Before the COVID-19 pandemic, meaningful work was already high on the management agenda. Employees were exhorted to find their “calling”; leaders, their “why”; organizations, their “true north.” There were good reasons for this: Studies have shown that high levels of meaning and purpose lead to improved engagement, productivity, and innovation.

But the pandemic has raised the stakes even higher. It has caused many of us to pause and reevaluate the role work plays in our lives and what truly matters to us. Employers who can’t offer meaningful work risk demotivating or losing valued employees — the very people needed to drive organizational growth and renewal.

Faced with this challenge, managers may be tempted to amplify internal messaging around corporate purpose. While purpose beyond profit is vital for a host of environmental, social, and financial reasons, relying on this approach alone to raise levels of individual meaning can backfire. The more employers try to tell employees where to find the meaning in their work, the less likely people are to actually find it. An authentic sense of purpose is not simply imposed; it is discovered.

In other words, meaning-making should be a grassroots process. But first, managers and employees must learn how to talk with one another about it. Engaging in dialogue is integral to discovering meaning. Talking with a trusted conversational partner helps us shape how we understand ourselves, interpret the world, and relate to others. And as we listen to others speak about meaning, and they listen to us, we help one another discover it.

We have found in our research and consulting work over the years that four barriers make such conversations difficult. Let’s look at each of these barriers — and how to overcome them.

[Here is the first barrier.]

Talking About Meaning Can Be Unsettling

When we ask people what meaningful work means to them, we often hear nervous laughter and comments like “That’s a funny question to ask” or “I don’t know.” Concerned that they don’t have a ready answer, they often need to be coaxed into discussion. Existential contemplations like “Why am I here?” and “What is the significance of this?” can feel quite intangible. In the workplace, where it is important to appear competent and in control, not knowing feels threatening to our identity.

Talking about meaning at work can also be disorienting. As a school principal in New Zealand said to us, “You’re tapping into something a lot bigger than [what] we usually talk about at work, which is good and important but also feels a bit more boundless than comfortable.”

Having been silent on the topic for so long, many people lack the language to articulate their deeper feelings about how work can contribute to a sense of meaning. As a result, they may miss opportunities to deepen their engagement and satisfaction with work. In developmental reviews or career conversations, employees typically do not speak up about meaning and may end up with the same unsatisfied need for it even if they are able to re-craft their job or take on another role. They may also feel isolated: In our research, we found that employees are often surprised that colleagues are on the same quest. Until conversations about meaningful work become more frequent and natural, employers will struggle to identify and meet individuals’ deeper needs.

Try to: Let employees talk about meaning in their own words. Just as meaning is deeply felt, so are the words associated with it, whether positive or negative. For example, one person might say, “I don’t like the notion of service — that’s what my pastor always talked about, and as a child I dreaded going to church with my parents. I prefer to think about impact.” Yet someone else might have an aversion to the word impact because their last workplace used it all the time but failed to measure outcomes; it amounted to empty, insincere rhetoric.

The words themselves are not wrong. But given individuals’ strong associations with them, it is best to enable people to choose their own language to describe what is meaningful to them. This will also help to ground them and make the conversations feel less disorienting. Sometimes, in our workshops, it takes people a while to come up with the right words, or they borrow language from one another. However they go about it, it is important that people find words that resonate for them rather than simply adopting corporate language. For example, employees may choose to talk about “quality relationships” rather than “internal networks” or even “collaboration” to assess whether their teamwork is meaningful.