How important is meaningful work to you? With the buzz about meaningful work coming through such channels as Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, through Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, and through various business blogs and magazines extolling the virtues of rewards in lieu of pay, it’s a question worth exploring.

Gone are the days when the sole purpose of work was to put food on the table. Nowadays, people are looking for more meaning in their work lives. The past few decades have seen a decline in job satisfaction levels and work attitudes. Throw in the recent recession, a few corporate scandals, terrorism, the shift of 2012, and you find people questioning their reason for living and what they should be doing with their lives.

Some people will quit their jobs to pursue work that fulfills them, while others look for more fulfillment in the workplace. If they don’t get the meaning in their work, they will expend their energy elsewhere. You know these people: they just do the minimum expected of them and go home — to do that other thing that they love.

But what encompasses meaningful work? According to Paul Fairlie, of Paul Fairlie Consulting, a firm that helps employers assess and create meaningful and healthy workplaces, meaningful work includes anything that helps you fulfill a life purpose, makes you happy, and that you would gladly do for no pay. Meaningful work also gives variety, control, feedback, recognition, and makes you do good for the world.

In this light, human resources personnel and managers can do their part in bringing more meaning to the job. Here are some tips:

1. Conduct a survey to find out what really matters to your employees. Then find ways to make the work seem more like those things that matter to them

2. Make employees more aware of meaningful work that’s already present in the organization. Make a connection between the individual jobs and the mission statement of the organization. Flaunt the meaningful work in your organization to attract and recruit people

3. Consider giving employees the opportunity to do philanthropic work outside of work

4. Provide better recognition. Recognition is important to employees

5. Revise your job descriptions and get employee feedback on how they could do their jobs differently. This is called “job crafting”, a technique from Amy Wrzesniewski at the Yale School of Management.

We’d like to have your feedback on what you believe constitutes meaningful work and how it can be incorporated in jobs. Do share with us.