each article in this issue takes a unique approach to addressing these topics, with some emphasizing ethics while others focus on the future aspects of meaningful work. Taken together, the papers indicate future research directions with regard to: (a) the meaning of meaningful work, (b) the future of meaningful work, and (c) how we can study the ethics of meaningful work in the future. We hope these insights will spark further relevant scholarly and practitioner conversations.

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Introduction: The Future Is Now

When we initially proposed the Special Issue topic, “Ethics and the Future of Meaningful Work,” to the Journal of Business Ethics in 2019, we were contemplating advances in, for example: the technological conditions of work (e.g., automation, artificial intelligence), the workplace environment (e.g., worker mobility; co-working arrangements; increasing insecurity and work intensity), workplace demographics (e.g., differences related to age, career stage, and life-stage; gender contrasts; and efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion), and geographical shifts (e.g., economic power rebalancing and increasing urbanization). Each of these factors has unique implications for transforming the world of work and therefore the meaningful connection people have to that work and its associated ethical implications. For example, when people’s work becomes automated, do they lose a link to what made that work meaningful, or are they freed up to pursue more meaningful work? What is the moral responsibility of organizations to enable the pursuit of meaningfulness in the workplaces of the future?

At that time, we could not have known that a global pandemic was approaching that would radically upend almost overnight how, where, when, and—most crucially what work means— why we work. Two international conferences that we had designated as opportunities to “workshop” potential submissions to the special issue were postponed and replaced by one global question-and-answer Zoom call. The strong levels of interest we witnessed in participating in the online forum demonstrated that scholarship on meaningful work was undeterred by the pandemic, but it also showed us that there is no replacement for face-to-face conferences to support meaningful, sustained interactions.

While many people, including us, were theoretically contemplating the implications of robots coming to take our jobs in an unknown, ambiguous, and uncertain “future of work,” a low-tech, old-style public health threat disrupted our present. The COVID-19 pandemic tragically claimed the lives of many people, including some family members and friends of (potential) contributors to and editors of the special issue. For survivors, it transformed—in both temporary and permanent ways—the world of work. The ensuing upheaval—including the designation of some workers as “essential”, increasing numbers of people working from home, and the so-called “Great Resignation” with the ensuing labor shortage—all have deep implications for employees, organizations, and even societies in terms of what work is offered, pursued, and further developed (e.g., Akkermans et al., 2020 ; Cook, 2021 ; Malhotra, 2021 ). The continuing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic further complicate our ability to experience, sustain, and provide meaningful work (e.g., Kramer & Kramer, 2020 ). Of course, the pandemic was not playing out in isolation. Other global issues—from political polarization, racial unrest, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, to the rapidly-advancing changes to the climate—compounded the instability of our economic, social, and governmental systems. Such macro-level turbulence and political unrest also makes people question their own sense of meaning and purpose, and creates a more uncertain future in which to understand and embed meaningful work (Fletcher & Schofield, 2021 ; Michaelson & Tosti-Kharas, 2020 ). The lesson, we believe—in addition to requiring us to stay nimble in our research, just as we have had to in our work lives these past several years—is that questions addressing the intersection of meaningful work, ethics, and the future of work, writ large, will become ever-more important as we collectively navigate a complex environment.

Even prior to the events of the last several years, research on meaningful work was on the rise. We witnessed a “Do what you love” cultural zeitgeist, as well as its ensuing backlash –which explored, for example, the ways in which the love employees feel for their work could be co-opted by organizations seeking to profit from and exploit this love (e.g., Cech, 2021 ; Jaffe, 2021 ; Tokumitsu, 2015 ). Management researchers also spent a great deal of time researching and cataloging what it means to view work as meaningful, including conceptualizations of work as a calling, passion, or purpose. Within the past few years, researchers have published several literature reviews (Bailey et al., 2019b ; Blustein et al., 2023 ; Laaser & Karlsson, 2022 ; Lysova et al., 2019a ; Thompson & Bunderson, 2019 ) and meta-analyses (Allan et al., 2019a , 2019b ; Dobrow et al., 2023 ), an edited handbook (Yeoman et al., 2019 ), and three journal special issues (Bailey et al., 2019a ; Laaser, 2022 ; Lysova et al., 2019b ) on these topics, illustrating growing scholarly attention. Meaningful work was also the inspiration for the theme of the 2016 Academy of Management conference in Anaheim, which aimed to foster conversations about “Making Organizations Meaningful.” These developments signal not only increasing interest in the concept of meaningful work but also raise several significant and as yet unanswered ethical questions that would benefit from interdisciplinary attention.

By joining the dialogue between ethics and organization studies about meaningful work (e.g., Michaelson et al., 2014 ) with the ever-present reality of future trends in working, this Special Issue addresses a topic of wide-ranging interest and applicability. The papers in this Special Issue demonstrate that meaningful work is not only a managerial imperative to attract and retain future workers. It is also potentially a moral imperative of individuals to pursue a positive impact through their work; of organizations to provide work that serves a worthwhile purpose; and of societies to protect activities, including work, that give shape and significance to our lives. Before we turn to an overview of the Special Issue, the papers it includes, and the themes that it covers, we briefly review the existing literature on meaningful work, business ethics, and the future of work.

What Do We Know About the Intersection of Meaningful Work, Business Ethics, and the Future of Work?

Business ethics is a discipline, meaningful work is a construct, and the future of work is a research setting or context. In theory, this means that they should be able to inform each other and do so without redundancy. Moreover, the future of work provides a kind of “extreme” research setting (Bamberger & Pratt, 2010 ) in which issues surrounding the ethics of meaningful work—from who has a right to it, to who has a duty to provide it, to what it means when meaningless work prevails—are heightened. There have been very few studies to date that truly speak to the intersection of these three topics–notable exceptions include Bowie, 2019 ; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019 ; Smids et al., 2020 ; Turja et al., 2022 . Therefore, we start by discussing prior research at the nexus between each of the pairs of topics in order to see what important questions remain to be addressed.

Meaningful Work and Business Ethics

Although scholars rarely agree on a precise definition of meaningful work (Bailey et al., 2019b ), the term generally refers to work that is personally and/or socially significant and worthwhile (Lysova et al., 2019a ; Pratt & Ashforth, 2003 ). Part of the disagreement on the definition is due to the sheer number of disciplinary approaches and perspectives that have been used to study meaningful work (Bailey et al., 2019b ). Historically, social scientists (more specifically, organizational psychologists) and philosophers (more specifically, business ethicists) have each studied meaningful work without a full awareness of each other’s perspectives (Michaelson et al., 2014 ). The former group has studied meaningful work as an individually fulfilling aspiration that has “positive valence” (Rosso et al., 2010 , p. 95), clarifies one’s identity in terms of what one does and where one belongs (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003 ), and enables self-actualization and the sense that one’s work is worthy (Lepisto & Pratt, 2017 ). The latter have studied it as, among other things, a human right (e.g., Bowie, 1998 ; Schwartz, 1982 ), a virtue (e.g., Beadle & Knight, 2012 ), and a “fundamental human need” (e.g., Yeoman, 2014 , p. 235). Meaningful work in organization studies has tended to draw primarily from the social scientific perspective to be framed in terms of an individual’s aspiration or motivation to perform meaningful work or an organization’s potential to perform better by providing opportunities for their employees to experience meaningful work (e.g., Bailey et al., 2019b ; Lysova et al., 2019a ). In business ethics, however, the focus has been more on the philosophical side, specifically on the responsibility of organizations or the state to foster a work environment in which the prevailing conditions preserve an individual’s autonomy to choose meaningful work (Michaelson, 2021 ; Michaelson et al., 2014 ). Of course, these perspectives are not mutually exclusive, and an interdisciplinary viewpoint opens up the possibility that responsible employers can serve individual employees’ preferences (e.g., Gifford & Bailey, 2018 ).

Meanwhile, an additional strand of social scientific research that explores work orientation, and particularly work as a calling—work that a person views as morally, personally, and socially significant and the end in itself (Wrzesniewski, 2012 ). However, there is extensive debate among both social scientists (e.g., Thompson & Bunderson, 2019 ; Dik & Shimizu, 2019 ) and philosophers (e.g., Care, 1984 ) about whether meaningful work that is a calling must focus on “serving self or serving others” (Michaelson & Tosti-Kharas, 2019 , p. 19). Although philosophers have long debated whether meaningfulness is a subjective phenomenon, determined by the individual, or an objective phenomenon with clear references to moral conditions in which work is performed (e.g., Wolf, 2010 ). At the same time, meaningful work scholars have considered the well-being of others as a dimension of what makes work meaningful (e.g., Lips-Wiersma & Morris, 2009 ; Rosso et al., 2010 ). Yet, with a few exceptions, scholarship has rarely asked whether meaningful work must be good for others beyond ourselves (e.g., Michaelson, 2021 ; Veltman, 2016 ). The connection between meaningful work and business ethics has been also reflected in the growing research that explores how the experience of meaningful work is enabled by ethical and responsible leadership (e.g., Demitras et al., 2017 ; Wang & Xu, 2019 ; Lips-Wiersma et al., 2020 ) and corporate social responsibility (e.g., Aguinis & Glavas, 2019 ; Brieger et al., 2020 ; Janssen et al., 2022 ).

