How can companies provide meaning to their employees?

Work in Progress 2 - Why do we even work?

After exploring the Future of Work as a whole subject in the first documentary, the second film in the Work in Progress series looks at the different ways in which companies can provide meaning to work.

This instalment aims to understand the following key questions about working life and individual motivations:

Why do some of us like to go to work?
Why do we join one company over another?
Why do we stay in our jobs?
For what are we willing to exchange our most precious resource, our time?

You can watch the full documentary on Vimeo, Curiosity Stream or Spicee.

Transcript

Laetitia Vitaud: Why do we even work? We work to eat and to live.

Voiceover: Seriously? Is that all? Am I just working for money? I want to have fun, I want spend my days with people I love and I care about, I want to feel useful. But is it even possible within companies?

Pierre Dubuc: Money itself is not a purpose.

Christopher Miller: It’s the increasing expectation employees have that they want more out of their work life than simply a paycheck

Sean Greenwood: When you connect with a company that you feel passionate about and that you’re doing the right thing – it doesn’t feel like work

Emmanuelle Duez: What counts are quality human relationships that are authentic and not the kind of fake entrepreneurial bullshit.

Laetitia Vitaud: A great work environment today for a lot of jobs is flexibility.

Pierre Dubuc: Dozens of employees move from Paris to the countryside

Roxana Popa: It just brings together everything that I like to do in my personal time

Laetitia Vitaud: The values of craftsmanship can be compatible with being somebody’s employee

Peter Steltzner: Everyone I think has creativity in them – some people don’t maybe admit it

Pierre Dubuc: When companies were created initially it was for mission

Christopher Miller: But it also isn’t incompatible at all with growing a strong, vibrant, profitable company.

Emmanuelle Duez: I think it will pass at some point, by the answer to this question: how is business profoundly useful to the world today? To the world of tomorrow? And if we’re not able to answer this question the problem is the idea of the company will die.

Announcing our partnership

Watch the moment Claire Bonenfant, Director of SThree France, and producer Samuel Durand revealed our partnership for the second Work in Progress documentary.