The concept of work is evolving (Schab, 2016). Increasingly, workers are seeking more meaningful and purposeful work that aligns with their values and passions. This has resulted in a major shakeup of workplace dynamics and the traditional view of what it means to do a job. This change has also contributed to uncertainty about future employment and careers, a lack of confidence in the concept of long-term career stability, and eroded worker loyalty to their employers.
While many definitions of work focus on the creation of economic products and values that can be consumed in the future, there is a growing body of literature that suggests that this narrow definition of work is inadequate to describe what it really means to do work. As such, a broad multidisciplinary revisiting of the notion of work is needed.
Work is the process of transferring energy into or out of a system. It can be done on any system with mass, including people. The amount of work done on the system is the product of the force exerted and the distance over which the force acts. The unit for work is the joule, which is equal to the work exerted on a mass times its acceleration. For example, the work required to lift a kilogram of weight uphill against gravity is 0.5 joules. This is because the upward force of gravity is equal to the kilogram’s weight times its acceleration.
In physics, work is an important physical concept that reveals the interplay of force and displacement. For an object to do work, it must be displaced, and the relative directions of the force and displacement determine whether the work is positive, negative, or zero. A book falling off a table onto the ground does work because the downward force of gravity is greater than the book’s weight and reaches down to the book, causing it to be displaced in a downward direction.
The value of an activity largely depends on the meaning it has for the person performing it. While this is obvious for activities like eating or sleeping, it is less clear for more complex activities such as the creation of a painting or a computer program. Moreover, the value of such activities may be diminished when the person performing them feels that they no longer enjoy or appreciate it.
While the desire for more meaningful work is driving significant changes to how and where we do work, it is critical that companies recognize that reskilling employees or replacing repetitive tasks with automation won’t provide the desired results. Instead, redefining work itself has the potential to expand value for workers and customers alike. This requires cultivating and drawing on intrinsic human capabilities to undertake work for fundamentally different purposes, rather than just to meet short-term productivity aims. To achieve this, it is necessary to understand what work is, and why it has been defined as such in the past. This article provides a chronology of the evolution of the notion of work and proposes a path forward towards a more holistic definition of this important human function.