Meaningful Work and the Future of Work

As of this writing, a Google Scholar search of the phrase “future of work” yielded nearly 90,000 results, about one-third of which were published within the past 5 years, and a regular Google search turned up 134 million hits. This observation clearly points to the recent exponential growth of interest in this topic. From the perspective of meaningful work, the future of work research tends to focus on whether job loss created by shifts like artificial intelligence and automation will pose a threat or opportunity to the quality of our work and lives, and more specifically to the pursuit of meaningful work. On the one hand, if jobs that are routine and potentially meaningless are automated, people could be freed up to pursue meaningful endeavors elsewhere, in their work and/or lives outside of work (e.g., Smids et al., 2020 ). This version of reality seems closest to the prediction by John Maynard Keynes nearly a century ago when he coined the term “technological unemployment” ( 1930 /2010). As scholars, we should be careful about judging which jobs could be automated with little worker pushback in view of the highly personal experience of work as meaningful. A poignant example is a long-haul truck driver interviewed in the documentary, The Future of Work and Death (Blacknell & Walsh, 2016 ) who, when asked what his plans are should self-driving trucks render him redundant, replies, “I’m going to retire when I die in the truck.” Truck driving reported the second-highest rate of on-the-job deaths in 2020 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ( 2020 ); however, this example suggests that there are real tradeoffs between subjective and normative perspectives on what work should be automated. In other words, should certain jobs be saved to satisfy the subjective preferences of those who want to perform them, should the market decide, or should the state paternalistically prescribe which jobs are worth saving?

When we refer to the future of work, we should also be careful not to limit our understanding to only the implications of technological unemployment, specifically the headline-catching notion of sentient robots or machines taking over individual jobs. Recent reviews of the future of work identify several dimensions, including technological, social/demographic, economic, and political/institutional (Balliester & Elsheikhi, 2018 ; Santana & Cobo, 2020 ). Within this framework, automation and AI represent only one sub-category within the technological dimension, which also includes the emergence of new forms of work (e.g., gig work, platform work, telework), digitalization, and innovation. Indeed, there has been some relevant research that focused on studying experiences of meaningful work in new forms of employment like the gig economy (e.g., Kost et al., 2018 ; Nemkova et al., 2019 ; Wong et al., 2020 ).

The social/demographic dimension of the future of work includes issues affecting individual workers, such as burnout, work-nonwork conflict; attention to broader societal imperatives including corporate social responsibility; and issues affecting vulnerable workers, such as immigrants, minorities, and older workers. Here, research has addressed how workers respond to challenges to maintaining meaningful work, including the burnout and overwork that accompany the connection to broader social imperatives like animal welfare (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009 ; Schabram & Maitlis, 2017 ) or volunteer work (e.g., Toraldo et al., 2019 ). Some emerging research has started to explore how different groups, such as those in blue-collar work or from minoritized groups, may have restricted opportunities to access some forms of meaningful work (e.g., Allan et al., 2019a , 2019b ; Lips-Wiersma et al., 2016 ).

The other two dimensions are the economic , which considers wage inequality, (un)employment, and job precarity, and the political/institutional , which considers industrial relations, trade unions, and the labor market. These future of work dimensions are addressed in sociological (e.g., Gallie, 2019 ; Lasser & Karlsson, 2022 ) and vocational research (e.g., Allan et al., 2020 ; Allan et al., 2019a , 2019b ; Duffy et al., 2016 ) on decent work, or the work that provides access to adequate healthcare, protection from physical and psychosocial harm, adequate compensation, adequate rest, and organizational values that complement family and social values. Research that explores decent work as a psychological work experience builds on the assumption that economic constraints and marginalization limit the possibility for individuals to secure decent work, and, therefore, for individuals to experience meaningful work (Allan et al., 2019a , 2019b ; Duffy et al., 2016 ). A review of the literature reveals that research on meaningful work has mostly considered the technological and social/demographic dimensions, viewing them as presenting both future threats and opportunities, but has paid less attention to the economic and political/institutional dimensions.

Business Ethics and the Future of Work

It might be fair to say that any business ethics research that is concerned about employee well-being is focused on making the future of work better than the present. From Adam Smith’s worry that division of labor capitalism made workers “stupid” to Karl Marx’s concerns about the alienation of labor, ethicists and political theorists have tried to envision better workplaces that respect human dignity (e.g., Pirson, 2017 ), support employee participation in workplace governance (e.g., Hsieh, 2005 ), and align with employees’ ethical values (e.g., Paine, 2004 ). Much business ethics research has been mobilized by the role of markets in fostering economic inequality (e.g., Beal & Astakhova, 2017 ), unequal treatment of workers in different jurisdictions (e.g., Donaldson & Dunfee, 1999 ), and structural injustices exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Van Buren & Schrempf-Stirling, 2022 ). Generally, business ethicists have worried more about sweatshop abuse (e.g., Arnold & Bowie, 2003 ), overwork (e.g., Golden, 2009 ), and workaholism (e.g., Boje & Tyler, 2009 ) than they have worried about technological future in which there is no work at all.

More recently, perhaps as robots and artificially intelligent machines have become more of a reality, scholars have begun to fret more about technology, particularly whether life will be “worth living in a world without work” (Danaher, 2017 , p. 41). It is possible that the jobs people lose to technology will be ones that were meaningful to them, making it difficult to move on (e.g., Smids et al., 2020 ; Turja et al., 2022 ). While the foreseeable future probably portends continued concern about familiar ethical challenges at work, the unforeseeable future could possibly bring unfamiliar ethical challenges having more to do with the “axiological challenge” (Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019 , p. 320) of how to replace work in a meaningful life. As long as human work remains, however, technology will influence the freedom and autonomy that have the potential to make work worth doing. Already, algorithmic decision-making about human resources (e.g., Leicht-Deobald et al., 2019 ) and the technological monitoring of employee activity (Martin et al., 2019 ) are seen to infringe upon employee autonomy, a potential invasion of the right to privacy as well as a critical element of the experience of meaningful work.

What Are the Insights From This Special Issue?

Our quest in this Special Issue was to seek to research the relatively understudied intersection of all three areas: business ethics, meaningful work, and the future of work. The call for papers ultimately attracted 72 submissions, a strong response in terms of both quantity and quality that we believe further justifies the novelty, timeliness, and resonance of the topic. After several rounds of peer-reviewed revisions, seven papers were finally selected to comprise this Special Issue along with this introductory essay. This Special Issue itself represents a variety of contributions highlighting the diversity of its authors. It features both conceptual and empirical contributions, as well as philosophical and social scientific approaches. Its authors come from universities in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, the UK, and the US. It also seems important to note, although this was not by design, that its editors come from universities in the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, and the US and represent multiple disciplinary approaches, including social science/psychology and philosophy/ethics. Overall, we hoped this Special Issue would be a valuable opportunity to truly bridge these divergent viewpoints to advance this constructive dialogue. Below, we provide a brief overview of each of the papers included in this issue.

First, Sarah Bankins and Paul Formosa (this issue) offer a conceptual article, The ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for meaningful work . The authors note that, since the industrial revolution, technological advancements have always had significant implications for meaningfulness through changes to work, skills, and affective experiences. In the paper, they propose three paths of AI deployment and discuss how, through each of these paths, AI may enhance or diminish five dimensions of meaningful work–task integrity, skill cultivation, and use, autonomy, task significance, and belongingness. The paths they identify are: replacing , in which AI takes on some tasks while workers remain engaged in other work processes; tending the machine , in which AI creates new forms of human work; and amplifying , in which AI assists workers with their tasks and/or enhances their abilities. Bankins and Formosa argue that while some pathways, such as tending the machine, may significantly limit opportunities for meaningful work, AI has the potential to make some types of work more meaningful by undertaking more boring tasks and thereby amplifying human capabilities. The authors offer the caveat that, while some jobs may be affected by just one of these paths, others may experience all three. Bankins and Formosa further draw on the “AI4People” ethical AI framework, which identifies five principles–beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice, and explicability–that enable us to assess the ethical implications of AI implementation on meaningful work. In summary, their argument suggests that there is not likely to be one single impact of AI on meaningful work, as it has the potential to make work meaningful for some workers but it can also make work less meaningful for others.

Next, in their article, Saving the world? How CSR practitioners live their calling by constructing different types of purpose in three occupational stages , Enrico Fontana, Sanne Frandsen, and Mette Morsing (this issue) examine one form of deeply meaningful work, work as a calling, to address the question of whether the sense of purpose that underpins a calling changes over time. In particular, they challenge the notion that callings constitute the end point of a journey towards self-actualization and instead draw attention to the tensions experienced by individuals as they seek to pursue their callings within organizational settings whose agendas may be very different from their own. Such tensions may be especially acute for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practitioners who may be driven by altruistic goals that potentially contrast with the realities of organizational life. Through a qualitative investigation of CSR practitioners in Sweden, the authors find that respondents constructed the purpose of their work differently across career stages. Early-career practitioners pursued an activist purpose aimed at affecting transformational change in their company’s approach to CSR, while mid-career practitioners constructed a win–win purpose grounded in the sense that not only did their work tackle social issues but it also supported their employer’s aims. Finally, late-career practitioners adopted a corporate purpose that prioritized corporate success unrelated to social aspirations—their own or their organization’s. This research reveals that callings can be lived out in different ways that may differ from a perception that callings are essentially ethical and prosocial. The authors highlight the potentially harmful long-term effects of companies prioritizing commercial goals over the social aspirations that drive CSR practitioners’ early work orientations.

