How to Discover Meaning in Your Work — Expert Interview with Simon Azari

Is it possible to find meaning and purpose in your job? And if it is, how does one set out to find it?

 

For most people, job meaningfulness is built, not found. We sat down with Simon Azari, our Product Manager at Weploy HQ, to talk about how he crafted a sense of purpose for his career as well as his current position at Weploy.

 

To Simon, job meaningfulness stems from solving problems to help change others' lives for the better, dedicating himself to perfecting his craft and building meaningful relationships and connections at work. 

Q: Initially, what do you think ‘meaningful work’ means? Are you familiar with the term?

A: I’m not super familiar with the term, but to me, meaningful work is work that gives you purpose, over and above just clocking in and out of your job.

Q: What is your very own definition of ‘meaningful work’?

To me, work becomes meaningful when I feel directly involved in changing something for the better for someone else. Whether that’s solving a problem for a customer, making life easier for a colleague or creating a great user experience to help people get their jobs done.

Q: How do you measure your work in terms of meaningfulness? 

In my role, I can tell when my work is meaningful by how much positive impact I have on the users of our product. When I can measure that something we’ve done in the team has improved things for our users, I know that I’ve made a difference.

Q: What are some of the things you find to be ‘meaningful’ in your work currently?

The more I connect with users (Weployees, Weployers and internal users) through conversations, interviews or by understanding data, the more I connect with the impacts that we have on them. For example, when a Weployee submits a timesheet, connecting with them going through that experience gives me an insight into how that person brings Weploy into their lives and gives us a chance to meaningfully make things better for them when going through that process.

Q: Have you ever felt ‘lost’ in a role? How would you describe that feeling?

I have, especially at bigger companies; and it feels like being disconnected from real people. I felt this way when I felt separated from the people using the products we were building, so I couldn’t see and feel how we were impacting them.

Q: When was the first time you felt like what you were doing had value, even if it wasn’t considered traditionally “meaningful?”

The first time was probably in the first company I worked at, where we found a lot of friction in the signup journey on our website. We made some changes to the experience, and we saw that more customers were successful in signing up. This sounds small, but it gave me evidence that real people signing up to our website could get their task (of signing up) done in a simpler, more stress-free way. People have busy lives, and reducing the effort involved in a small task like this can have a big impact on people.