Most people around the world work for a living and spend a significant amount of their time as an adult at work. From their late teens (typical employment age) to their mid 60s (usual retirement age), most people spend the biggest chunk of their conscious time (time not spent sleeping) engaged in work in some form or capacity - an estimated 90,000+ hours! What this implies is that by the time they get to retirement age, their work experience makes up a major portion of their life experience. So the response to the question “Was that a life well lived?” is by default heavily impacted by the response to the question “Was that a work-life well lived?”. It becomes critical then to ensure that people experience deeply fulfilling and meaningful work lives so that it can contribute to their having fulfilling and meaningful lives in general.
But research has shown that only a small minority of workers worldwide enjoy such high quality, optimal work lives. In fact, Gallup’s State of the GLOBAL Workforce 2021 Report found that employee engagement around the world dropped from 22% to 20% from 2019 to 2020 while workers’ daily stress reached a record high in going from 38% to 43% over the same period. These results are deeply troubling.
What are the key lessons and practices from the fortunate few who do have optimal work lives that we can learn and translate into advice and guidelines for the rest of the working population? We need to note that there is no shortage of books, talks, webinars, discussions, etc. that offer suggestions on all aspects of work life in organizations. Most of them focus on helping organizations become more effective and efficient, or transforming the readers into leaders, or building up a singular aspect such as creativity or networking or motivation or purpose. The sheer volume of tips, suggestions and exhortations out there can be overwhelming and unwieldly, and the advice sometimes contradictory. What is needed is a set of core principles distilled from rigorous research, woven together into a reasonably coherent whole, and offered as a somewhat malleable framework that each of us can adapt to our own unique and personal realities and aspirations - the OWL project in a nutshell.