In Body-centric cycles of meaning deflation and inflation , authors Anica Zeyen and Oana Branzei (this issue) draw on a longitudinal study of 24 self-employed disabled workers in UK organizations to explore how respondents used their bodies to make meaning at work during the COVID-19 global pandemic. In so doing, they employ an “ethics of embodiment” theoretical lens that views meaning-making in the context of work as inherently body-centric. Disabled workers are particularly relevant to study in this context given how marginalized they may be at work precisely because of their bodies, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing interview and diary data and analyzing it in an abductive fashion, the authors found that disabled workers purposefully enrolled their bodies in what they term dramas of suffering or dramas of thriving . These dramas not only rendered mind–body differences visible to the workers and others at work but also instigated their meaning-making at work: dramas of suffering deflated meaning while dramas of thriving inflated it. The authors developed a process model of meaning-making through body drama that showed this process to be cyclical: suffering demanded more meaning-making, which often entailed more suffering, and so on, with a similar cycle for thriving. Importantly, each respondent was locked into their own body-driven cycle of either suffering or thriving. This study provides a unique perspective on the various forms of worker disability, as well as the various paths disabled workers can take to strengthen or weaken meaningfulness in response to a challenge like the pandemic.

Frank Martela’s (this issue) paper, The normative value of making a positive contribution—Benefiting others as a core dimension of meaningful work , asserts that normative accounts of meaningful work should be expanded to include contributing–doing work that has a positive impact on the lives of other people—as another key moral dimension of meaningful work. While the view that work must make a social contribution may be assumed in some subjective accounts of meaningful work—such as when meaningfulness is associated with corporate social responsibility—it is not always viewed as a normative requirement. Martela reflects on normative accounts of meaningful work that have been built mostly around autonomy, the capability for self-development, and the avoidance of alienation. What makes these accounts normative is that they tend to impose moral responsibilities on employers to provide work that preserves the freedom of the worker to pursue work that is subjectively meaningful. However, while these accounts may be good for the worker, Martela’s account of meaningful work may also impose a normative obligation on the worker to perform work that is good for others . Moreover, this account of meaningful work not only ascribes responsibilities to the individual, but it also implies that the employer is morally responsible for providing work that enables the individual to make a positive contribution to society. Martela argues that doing work that does not make a positive impact or being separated from the positive contribution one’s work is making, is its own form of alienation from work.

David Silver (this issue) echoes this theme in Meaningful work and the purpose of the firm while expanding on what the pursuit of a positive social contribution means for the organization. He argues that it is important to create products and services that provide a benefit to the people who ultimately use them. However, he asserts that doing so is the fundamental goal of the firm, not merely the aim of meaningful work. Silver thus situates his examination of meaningful work in the context of debates about the purpose of the firm, particularly against the backdrop of a profit maximization thesis that has only relatively recently been challenged as a legitimate organizational purpose. Because people typically work within organizations, Silver argues that employees’ opportunity to perform work that is meaningful by virtue of its societal contribution can either be supported or undermined by their employer’s purpose. He proposes that when that purpose is profit maximization alone, even work that makes a positive contribution to others, whether organizational shareholders or other stakeholders, may not feel meaningful. Conversely, when the purpose of the firm is to benefit end users, even work that might otherwise be viewed as meaningless can be imbued with a sense of serving a meaningful purpose.

In his paper, What makes work meaningful? Samuel Mortimer (this issue) acknowledges that meaningful work must be both personally motivating and objectively worth pursuing. He observes that in qualitative interview studies of workers who feel their work is deeply meaningful, they not only describe how the work makes them feel, but also explain how their work contributes to a broader purpose or mission to which they are committed. Mortimer argues that the answer to the question of what makes work meaningful can be found in a burgeoning philosophical consensus that there must be both subjective and objective elements to meaningful work. He argues that subjective, or experiential, accounts of meaningful work are of value to providers of work endeavoring to attract and retain employees but that it is circular to tell someone who is seeking meaningful work to find work that feels meaningful to them. However, Mortimer also recognizes that so-called objective accounts of meaningful work show that such work, which sometimes entails significant sacrifice, can have the unintended consequence of undermining the pursuit of a meaningful life. He aims to integrate these two accounts of meaningful work by arguing that volitional commitment to a particular line of work makes it normatively meaningful.

Santiago Mejia (this issue), in The normative and cultural dimension of meaningful work: Technological unemployment as a cultural threat to a meaningful life , also seeks to expand our understanding of meaningful work beyond the subjective experience of the individual worker. In doing so, he discusses not only what makes work meaningful but also why work matters. Mejia draws attention to the pervasiveness of work in our society, which is evident in the fact that conventional measures of societal well-being include, for example, the unemployment rate, how we identify ourselves with our occupations, and how we measure time in terms of pre-work education, our working life, and post-work retirement. Mejia imagines a future in which we may potentially work less, or not at all, and envisions a cultural crisis in which the absence of work will take away a central organizing telos around which our contemporary lives gravitate—including the opportunity that work provides to contribute to our own and the common good.

What Are the Takeaways and Future Research Directions?

A consideration of the common themes emerging from the Special Issue papers points to three fundamental questions: (a) What is the meaning of meaningful work? (b) What is the future of meaningful work? and (c) How should we study the ethics of meaningful work in the future? We believe attention to these themes and questions would be particularly fruitful moving forward to inform the future of both research and practice on meaningful work, business ethics, and the future of work.

What Is the Meaning of Meaningful Work?

One of the main themes identified in the Special Issue concerns how we conceptualize meaningful work. In fact, the four final papers together grapple with this question, while each author takes a distinct perspective on what “counts” as meaningful work. Martela (this issue) and Silver (this issue) argue that meaningful work must make a societal contribution. Conversely, Mortimer (this issue) and Mejia (this issue) merge the societal, normative view of meaningful work as doing good with the more personal and sociocultural view that meaningful work is volitional (Mortimer) and culturally determined (Mejia). Although the great variety of experiences of meaningful work makes it an endlessly fascinating concept, many philosophical questions remain, including: Is what unites all such experiences the subjective sentiment on the part of the worker that what they are doing is meaningful? Is it possible for them to be objectively mistaken—for the work one thought to be meaningful actually to be quite meaningless? Given that immoral work has been used as a counterexample to challenge meaningful work subjectivism, is it reasonable to suggest that all meaningful work must be moral work?

In sum, there remains room to articulate more clearly what “the search for something more” (Ciulla, 2000 ) in one’s work consists of, whether from the subjective or objective perspective. In their implicit dialogue with one another and with philosophical research on meaningful life (especially Wolf, 2010 ) and meaningful work (including Michaelson, 2021 ; Veltman, 2016 ), these four papers in the Special Issue by Martela, Silver, Mortimer, and Mejia all suggest that while the subjective experience of meaningfulness may be necessary to render work meaningful, it is not sufficient to render work normatively meaningful. In fact, to our knowledge, these papers comprise the most comprehensive, collective attempt to challenge the assumption, shared by many organization scholars and business ethicists, that what makes work meaningful is “in the eye of the beholder” (Michaelson et al., 2014 , p. 86). They challenge this so-called subjectivist account of meaningful work by suggesting that meaningful work ought to be moral work, although some are careful to note that this does not necessarily imply that all normatively moral work is experienced as meaningful work (also see Yeoman, 2014 ).

We note that, in addition to these four papers, dozens more of the submissions we received questioned what meaningful work means. While achieving a consensus would increase continuity and foster a more coherent dialogue, a pluralist conceptualization of meaningful work permits the field to engage with a broader perspective on what constitutes meaningful work. We thus encourage future researchers to continue to conceptually and empirically explore the multiple meanings of meaningful work, similar to the efforts of research on calling (e.g., Dik & Shimizu, 2019 ; Thompson & Bunderson, 2019 ). In any case, scholars should specify upfront in their studies what they mean by meaningful work and why they have chosen this particular perspective. Furthermore, in line with Mejia’s (this issue) suggestion that meaningful work is culturally determined, we also call for cross-cultural research that examines how cultural accounts of what makes work worth doing enable or hinder people’s access to meaningful work. So far, research addressing these important questions remains scarce (cf. Boova et al., 2019 ). Moreover, we encourage scholars to consider how such debates about the meaning of meaningful work could shape whether and how organizations should implement certain organizational policies and practices with the aim of enabling meaningful work.

What Is the Future of Meaningful Work?

To our surprise, almost none of the papers that were submitted to and eventually included in the Special Issue primarily used the future of work as a research focus. Instead, many authors raised issues related to the future of work in the discussion as a contextual factor that might complicate the findings. This may indicate a reluctance on the part of authors to dive into these issues, or a paucity of research to build upon. Only Bankins and Formosa (this issue) and Mejia (this issue) put the future of work front and center. Both papers address the technological aspect of the future of work, speaking to the potential for technology, if not managed correctly, to pose a fundamental threat to meaningful work. Two other papers in the Special Issue—Fontana, Frandsen, and Morsing (this issue) and Zeyen and Branzei (this issue)—address the social dimension of the future of work. We look forward to reading future research that considers the full spectrum of relevant and timely settings at the intersection of technological, social, political, and economic dimensions of the future of work. Also, scholars should explore the ways in which these various domains interact with each other to facilitate or constrain organizations’ ability to provide, and employees’ ability to access meaningful work. To spark such a research program, we invite meaningful work scholars to team up with scholars studying the implications of the future of work. This could also boost much-needed interdisciplinary research on meaningful work.

