Meaningful Work: The Three Things That Keep People Engaged and Performing

Learn how to build a team culture where people feel genuinely motivated, using a research-backed framework that drives engagement, reduces burnout, and improves retention.Meaningful work is not a soft concept. It is a measurable driver of productivity, engagement, resilience, and retention, and leaders have far more influence over it than most realise. Tamara Myles, co-author of Meaningful Work and professor at Boston College, has spent five and a half years researching exactly what leaders do to create it, across 25 industries and thousands of employees.Her three-C framework is the core of this episode: Community (people feel they belong), Contribution (people feel their work matters), and Challenge (people feel someone believes in their potential and invests in it). All three must be present, because they create a multiplier effect. If any one is missing, it cancels the others out.The episode is practical throughout. Tamara covers the number one meaning killer in organisations, why generational differences in engagement are more about career stage than age, and how a single well-structured one-to-one can address all three Cs at once. Clients including Google, Microsoft, and KPMG have applied this research directly.CHAPTERS00:00:00: Introduction and Tamara's research background00:04:00: Meaning versus purpose: why the distinction matters00:06:00: The number one meaning killer: values misalignment00:07:00: The three Cs: Community, Contribution, and Challenge00:11:00: Why burnout is often about impact, not workload00:12:00: The Zone of Possibility: high expectations plus high support00:16:00: Building community in hybrid and dispersed teams00:19:00: The friendship effect: why connection makes hard work easier00:21:00: How to address all three Cs in a single one-to-one00:24:00: Generational differences and what the data actually shows00:29:00: The Inside Scoop exercise for building team connection00:32:00: Leader Tamara admires: Madonna BadgerGUEST BIOGRAPHYTamara Myles is a researcher, author, and professor at Boston College, and an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is co-author of Meaningful Work and author of The Secret to Peak Productivity. Her research spans 25 industries and informs her work with organisations including Google, Microsoft, and KPMG. Her writing has been featured in Forbes and Business Insider. Find her at tamaramyles.com.#ad Editing my podcast used to be the most time-consuming part of my week. I now use Descript to edit my audio and video by simply deleting words from a transcript. It allows me to create my YouTube Shorts and TikTok clips in a fraction of the time.If you want to try it for your own projects, you can sign up here: https://get.descript.com/LevelUpUsing this link costs you nothing extra, but the small commission I receive helps support the work I do on my podcast and articles. Paid plans start at around £12 / $16 per month (billed annually) for the Hobbyist tier.Music, jingles, and images - attribution.Podcast Background Track: https://pixabay.com/users/poorartistt-45918667/Guitar Jingle: https://pixabay.com/music/introoutro-guitar-intro-ident-151972/Swoosh Sound Effect: https://pixabay.com/users/universfield-28281460/Images: https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation/ & https://www.perplexity.ai/Background: https://pixabay.com/users/tommyvideo-3092371/Thank you for watching/ listening.Follow LevelUp!Disclaimer.LevelUp and the podcast host do not endorse, verify, or take responsibility for any products, services, views, or claims presented by guests during podcast episodes. Any opinions or statements made by podcast guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or  positions of LevelUp or its representatives.© 2025 LevelUp.This episode is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/