Travelzoo Inc. ’s 438 employees spend their days trying to find customers a good deal on flight and hotel packages. To hear managers describe their work in meetings, however, booking a customer on a cheap trip to the Caribbean can serve a higher purpose: helping someone get over the death of a loved one or meet a future spouse.
“If we all traveled, there would be significantly more peace on Earth,” Travelzoo Chief Executive Chris Loughlin said he has told employees.
Can a job just be a job? Not anymore.
Faced with a cadre of young workers who say they want to make a difference in addition to a paycheck, employers are trying to inject meaning into the daily grind, connecting profit-driven endeavors to grand consequences for mankind.
In part, professionals are demanding more meaning from their careers because work simply takes up more of life than before, thanks to longer hours, competitive pressures and technological tethers of the modern job. Meanwhile, traditional sources of meaning and purpose, such as religion, have receded in many corners of the country.
Companies have long cited lofty mission statements as proof they have concerns beyond the bottom line, and in the past decade tech firms like Google Inc. attracted some of the economy’s brightest workers by inviting recruits to come and change the world by writing lines of code or managing projects.Now, nearly every product or service from motorcycles to Big Macs seems capable of transforming humanity, at least according to some corporations. The words “mission,” “higher purpose,” “change the world” or “changing the world” were mentioned on earnings calls, in investor meetings and industry conferences 3,243 times in 2014, up from 2,318 five years ago, according to a Factiva search.
[Keep reading. . .]
I like this comment from an employee: “Siobhan Kiernan, a KPMG manager, acknowledged that she’s not a brain surgeon or a scientist. But she is helping some of those people do their taxes.” But isn’t that ENOUGH? Isn’t the actual work of the calling sufficient and worthy in itself?
Christians often think they have to spiritualize their work, adding in extra spiritual activities, such as witnessing or praying on the job, in order to make it worthy of God’s calling. But now business corporations are doing the same thing! People don’t realize that God cares about widgets and factory lines and hammering nails and typing at your computer screen and doing people’s taxes for them! Those are the tangible ways through which you and God through you serve your neighbors.
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