We note that the paper by Fontana, Frandsen, and Morsing (this issue) considers corporate social responsibility, an element of the social dimension of future work that has gained increased importance, as organizations take more ownership of their role in societal ills such as climate change. Similarly, Zeyen and Branzei (this issue) discuss how disabled workers adapted to new and future realities of working triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. An important point that both papers highlight is the value of taking a process view of change over time, whether in exploring meaning-making at work (Zeyen & Branzei, this issue) or revealing deep experiences of meaningful work captured by the concept of work as a calling (Fontana, Frandsen, & Morsing, this issue). In this way, these papers emphasize the necessity for future research to consider how meaningful work changes and fluctuates over time, an issue that has so far received only scant attention. Qualitative studies (Bailey & Madden, 2017 ; Mitra & Buzzannell, 2017 ; Lips-Wiersma & Wright, 2009 ) have uncovered the temporal and tensional nature of meaningful work, while quantitative studies have found that meaningfulness fluctuates within a person on a weekly (e.g., Lysova et al., 2022 ), daily (Vogel et al., 2020 ), and situational (Fletcher et al., 2018 ) basis. We therefore call for future research to emphasize a temporal understanding not only of meaningful work itself but also of how we study it by examining, for example, how people respond to future threats to meaningful work, or how newcomers’ evaluations of meaningfulness fluctuate as they move in between onsite and remote work environments.

How Should We Study the Ethics of Meaningful Work in the Future?

The articles included in the Special Issue reflect the philosophical as well as social scientific disciplinary approaches to studying meaningful work, making an important step toward bridging disciplinary boundaries and create a shared dialogue that moves the field forward. However, we cannot help but notice that within each paper, one disciplinary perspective remains dominant. Therefore, our first three papers, representing the social scientific perspective, best dialogue with each other, while the last four, representing the philosophical perspective, primarily speak to each other. To move the field forward, we hope that in the future scholars in different research disciplinary perspectives would continue engaging in a dialogue with each other.

We believe there are ample opportunities to consider interdisciplinary perspectives on meaningful work—including in theorizing and, where applicable, data analysis—ideally involving interdisciplinary co-author teams in the design of studies informed by multiple perspectives. Such studies could include novel research contexts or mixed methods, perhaps blending qualitative and quantitative empirical approaches as well as a focus on interventions—see Fletcher and Schofield ( 2021 ) and Lysova et al. ( 2022 ) as examples. We also call for research to address the multiple levels of analysis inherent in studying meaningful work—e.g., cultural and societal, industry and occupational, organizational, and individual levels—all of which may inform and/or contrast with each other.

One particular avenue to explore is the intersection between equality, diversity, and inclusion (ED&I) and meaningful work, which we see to be promising in terms of promoting much-needed theory development. ED&I is becoming increasingly critical to address across various literatures, particularly given likely future population and demographic shifts, the continued rise of populism and nationalistic agendas as well as war and political frictions between countries, and the economic inequalities and uncertainties arising in the post-pandemic world. This requires enriching the understanding of meaningful work for minoritized individuals that involves: contextualizing meaningful work within the wider landscape of their identity, their organizational and occupational setting; and their relationships at work (Fletcher & Beauregard, 2022 ; Fletcher & Everly, 2021 ; Zeyen & Branzei, this issue). However, this understanding also needs to examine current, and potential future, objective conditions of work which may compound disadvantages.

In conclusion, rather than being the ultimate word on ethics and the future of meaningful work, we view this Special Issue as an initial, hopefully, foundational step to better understand how these topics connect with each other. Since we as academics think about our own meaningful work, we hope that some of the suggestions we have made in this essay will help spur exciting new ideas and contributions. We also hope that some of the insights generated in these papers can inform real working people, work organizations, and people in positions to set organizational and public policy. Given how much the near future of work was transformed by COVID-19 and how many major changes loom on the horizon, it seems there will be no shortage of opportunities to reflect on what work means now and how meanings have changed and will change in the future, including whether work is seen as meaningful.

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Acknowledgements

We are truly thankful to our Special Issue editor, Arno Kourula, for his continuous support and help in making this Special Issue a reality. We would like to recognize the fantastic work of our reviewers who devoted their precious time and shared their expertise with our authors while also going through turbulent times these past 3 years. Last, but not least, we thank the authors of the 72 papers submitted to this Special Issue for sharing their interesting and timely work with us.

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Evgenia I. Lysova and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas have contributed equally to this article and share the first authorship.

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Department of Management and Organization, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Evgenia I. Lysova

Babson College, Babson Park, MA, USA

Jennifer Tosti-Kharas

University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Christopher Michaelson

University of Bath, Bath, UK

Luke Fletcher

King’s College London, London, UK

Catherine Bailey

Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

Peter McGhee

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Lysova, E.I., Tosti-Kharas, J., Michaelson, C. et al. Ethics and the Future of Meaningful Work: Introduction to the Special Issue. J Bus Ethics 185 , 713–723 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05345-9

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Work is an inescapable feature of the modern world. Most of us, except for a lucky few, spend a significant portion of our lives working. If this is the case, we may as well try and make it meaningful. In a 2019 report , 82% of employees reported that it is important to have a purpose in their work and that creating meaningful work was one of their top priorities.

But what exactly makes a particular job an instance of “meaningful work”? Is it just any sort of work people happen to believe is meaningful? Or is it a job with certain objective features?

To answer these questions, we might first think about what makes work meaningless. Take the Greek myth of Sisyphus, whose punishment for misbehaviour was to roll a boulder up a mountain only for it to roll back down just before he reached the top. He had to walk back down and start again, repeating the process forever. Today, we describe laborious and futile tasks as Sisyphean.

The gods knew what they were doing with this punishment – anyone who has spent time doing Sisyphean tasks in their work will understand how soul crushing they can be.

Fyodor Dostoevsky certainly understood this. Partly informed by his own experience in a labour camp, the novelist wrote that : “If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely … all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”

This article is run in partnership with HowTheLightGetsIn , the world’s largest ideas and music festival, which returns to Hay-on-Wye from May 24-27. On Sunday, May 26, The Conversation’s Avery Anapol will host a live event delving into whether “meaningful work” exists in today’s age. Check out the festival’s full line-up of speakers and don’t miss an exclusive 20% off tickets with code CONVO24.

People may believe such Sisyphean tasks are meaningful (maybe this is the only thing that makes it bearable), but is this belief alone enough to make it so? Many philosophers don’t think so. Instead, they argue that for an activity to be meaningful, it must also contribute to some goal or end that connects the person doing it to something larger than themselves. As philosopher Susan Wolf puts it, meaning requires seeing “one’s life as valuable in a way that can be recognised from a point of view other than one’s own”.

In my own research into the meaning of work, I argue that for a job to be meaningful, it requires some objective feature to connect the worker with a larger framework that extends beyond themselves.

This feature, I suggest, is social contribution: are you making a positive difference with your work? Is your work useful, and does it help others carry out their lives? Confidently answering “yes” to these questions places your work in the larger context of society.

Sisyphean work clearly fails against this standard of social contribution, and so cannot be meaningful. There are, at least according to some studies , a surprising number of jobs like this in modern economies. The recent penchant for “lazy girl jobs” and “fake email jobs” suggest that some young people may actually be seeking out such work as a way to maintain a healthier work-life balance and separate their sense of self from their job.

Read more: This philosophical theory can help you stop taking criticism personally

Another implication of my view is that work cannot be meaningful if it not only fails to help others but actually harms them. Examples might be marketing intentionally defective products, or working in sectors that contribute to the environmental crisis and all its affiliated harms. The phenomenon of “climate quitting” (leaving an employer for environmental reasons) could be seen as the result of people deciding to quit out of a desire for meaningful work.

These examples suggest that a job will not automatically be meaningful just because it contributes to the economy. While market value and social value sometimes overlap (for example, working in a supermarket helps put food in people’s stomachs), these two kinds of value can come apart.

We must think about who benefits from our work, whether their social position means this benefit comes at the cost of others being harmed, and whether there are likely to be unintended negative consequences from our work.

Meaningful work within organisations

On top of just asking whether some jobs positively contribute to others, I also suggest that work will struggle to be meaningful when workers do not experience their contributions as palpable. In other words, can you see the contribution you are making in your work, or do you feel abstract and removed?

This is especially relevant to people with jobs in complex companies or large organisations. Most companies do not give ordinary workers influence over big decisions that affect how the company operates in society (such as decisions about what product to produce or service to offer, which markets it operates in and so on). Instead, this influence is limited to managers and executives.

As a result, workers can easily become disconnected and alienated from the social contribution contained in their work, thereby preventing it from being meaningful for them. Take the following from an auditor of a large bank : “Most people at the bank didn’t know why they were doing what they were doing. They would say that they are only supposed to log into this one system … and type certain things in. They didn’t know why.”

The issue here isn’t that the workers aren’t contributing (banks have an important social function after all), but that in their day-to-day work they are completely removed from how they are contributing.

One way to make more work more meaningful for more people would be to think about how large organisations could more democratically involve workers in these sorts of decisions. This could mean giving workers veto powers over strategic decisions, having worker representatives on company boards , or even turning the company into a worker cooperative .

Research suggests democratic arrangements like these can help people find a sense of meaning in their work by connecting them more closely to the positive outcomes that result from it.

A fan of cutting-edge debate and putting ideas at the centre of public life? Then you won’t want to miss HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest ideas and music festival this spring. Returning to Hay-on-Wye from May 24-27, the event will convene world-leading thinkers and Nobel prize-winners including David Petraeus, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, Amy Chua, Peter Singer and Sophie Scott-Brown. A remedy to online echo-chambers, the festival unites speakers across disciplines to chart tangible solutions to the crises of our era.

