SPW

“We wanted to better understand meaning at work in order to design well-being initiatives truly aligned with employees’ lived realities.”

The Service public de Wallonie organizes an annual event dedicated to workplace well-being for HR professionals, quality of work life managers and public sector leaders within the Walloon public administration.

During the COVID-19 health crisis, the 2021 edition had to address a challenge that had become central for many organizations: how can employee well-being and engagement be maintained when professional, relational and organizational reference points have been deeply disrupted?

In this context, the SPW wanted to organize a half-day event providing participants with frameworks for understanding meaning at work in order to help them design workplace well-being initiatives more closely connected to employees’ actual experiences.

Understanding meaning at work in order to better support workplace well-being

This intervention emerged from a reality widely observed during the pandemic: the difficulties experienced by teams were not limited to organizational or health-related issues. They also reflected deeper questions regarding people’s relationship to work, the usefulness of their missions, professional relationships and work-life balance.

The objective of this session was therefore to provide managers and HR professionals with practical frameworks for understanding meaning at work so they could more accurately identify the levers available to support employee well-being.

The intervention was designed as a hybrid format combining:

• a webinar providing theoretical insights;
• interactive discussions with participants;
• collaborative workshops based on practical cases inspired by situations experienced during the health crisis.

The goal was to move beyond an approach focused solely on the symptoms of distress and instead offer a broader understanding of the mechanisms that strengthen or weaken meaning at work within organizations.

Translating research on meaning at work into actionable tools for organizations

The intervention drew on research related to meaning at work, career transitions and the effects of crises on individual and collective reference points.

The webinar notably explored meaning at work through six major dimensions from the theoretical model developed by Estelle Morin: the purpose of work, interest in work activities, feelings of fairness and respect, social relationships, security and autonomy, and work-life balance.

These different dimensions served as an analytical framework for understanding the difficulties intensified by the health crisis: loss of collective reference points, isolation linked to remote work, tensions around recognition, mental overload, feelings of unfairness and questioning the social usefulness of certain jobs.

The objective was to demonstrate that workplace well-being initiatives cannot be designed independently from the ways individuals experience and interpret their work on a daily basis.