And don’t miss The Conversation’s live event at the festival on Sunday, May 26 with Avery Anapol delving into whether “meaningful work” exists in today’s age. We’re delighted to offer 20% off tickets with the code CONVO24. Get discounted tickets here .

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World of Work

The world of work comprises several things that most people resonate with, for instance, employers, promotions, occupations, and jobs, among others. In other words, in most cases, people tend to label all these aspects based on their understanding of the nature of workers and the nature of the organization; for instance, in as much as we all resonate with these things, everyone has a different experience while interacting with them. In as much as various opinions and theories help understand work, why people work, and the motivation to work, various factors motivate employees to work. With the daily hassle and tussle that comes with the little activities around work, workers face frustration and irritation while at work. For instance, having a heavy workload, conflicts with colleagues, and lack of support from supervisors, among others, while working in a particular role. Nonetheless, there are daily uplifts in the workplace that promote positive experiences, which also help promote good performance for the employee and the organization. Employees need motivation for better performance while working in various positions in the company; thus, this essay will expound on employee attitudes to work, focusing on various factors of motivation as well as employee experience in their roles.

An employee’s attitude towards work is very important for the effective production and performance of the organization; in other words, attitude motivation comes from employers motivating their employees by influencing how they think or behave towards various employment activities. In other words, motivation and attitude to work are closely linked to the success of an organization. With strong motivating factors in the organization, the team will be able to work in unison and achieve the objectives and goals of the organization effectively. Moreover, with a positive attitude, the career trajectory can be channelled towards work motivation, further contributing to the organization’s performance and success (Sitopu, Sitinjak, & Marpaung, 2021, p 77). All employees working within a particular organization aim to achieve satisfaction and appreciation for the work and energy they put into the organization. The feeling of acknowledgement, appreciation and respect are a measure and drive to enhance production for better results and increase the company’s chances of attaining its goals. The primary motivator to work for most employees is survival; in this case, the employee is motivated to work based on the necessity for food, shelter, educating their children and accumulating enough savings for a better future. Nevertheless, motivation out of survival has a different impact on the employee’s attitude, in that most employees motivated out of survival have no appreciation for the work. They do the work out of necessity, not with the zeal or morale needed.

Based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, a person’s behaviour can be influenced by the nature of their unsatisfied needs; thus, an employee’s need can be motivated by social needs, self-actualization, safety needs, physiological need and esteem needs (Cui, Wang, Chen, Wen, & Han, 2021). One factor that motivates employees is appreciation and recognition for work well done; in this case, it helps satisfy Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs for esteem and boosts the employee’s ego. Recognition not only makes an employee feel good but also helps improve their attitude towards work and feeling of accomplishment in the workplace. In other words, recognition triggers better performance by recognizing good behaviour or efforts, and there are chances of consistency and repetitive action of significant impact on the organization’s success. Nonetheless, this also applies in the disciple process of employees because it helps discourage certain behaviour that doesn’t add significant value to the company, thus influencing the employee’s attitude.

Similarly, the other factor that motivates employees is being involved in decision-making and making additional input to the company’s matters. In this case, the company can show employees they are valued and that the organization’s success is a collective and team effort. This measure is highly effective as it helps paint a clearer and bigger picture of the firm’s objectives, and it helps shift attitude from reporting to work for the paycheck to coming to work to help steer the organization to great heights in the market. In other words, people desire to know the performance and direction the company wants to take; they are interested to know if the direction suits their career inspirations, desires and security. Nevertheless, the company also gets a boost of in-grown ideas that can be highly effective in improving competitive advantage and market share; with such growth, the employees get a positive attitude toward their work.

The management and leadership approach of the company also plays a huge role towards motivating employees to work. For instance, an understanding supervisor pays heed to how employees receive information, correction, instruction and discipline. In other words, the supervisor should be one with social skills to understand the moods and emotions of the employees. In addition, this improves the attitude of employees as they are guaranteed to be in a workspace that is concerned about their well-being; this motivates them since the relationship between management and employees is conducive to better performance. Moreover, having management that considers career growth and development by considering the strengths and abilities in assigning work also improves attitude to work. In this case, the management delegates duties to sharpen leadership skills and groom an employee for a promotion. Therefore, this motivates employees, improving the organization’s performance (Basalamah & As’ad, 2021, p 99). The management also ensures that the working conditions are improved and offers social amenities like a nursery for mothers with young ones, totally shifting the attitude of employees. In this case, female employees feel valued and are guaranteed job security as their separate family lives can’t affect their job in any way; this is also competitive and makes employees work harder as not many companies offer such facilities. In addition, to ensure employees stay motivated and maintain a positive attitude to work, the management has to be responsive to staff problems and challenges in their respective workplaces; how they approach complaints and concerns reflects highly on an employee’s attitude. If they respond quickly and ensure employees are comfortable, there is guaranteed improvement in productivity due to the feeling that they can be heard; thus, they are obligated to perform accordingly.

Lastly, monetary rewards also help motivate and improve attitudes to work, for instance, good wages. If the employer works for survival, in that the money they get isn’t enough to meet basic needs, the attitude of such an employee will always be down. Nonetheless, wages were to be paid based on performance and not seniority. In that case, remunerations should reflect the level of appreciation for performance and effort put into the organization’s success. The management should not hold on until employees have gotten better proposals before they are willing to do that. In other words, to promote a positive attitude towards work, give them the respect they deserve (Alrawahi, Sellgren, Altouby, Alwahaibi, & Brommels, 2020). Ultimately, the management ought to expect to give employees something other than just a paycheck. If all your business implies just a paycheck, any tantamount paying position and offers will come their way. Therefore, the leadership team should give employees challenges, recognition, opportunities for improvement and advancement, praise, and an environment where they can feel pleased to work.

Job roles also influence attitude and motivation regarding work in the organization. In this case, there are usually positive and negative factors employees experience due to the various job roles they perform. Job roles impact occupation fulfilment and satisfaction in the workplace, thus impacting the expansive nature of the organization as well as the career development of the employees. Job roles have a positive experience for employees, allowing for growth opportunities and skill development. No employee desires to stay trapped in a similar job, doing the same activity and tasks for the rest of their workdays without development and growth. Job roles offer a positive factor to the employees’ experience as it helps bring out the potential of an employee through the proper utilization of their talents; in most cases, job roles offer an opportunity for one to explore interesting and unique abilities that should be sharpened and utilized (Lambert, Keena, Leone, May, & Haynes, 2020, p 407). Thus, the management of any organization should offer training programs to keep every employee up to par with changes within their fields. In addition, job roles allow employees to contribute to the organization’s growth by putting their knowledge and skills to work. In other words, assigning job roles to employees help in the in-house training of employees. Thus, these learning experiences for employers and employees help build trust, reduce apathy, and develop deep connections with the workforce. Employees develop positive attitudes and feel more motivated because their high-level knowledge or experience is utilized for the organization’s success and self-actualization – excelling in their professions.

Furthermore, job roles help employees trust and appreciate leadership decisions and choices. Job roles help develop and improve workers’ trust and respect in their leaders, thus straightforwardly influencing their performance. Managers should assign roles based on the skill set, experience and competence of an employee; on the other hand, through delegation, they can assign supervisory roles as well (Wang, Xu, Zhang, & Li, 2020, p 19). In this case, they get to satisfy career goals for being in charge as a supervisor and understand the need for managers to be fair and impartial and treat employees as people with unique considerations and opinions. In other words, while putting an employee in that spot of making decisions, they understand their supervisors’ decisions and respect them accordingly.

Nonetheless, job roles have also negatively impacted employees’ experience. For instance, being assigned to a role that aligns differently from one’s skills and abilities has resulted in low occupation satisfaction. Moreover, this covers a broad issue within the organization since it affects the performance and productivity of the company. If Employees are not content with their roles, a couple of areas of their work are impacted, which may also affect other employees. Based on a review by the “Worldwide Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health” they found out that employees who report low fulfilment and satisfaction were due to the lack of morale in the job roles they are assigned to do (Duan, Ni, Shi, Zhang, Ye, Mu, & Wang, 2019, p 9). in line with low satisfaction from the poor assignment of roles, the other negative factor is the lack of resources under the assigned role. When someone feels hopeless and is forced to work without the necessary tools, they lose focus and don’t consider their tasks carefully. In other words, they find various activities that truly do not make them euphoric, simultaneously dismissing the occupation they should do. When one’s role is faced with challenges that make the work of the employee hard, there will be low productivity, it is ordinary for various groups within the workforce to feel frustrated therefore, and the profits of the organization start trickling down. Employees who are unhappy with their roles are fundamentally more inclined to experience and report issues at work. Thus, employees who are satisfied or happy at work are obligated to report finding out about learning in their business. Moreover, job roles and responsibilities give employees more pressure to perform and be productive in delivering the assigned tasks, resulting in job stress among employees.

In a nutshell, In as much as various opinions and theories help understand work, why people work, and the motivation to work, various factors motivate employees to work. With the daily hassle and tussle that comes with the little activities around work, workers face frustration and irritation; job roles also influence attitude and motivation regarding the position in the organization. In this case, there are usually positive and negative factors employees experience due to the various job roles they perform. Job roles impact occupation fulfilment and satisfaction in the workplace; it has also helped appreciate the organization’s leadership and helped in employee career development and growth, thus impacting the expansive nature of the organization and the employee’s career development. Employees need motivation for better performance while working in various positions in the company; such factors include good wages, the satisfaction of their esteem through recognition, allowing and offering opportunities for career growth and paying keen attention to social interactions and relationships while handling employees.

Alrawahi, S., Sellgren, S. F., Altouby, S., Alwahaibi, N., & Brommels, M. (2020). The application of Herzberg’s two-factor theory of motivation to job satisfaction in clinical laboratories in Omani hospitals.  Heliyon ,  6 (9), e04829. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020316728

Basalamah, M. S. A., & As’ad, A. (2021). The Role of Work Motivation and Work Environment in Improving Job Satisfaction.  Golden Ratio of Human Resource Management ,  1 (2), 94-103. Retrieved from https://goldenratio.id/index.php/grhrm/article/view/54

Cui, L., Wang, Y., Chen, W., Wen, W., & Han, M. S. (2021). Predicting determinants of consumers’ purchase motivation for electric vehicles: An application of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model.  Energy Policy ,  151 , 112167. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421521000367

Duan, X., Ni, X., Shi, L., Zhang, L., Ye, Y., Mu, H., … & Wang, Y. (2019). The impact of workplace violence on job satisfaction, job burnout, and turnover intention: the mediating role of social support.  Health and quality of life outcomes ,  17 (1), 1-10. Retrieved from https://hqlo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12955-019-1164-3

Lambert, E. G., Keena, L. D., Leone, M., May, D., & Haynes, S. H. (2020). The effects of distributive and procedural justice on job satisfaction and organizational commitment of correctional staff.  The Social Science Journal ,  57 (4), 405-416. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.soscij.2019.02.002

Sitopu, Y. B., Sitinjak, K. A., & Marpaung, F. K. (2021). The Influence of Motivation, Work Discipline, and Compensation on Employee Performance.  Golden Ratio of Human Resource Management ,  1 (2), 72-83. Retrieved from https://www.goldenratio.id/index.php/grhrm/article/view/79

Wang, C., Xu, J., Zhang, T. C., & Li, Q. M. (2020). Effects of professional identity on turnover intention in China’s hotel employees: The mediating role of employee engagement and job satisfaction.  Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management ,  45 , 10-22. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1447677020301728

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The world of work is changing rapidly. Working conditions today are not the same as before and people no longer rely on taking one job for life. Discuss the possible causes for these changes and give your suggestions on how people should prepare for work in the future.

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In many countries children are engaged in some kind of paid work. Some people regard this as completely wrong, while others consider it a valuable work experience, which is important for learning and taking responsibility. What is your opinion?

Many people find it difficult to speak in front of and to present to anaudience. it is believed that this skill should be taught in school. why is this important to what extent do you agree or disagree with it, you are going to take a short holiday in singapore and you want to rent a holiday apartment while you are there. write to the tourist information office. in your letter: -explain what you need. -say when you plan to be there. -ask for information about prices., some people say that feeling of competition should be encouraged in children others say they should be taught to become cooperative. what is your opinion, more people live alone today than they did in the past. do you think this is a positive or negative development give your opinion and relevant examples to support your view..

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Work and Career Essays

Reducing the Working Week

by Hayder Ahmed (Leeds, UK)

The length of the working week does not reflect modern lifestyle needs. It should be substantially reduced to give people more leisure time and time with their families. How far do you agree with this statement? Day by day, the life is becoming more complex and very difficult and people work for long time in every day. It is agreed that the number of working day in a weak should be reduced to give workers more free time with their families. Analysing both difficulty and complexity of life nowadays as well as people work hard for long time will show this. Firstly, today, the life is complex and people spend a long time working very hard without a rest time. For instance, people work from the beginning of morning to the end of evening very hard. When they back to their home, they might be tired and stressful. Therefore, people can not find a free time to talk and discuss with their families and spend enjoyable time with them. Thus, this makes it clear why people need for more free time every week. Secondly, as people work hardly for a long time during a working day, they might be stress and their health could be not good. For example, when workers do their job, they will be standing all the time and sometime doing hard without a rest time. Thus, their body could be very tired and in a bad condition and this routine continues every day. From this, it becomes quiet evident that why decreasing the number of working day is important for people health. In summary, people are working very hard for long time. Therefore, their health condition could be bad and they do not spend more time with their families. Thus, it is clear why the idea of increasing the number of working day can not be supported. After analysing this subject, it is predicted that the drawbacks of working a long time without rest more than benefits. (295 words) ***** I'd appreciate some feedback for my essay on work and careers.

Working Part-time while at High School

Some high (secondary) school students work part-time while some do not, instead just focusing on their studies. What are the advantages and disadvantages of part-time jobs for high school students? Many high school students take up jobs in their free time. Some parents discourage their teenagers from working while studying. Both these cases have good and bad points. The students who take up part-time jobs become responsible. A job brings them income by which they get spending power. For example, a teen who works can use his money to buy his own text-books, pay for his lunch at the canteen, and also purchase personal things for himself. This reduces the burden on their parents especially in low-income families. These high school kids learn to spend wisely and hence tend to practice the art of saving for a future need. There are also drawbacks of getting themselves employment. They can get distracted from their studies. This can happen because a student may want to put in more hours of work in order to earn more cash. As a result, he will spend more time working and less time focusing on his educational side. Another downside is that with money power in his hands, he could easily fall prey to bad habits like gambling, drugs and smoking. This can lead to destruction of his academics and ultimately destroy his future career. Different homes are different when it comes to their financial state. Hence, low income groups might prefer if their children make a small earning to support themselves. However, high society people may not be in favor that their offspring gets employed as they feel it is below their status and , besides they can fund their teens.

Not Paying Taxes Essay

Some people believe that they should be able to keep all the money they earn, and should not have to pay tax to the state. To what extent do you agree or disagree? Every citizen have to pay a amount of their income. Countries implement changeable income taxes that generally depends on people`s rich rate. You will be seen end of the this Essay, how we are returning paid taxes by government. We use money every moment of our life for buying necessary things such an food, drinks and other costs to survive our life. And this provided product to us is controlling by government. There are massive official that they are working to supply our needs behind of this process. Those officials earn money from our taxes. On the other hand, governments have very large of responsibilities on own citizens such a security, relationship with other countries that is for giving right when they left their country, service that is for every sector to survive their life. To sup up, we have to pay taxes for this a lot of wheel can work. It is obligated rule for all citizens. Likely there are strict rules that someone reduce to pay income taxes , government do punish by fine or imprisonment .

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Photo essay: Changing world, changing work

Date: 28 February 2017

The world of work is changing fast, through innovation, increasing mobility and informality. But it needs to change faster to empower women, whose work has already driven many of the global gains in recent decades.

Women still predominantly occupy jobs that pay less and provide no benefits. They earn less than men, even as they shoulder the enormous—and economically essential—burden of unpaid care and domestic work.

Realizing women’s economic empowerment requires transformative change so that prosperity is equitably shared and no one is left behind. The international community has made this commitment in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Every woman should enjoy her right to decent work. As a global champion for gender equality and women’s empowerment, UN Women asks: What do we need to get there?

EQUAL PAY FOR WOMEN

It doesn’t matter where they work or what they do. Women globally are paid less than men for the same work.

Why does the gender pay gap persist? In many countries, disparities in education have begun to close. But that’s not enough to knock down gender-based discrimination in the world of work. It keeps women out of some jobs and segregates them into others—often the lowest paying ones.

Many constraints stem from balancing paid work and family responsibilities. Inflexible working hours and limited parental leave are among the factors forcing women into part-time employment or even out of the workforce for long stretches. Some countries still mandate women to retire earlier than men.

What can we do? Call for passing and enforcing laws and regulations upholding the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. Ensure that businesses do their part to close the gender pay gap.

CLOSE THE PARTICIPATION GAP

Record numbers of women are being paid for work. But labour force participation rates lag those of men .

Three-quarters of working-age men are in the labour force, compared to half of women, and in some regions, young women are unemployed at much higher rates than young men.

These gaps suggest that not all women who want to work can do so . Some are discouraged by gender bias. Others find no way of surmounting barriers, such as the lack of parental leave, and child and dependent care. Whatever the cause, women have a right to participate equally. The economics are compelling too—a potential boost of 28 trillion USD to global annual GDP by 2025.

What can we do? Enact paid parental leave and flexible work policies, provide child care, and encourage public and private employers to aim for gender parity at all levels of hiring.

SHARE UNPAID CARE!

Women make a huge economic contribution that fills gaps in services. Why is it unshared and uncounted?

Cooking, cleaning, caring for children and the elderly—economies depend on such work, valued at between 10 and 39 per cent of GDP. It can contribute more to an economy than manufacturing or commerce.

Unpaid care and domestic work fills gaps in public services and infrastructure—and are largely provided by women. That’s an unfair burden and an unfair barrier to equal labour force participation and pay. Reducing these requires shifting norms around who does this work, and investing in decent, paid work in the care economy.

What can we do? Pass policies that reduce and redistribute unpaid work, such as through more paid jobs in the care economy, and encourage men to share care and domestic work. Invest in systems to provide water, electricity, transportation and other essentials that reduce household labour.

FOR EVERY WOMAN: DECENT WORK

Far too many women labour in informal work with little pay or protection of their rights.

Gender discrimination unfairly concentrates women in jobs as street vendors, domestic workers and subsistence farmers, among other informal occupations. For women with few skills or knowledge of their rights, or who have migrated to another country, informal jobs may be the only option to earn a living.

Informal employment typically is poorly paid. Falling outside the reach of labour laws, it can be unsafe and bereft of social benefits, such as pensions, sick pay and health insurance. Globally, 57 per cent of domestic workers have no limitations on their working hours.

What can we do? Extend social protection and minimum living wages, promote the transition to formal employment in line with ILO Recommendation No. 204, and ratify ILO Convention 189 on Domestic Workers.

ANY JOB IS A WOMAN’S JOB

Work is rapidly transforming. Ending occupational segregation must be part of the shift.

Technology and the greening of economies provide new opportunities for women in the world of work. But gaps need to be closed, with women over-represented in lower-paid jobs and under-represented in leadership positions, and in science and technology. Half the global working population is in the service sector, dominated by women; their share reaches as high as 77 per cent in East Asia.

Gender barriers in work are embedded in discriminatory laws, social norms and policies. Trade policies may take advantage of a cheap female workforce, for instance. Fiscal policy may limit spending on services that could help women better balance work and family.

What can we do? Take urgent policy action to eliminate barriers that discriminate against women workers. Provide education and training for women that open opportunities for women in the changing world of work.

ORGANIZING: IT’S A WOMAN’S RIGHT

The nature of women’s work often keeps them outside the reach of labour organizing and union protections.

Women’s ability to organize in workplaces and communities is indispensable for upholding labour rights. Women’s collective voice is a pathway to ensuring decent work, and to influencing public policy priorities. In trade unions, women members have driven achievements in organizing and collective bargaining, including among highly vulnerable groups such as domestic workers.

Yet many barriers remain to the right to organize, including repressive laws . Women working part-time or isolated in homes may have fewer opportunities to learn about, form or join protective networks, self-help groups or organizations such as unions.

What can we do? Aim for gender parity in decision-making positions in trade unions, worker and employer organizations and corporate boards. Urge governments, employers and organized workers to jointly promote the human and labour rights of all women workers.

STOP HARASSMENT AT WORK!

Violence against women is a violation of their rights. In the workplace, it imposes high costs.

Going to work presents risks of violence and harassment for women across all ages, incomes and job types. A boss may link advancement to sexual favours. A taxi cab might become a source of income and a risk for rape.

The consequences are many . Damages to physical and mental health can lead to absenteeism, lower earnings and job loss. Women may feel unfairly constricted in their choice of employment or freedom of movement.

What can we do? Enact and implement laws and policies to criminalize all forms of workplace harassment and gender-based violence. Work with unions, employers and advocates for informal workers so all women know their rights and can seek redress for violations.

EQUALITY IN LAWS AND BENEFITS

Discriminatory legal provisions and social protection gaps increase the chance that women will live in poverty.

Only 67 countries have laws against gender discrimination in hiring practices, while at least 155 have one or more gender-based legal restrictions on women’s employment and entrepreneurship. Discriminatory laws and inadequate legal protection compound gender inequalities and disempower women workers.

Women also lack social protection benefits—they are over- represented among the 73 per cent of people with only partial or no access to pensions, unemployment compensation and even health insurance. This renders them more vulnerable to poverty—on top of earning less than men.

What can we do? Remove all discriminatory labour legislation in line with CEDAW. Enact well-designed social protection schemes that reduce poverty and reach all women, including those who are working, retired or providing unpaid care.

ECONOMIES THAT WORK FOR WOMEN WORK FOR ALL

The future envisioned for humanity and our shared planet, across all of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, rests on fully freeing women’s power and potential. It is time to act on the high ambitions of the 2030 Agenda and guarantee that every woman can thrive and contribute, including through decent, dignified work.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Work Experience — The Importance Of Work Experience

The Importance of Work Experience

• Categories: Work Experience

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Published: Mar 6, 2024

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Advancing social justice, promoting decent work ILO is a specialized agency of the United Nations

Migrated Content

ILO Working paper 100

This paper examines the experiences of delivery workers on digital labor platforms in Chile and analyses the implications of the platform business model. It highlights challenges in working conditions and algorithmic management practices, which are crucial to address for ensuring decent work, as Chile moves towards implementing a new law to regulate platform work.

Additional details

• Antonia Asenjo Cruz , Alberto Coddou Mc Manus , Rishabh Kumar Dhir
• ISBN: 9789220400234 (print)
• ISBN: 9789220400241 (web pdf)
• ISBN: 9789220400258 (epub)
• ISBN: 9789220400265 (mobi)
• https://www.ilo.org/static/english/intserv/working-papers/wp100/index.html
• ISSN: 2708-3438 (print)
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Book review Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us Bustling around 1960s Los Angeles, a new publication explores the world of Corita Kent—also known as the ‘Pop Art Nun’—animating her unique approach to art education through a lesser known aspect of her work: photography. Photographs by Corita Kent Essay by Sophie Wright

“Everything is a source.” Tucked below a spattering of commanding signs—shouting “FULL,” “STOP,” “Take it easy”—is one of the first gems of wisdom to be found between the covers of Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us . The words are spoken by Corita Kent, an artist, designer and educator whose infinite curiosity for her surroundings and resourceful approach to creativity made her a much-loved figure in the Los Angeles community she was active in during the 1960s and beyond.

Also known as Sister Mary Corita, and later dubbed the ‘Pop Art Nun’ by the press for her bright and bold screen prints, Corita led the art department at Immaculate Heart College before leaving the order in 1968. Against the shifting social landscape of the 1960s, the college gained notoriety as a hub of radical education and progressive ideas under her care. Art was not relegated to the classroom; it was to be found in the gas stations, grocery stores and grimy streets, accessible to all. Rooted in the times she lived in, her approach was happily entangled with the visual language of consumer culture, her many exercises aimed at deconstructing it into something new that spoke loudly for love, justice and peace.

From the students who knew her to important figures of the Californian avant garde art scene to those who learnt to live and make by her playful rules through her art, Corita’s legacy shapes the hearts and minds of those who encounter it to this day. The spirit of her teachings is infectious, working like a germ of joy that spreads between people. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, you’re about to find out thanks to a new publication edited by three artists Julie Ault, Jason Fulford and Jordan Weitzman, with support from the Corita Art Center.

Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us animates Corita’s vision through a lesser-known facet of her work and life: photography. Between 1955 and 1968, the self-proclaimed collector racked up over 15,000 35mm slides which have recently been digitized for the first time.

For Olivian Cha, the center’s Curator and Collection Manager who contributes an essay to the book, the slides provide an intimate portal into Corita’s creative process. “There is a kind of freedom she has with her camera that is quite different from how she created and printed her serigraphs,” she says. “Photography allowed her to collect and record in abundance, with less emphasis on the final outcome or image. It was a tool for what she called ‘sorcery’—a way to see everything as a source to be reinterpreted and made into relationships and meaning.”

For Corita, photography was both a tool and a medium which means it takes on a shapeshifting role throughout the pictures in the collection. There are images used as source material for screen prints. There are photographs of students looking, learning, playing, providing important documentation of the activities of the IHC community and its events. There are portraits of LA art luminaries like Buckminster Fuller and Charles Eames that Corita invited to speak at the school. There are the photographic results of her class field trips, in which empty slide frames became “finders” used to invite people to look deeply at their surroundings.

The archive she amassed swells with a bounty of different, colorful things that defy straightforward classification. As Cha notes in the book’s essay, after the school closed and the collection was rehoused by the Arts Center in the late 90s, it was “organized according to subjects such as ‘dolls and puppets,’ ‘ideas for problems,’ ‘mad hat party,’ ‘people stamping,’ ‘photographs of sunflowers, ‘Walk in rain, etc. Where?,’ and ‘tomato, ‘hang on’—groupings likely inherited from Corita and the art department.”

For the LA launch of Corita Kent: Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us , Ault set herself the Corita-esque task of writing 25 things about the slide collection to share with the audience. “A brainstorm. An archeological dig. A messy chronicle. An image bouquet. A how-to-manual.” The list goes on, paying testimony to the many possibilities of the archive—as well as the challenges of paving a path through its eccentric topography.

These 15,000 images are an overwhelming ‘source’ in and of themselves; a treasure trove from which countless stories about Corita could be told. So which route does the book choose? It doesn’t! Instead, it invites us along for a ride full of digressions, opting to show rather than tell. A flow of bright images dance and sing through sixties Los Angeles, accompanied by snippets of Corita’s thoughts. Every now and then, an annotation diverts us to the index, replete with anecdotes and context on the who, what, where of some of the photos.

The beauty of this unruly guidebook through Corita’s world lies in its spirit of discovery which speaks both to its subject and the creative process of its makers. During the production of the book in 2022, Weitzman wrote in his notebook: “Feel so excited each time I open a new folder. Have the sense like there is all this gold, but still have no idea how this book will turn out. At very least hope it communicates the excitement of looking through everything, discovering this incredible world. So curious where it will go, how Jason and Julie will mold so many possibilities… There can be a thousand Coritas….”

As if the archive itself were an assignment, the trio got to work. “I think the three of us were all imagining Corita watching us, and we didn’t want to disappoint her! Julie, Jordan and I have all internalized a lot of Corita’s ideas and spirit, and we tried to channel it into the book,” Fulford adds. Together, these makers make good students. Though all masters of their crafts, in working collectively the editors opened themselves up to playing with the slide collection, letting go of whatever they individually had imagined the book to be and gradually infusing it with the main tenets of Corita’s approach to art.

“One thing that sticks out is how she talked about treating everything like an experiment,” says Weitzman. “I love how Corita aspired to be an amateur,” explains Fulford. “She said that the amateur doesn’t yet know what is not possible, so they jump into a situation with naive energy and big ideas.” Incorporating a beginner’s mind and a process of deep looking into their edit, three different sets of eyes achieved what one gaze could never.

Keeping a fresh eye and finding meaning amidst a mass of images were core objectives of many of Corita’s exercises—skills that wouldn’t go amiss in our own image-drenched era. Informed by the media landscape of Los Angeles, she encouraged a reframing of the chaos of the city into little bright and useful pieces. Nothing was deemed unworthy; a tin of tomatoes was as beautiful as a flower. Altars were erected out of cardboard, kites fashioned out of newsprint, ads repurposed as protest placards. Invitations to meditate on a Coke bottle for up to an hour helped students cultivate a devotion to the commonplace, reminding them that art was everywhere.

The power of valuing the ordinary, of seeing everything and anything as a potential artistic experience, can be felt throughout the collection’s images and the smiling, industrious faces of the people in them. When “everything is a source,” the everyday can be transfigured. Through the lens(es) of Corita and co, the urban sprawl of Los Angeles overflows with visual surprises and trash waiting to be discovered and reimagined as something else. Brimming with celebration, confetti, cookies, hearts, flowers and balloons, the pleasures of looking at the world and making things—especially collectively—trumped the importance of outcome.

This vibrates through the structure of the collection too, which places no singular value on any one set of eyes; we have no sense of who made each image and it doesn’t seem to matter. For the IHC, art seemed to be a social, collaborative event that fed back into the city that gave them so much. In one of the book’s quotes, Corita says: “We began to realize, along with everybody else, that what happened to the individual is largely what happens to the community; and if the individual is developed to her fullest extent, that can only be good for the other people that she’s working with or for.”

Introducing her students to worlds bigger than the four walls of the classroom, Corita encouraged them to connect with their own creativity but also with the struggles of the era they were living in. Flipping their source material on its head, they played hard to tickle the language of advertising out of its brash consumerist objectives, cropping and co-opting it to emit loving messages around the LA area.

In its own field trip around the slide collection, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us brings to life the vibrant world contained within it, as well as introducing us to some philosophies and tools to navigate through Corita’s—and our own—world with our eyes wide open.

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Witness testimony in Trump's hush money trial wraps for the day

From CNN's Kara Scannell, Lauren Del Valle, Jeremy Herb and Sabrina Souza in the courthouse

Witnesses walk through how bills were paid at Trump Org. Here’s what happened in court and why it matters

From CNN's Elise Hammond

In the hush money trial against the former president, prosecutors called two witnesses Monday who worked in accounting in the Trump Organization: Jeffrey McConney , a former Trump Org. controller, and Deborah Tarasoff , an accounts payable supervisor.

McConney walked the jury through the paper trail that showed how executives organized and paid back Michael Cohen for the money he sent to Stormy Daniels’ attorney. This is important because at the heart of the trial — the falsification of business records — are the payments to Cohen, which were listed as retainer fees.

Tarasoff described in more detail how checks were paid at the organization and when Trump’s approval was needed for payments.

Here’s what happened in court today:

Jeffrey McConney

• McConney testified that he had a conversation with Allen Weisselberg , former chief financial officer of the Trump Org., about a need to “reimburse” Cohen . McConney then showed jurors 12 checks, each for $35,000 , that were paid to Cohen in 2017. Cohen sent invoices for those checks and asked that the payments be listed as part of a “retainer agreement.” As previous testimony in the trial revealed, there was no actual retainer for Cohen.
• McConney also explained to the jury why Cohen was paid $420,000 in all and how each check was cut, first from Trump's revocable trust and then from his personal account .
• The jury also saw business records relating to the payment to Cohen that are tied to several of the 34 falsifying business records charges against Trump. The records show several rows and columns organized to record the payments.
• On cross-examination, Trump attorney Emil Bove questioned McConney about his knowledge of Trump's role in these payments. "President Trump did not ask you to do any of the things you described?" Bove asked. "He did not," McConney testified. He said he was told to do this work by Weisselberg. McConney also said he did not know if Cohen did legal work for Trump in 2017.

Deborah Tarasoff

• As accounts payable supervisor, Tarasoff said she would get an approved invoice , enter it into the system, cut the check and get it signed. Tarasoff testified that Trump or his sons needed to approve invoices of more than $10,000 and Trump was the only person who authorized checks from his personal account , including during his presidency.
• Tarasoff said Trump would sign the checks by hand. She said they were signed in black Sharpie . Tarasoff said Trump did not always sign the checks, even when Weisselberg approved them. He would “write 'void' and send it back,” she noted.
• Before Trump was president, Tarasoff testified that she “ would cut the check , put it with the backup and bring it over to Rhona (Graff) who would bring it in to Mr. Trump to sign,” referring to Trump’s former longtime assistant. The invoices and the checks were stapled together, she said, with the check on top of the invoice. When Trump became president, Tarasoff said they would mail checks to the White House .
• The jury was shown the voucher form that said "retainer" in the description line that Tarasoff said she obtained from the invoice. Tarasoff also confirmed each of the $35,000 checks with Trump’s signature were sent to Cohen.
• On cross-examination, she acknowledged that she was not present for conversations between Trump and Weisselberg about the payments. She also said she worked with Trump's children Eric, Don Jr. and Ivanka Trump, over the years. Tarasoff still works for Trump Org., which means she works for Eric Trump, who was also in the courtroom today.

What’s next: Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass estimated they still need about two weeks from tomorrow to make their case. He stresses that's a very rough estimate. The defense will also get an opportunity to call its witnesses after that if they choose.

Gag order hearing: Judge Juan Merchan  found Trump in contempt  for violating the gag order again, specifically concerning comments he made about the makeup of the jury in this case. Prosecutors had alleged Trump violated the gag order on four separate occasions . The judge ruled that the three other comments did not violate the order. "Going forward this court will have to consider a jail sanction," Merchan said, noting the $1,000 fine is not stopping him, but he told Trump “incarceration is truly a last resort .”

Remember: Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business record s. Each criminal charge relates to a specific entry among the business records of the Trump Organization, according to the indictment . Prosecutors allege that Trump allegedly disguised the transaction to Daniels as a legal payment and falsified business records numerous times to “promote his candidacy” in the 2016 election.

Prosecutors roughly estimate they need about two more weeks to make their case

Judge Juan Merchan asks the prosecution how they're doing on timing for making their case.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass says they're doing "well," but estimates they still need about two weeks from tomorrow. He stresses that's a very rough estimate.

Trump tapped defense attorney Todd Blanche's arm as Steinglass made the estimation.

What Deborah Tarasoff said in just over an hour of testimony

From CNN's Kara Scannell, Lauren del Valle, Jeremy Herb and Sabrina Souza

Deborah Tarasoff, an employee in the Trump Organization’s accounting department, testified for just over an hour Monday about the check-writing process at the company.

Tarasoff helped arrange the 12 checks for $35,000, each signed by Donald Trump and sent to former attorney Michael Cohen in 2017 as reimbursement for the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.

She testified that after 2015 any invoice over $10,000 had to be approved by Trump or one of his sons. When she created the checks, Trump would sign them, she testified — or, if he disapproved, he would write “void” on them, she said.

"If he didn’t want to sign it, he didn’t sign it," she said. She knew he was the one signing them because, "It was signed in Sharpie and it was black and that’s what he uses."

She testified she had no decision-making authority but followed instructions, including getting invoices approved, entering them into the system, cutting the checks and getting them signed.

On cross-examination, she acknowledged that she was not present for conversations between Trump and former Trump Org. CFO Allen Weisselberg about the payments.

Judge tells jury they'll wrap up early today

"Jurors we're going to stop a little bit early today," Judge Juan Merchan tells the jury.

The jurors are now leaving.

Tarasoff is off the stand

Trump attorney Todd Blanche just wrapped up his cross-examination of Deborah Tarasoff.

There won't be a redirect, and Tarasoff is off the stand

Tarasoff says she doesn't know what happened to Cohen checks after they were mailed but they returned signed

Trump attorney Todd Blanche also noted that Deborah Tarasoff was not present for conversations between former Trump Org. CFO Allen Weisselberg and Donald Trump.

"When Mr. Weisselberg on some of the emails or Mr. McConney told you to go ahead and pay it, generate a check, you didn’t get permission from President Trump himself, correct?" Blanche said.

"Correct," she said.

She clarified with Blanche that all the checks to Michael Cohen shown in court were signed and that she doesn't know what happened with the checks after she mailed them to the White House.

But she did receive them back in the mail signed.

Blanche follows up with more questions about invoices

Attorney Todd Blanche is asking Deborah Tarasoff if Trump was focused on getting ready to be president during the start of 2017.

"I think so," Tarasoff replies.

Blanche follows up and asks whether the requests to pay for invoices "happens all the time?" Yes, Tarasoff says.

Blanche is trying to rehabilitate earlier testimony from Tarasoff that Trump would sometimes void checks for invoices he didn't want to pay. "If he didn’t want to sign it, he didn’t sign it," she testified earlier.

Tarasoff says Trump Org. is family-run and says she's worked with Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka Trump

Deborah Tarasoff confirms to defense attorney Todd Blanche that the Trump Organization is a family-run business. She says she has worked with Trump's children Eric, Don Jr. and Ivanka Trump over the years.

Trump is fully turned 90 degrees in his chair while Tarasoff is testifying. His arm is over the back of the chair, and he's facing toward Tarasoff.

Prosecutors have finished their questioning of Tarasoff

Prosecutors have wrapped up their questioning of Deborah Tarasoff. Trump attorney Todd Blanche is now starting his cross-examination for the defense.

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