For much of his career, Jeff Westphal was a different kind of CEO.
Sure, he’d done the typical things that mark business success: building a career at Vertex, the Montgomery County-based corporate tax software firm his father founded in 1978; helping grow that company from a small, 20-person operation to a major firm with more than 900 employees; retiring at age 55.
Listen to the audio edition here:
But he also spent hours getting to know his employees, asking them what they found meaningful about work. He helped them think deeply about their career paths and, if someone was unhappy in their current job or passionate about something else, he openly encouraged them to chart a new course — even if they were a devoted and productive member of the team.
“Life is too short,” he says. “If you really think about what you care about and it matters more to you than what you’re doing here, go do that.”
Some people took him up on his advice. One left Vertex to carve and sell decorative birds. But many more stayed. The company’s employee turnover rate was about 4.5 percent, Westphal says. Turnover rates in software, tech and IT range from 13 to 18 percent — one of the highest for any industry. The CEO’s tactic didn’t just endear him to his staff; it set him on a new path himself.
Today, Westphal — a philanthropist who has donated in particular to Drexel University — is the founder and CEO of MeaningSphere, an online coaching tool designed to help people find meaning in their careers.
In a time where 66 percent of U.S. workers report experiencing job burnout — a 10-year high — MeaningSphere could be a small step toward helping people build happier lives.
What gives life meaning?
Westphal didn’t start out intending to found a company that would help people understand what makes their jobs meaningful. At first, he thought he’d write a book and become a public speaker in his retirement to share his message. His own story of how he led Vertex is featured in Isaac Getz and Brian M. Carney’s Freedom Inc.
But as he looked at his shelves — stacked with business and psych books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and The Fifth Discipline and Synchronicity — he realized there were a lot of great books out there, but there weren’t tools that helped people understand and quantify their work-life fulfillment, and find ways to make change.
Books were fine, but he realized that in his own career it was his mentors who listened and offered feedback that encouraged him to act.
“If I hadn’t had a mentor and the opportunity to apply this learning in the real world and practice and get feedback and make mistakes, I probably wouldn’t have advanced much,” Westphal says. “I needed to create a place where people can see these larger connections and feel a sense of support.”
So, he started digging deeper into the research around what helps people find meaning at work. Early on, people tended to care about the basics — getting their first job, earning enough to move into their own apartment — but as their careers went on, they started to look for a deeper meaning. What made work meaningful differed for different people. Some wanted jobs that allowed them to feel creative; others wanted genuine connection with their coworkers; others to know they were making an impact on the lives of others.
“People need authenticity, and they’re so sick of packaged words that basically say nothing,” he says.
His vision for MeaningSphere: Create an actionable tool that helps people discover the deeper meaning in their work and that guides them through what changes they can make to help their careers be more fulfilling.
A tool for finding meaning at work
In his research, Westphal came across the work of a team of New Zealand academics who had conducted deep, cross-cultural studies into what makes our jobs meaningful and published The Map of Meaningful Work: A Practical Guide to Sustaining our Humanity. He saw the potential to use their research to create a coaching tool that would help people understand what matters to them about their work, and give them insights on how to make their work lives more fulfilling.
So, he licensed their framework and used it to create MeaningSphere. The result: A two-part system that first measures, then guides users.
“There’s huge demand for some way to not feel hopeless about work.” — Jeff Westphal
The first part of the system is the Fulfillment Indicator, a quick, free assessment tool designed to determine how well your career aligns with what gives you meaning, which Westphal compares to “stepping on the scale.” It consists of 10 questions that ask you to rank how engaged you are at work, how much independence you have in your job, whether your career gives you energy, etc. It also asks you to rate how much each category matters to you and then provides an assessment, showing how connected you feel to your job. It’s not a type indicator personality test like Myers-Briggs, because people’s relationship with work can change over their life. The Indicator gives people a sense of what’s working for them and what’s not right now.
“It’s really an invitation to just say, hey, take a few minutes for yourself if you feel like something’s not quite right at work and I’m not sure why,” says Sheri Buergey, director of meaningful experiences, culture and engagement at MeaningSphere.
The second tool, the Builder, is designed to go deeper, walking people through what matters to them, why and how they can make changes to be more fulfilled in their jobs. The Builder begins with an approximately 10 minute, 31-question online assessment to help people understand why they might be feeling unfulfilled at work. These questions are based on the New Zealand researchers’ Map of Meaning framework and measures how people from different career paths and cultures find meaning in their jobs.
Once the assessment is complete, users receive a report that helps them identify small opportunities for change so they can find more meaning in their jobs and tools to create an action plan for more major changes. It might be as small as realizing that what you truly love about work is building human connections, so you can think about having more of that in your job; or it might mean leaving a job to pursue a passion. The Builder costs $50.
It’s similar, in some ways, to tools like The Values Bridge, developed by author and NYU Stern School of Business professor Suzy Welch, to help people build more authentic relationships and make decisions based on their values.
“If I hadn’t had a mentor and the opportunity to apply this learning in the real world and practice and get feedback and make mistakes, I probably wouldn’t have advanced much.” — Jeff Westphal
The entire system took Westphal and a team of psychologists, business coaches and product designers six years to research, design and test. They hired an external research firm to run anonymous focus groups, for feedback on early concepts. There were some setbacks — a global pandemic, Westphal’s cancer diagnosis, his wife’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, needing to replatform the site — but he feels it’s been worth it for the people he can help.
“As I learned in my prior career, if something’s worth doing, you fight through the thick and thin,” he says. “I wanted to do it in a way that could support millions of people at a budget they could afford for anybody who wanted to have a more fulfilling work life.”
Helping more people build meaning
MeaningSphere, launched on October 15, is still in its early days. The company declined to share data about how many people have used the Builder and Indicator.
Right now the tool is focused on reaching individuals (as opposed to companies or groups). Westphal knows not all bosses are like he was. “Would you trust your employer to be like, I’m here to help you with the meaning of your work?” he says. Laughingly, he recalls his own time at Vertex when, “as crazy as I was about it, it was still like half the people were sitting with their arms crossed, like, what’s in it for you?”
But employers would be smart to believe in the importance of MeaningSphere’s mission. Workers who find meaning in their work are happier, and happy workers are, according to one Oxford study, 13 percent more productive. McKinsey found employee performance improved by 33 percent when workers found their jobs meaningful, and those workers were 49 percent more likely to remain with their employers.
Still, Westphal understands he’s an outlier when it comes to wanting his employees to seek fulfillment and realizes MeaningSphere is a better fit for individual seekers. “The only person who can give you meaning is you,” he says. “It’s intended to basically provide really smart mirrors that individuals can use throughout their experience to grow in their own self awareness and make better choices based upon what they truly care about.”
What’s more, “You’ve got to trust and feel safe with the organization who invites you to do this kind of thing,” Westphal says. “There’s huge demand for some way to not feel hopeless about work.”
The company does see, however, potential to connect with professional associations, university alumni associations and similar groups — which have the added advantage of giving participants opportunities to network with and support like-minded meaning seekers.
Less than two months in, MeaningSphere is focused on the U.S., through reaching people on social media and advertising via Meta and Google. Eventually, they plan to expand globally so they can reach anyone who wants to improve their work life. Westphal’s long term vision is to change the paradigm of how we think about the work we do. He hopes one day, people will ask one another how they find meaning when they’re making small talk at cocktail parties, rather than asking: So, what do you do?
Corrections: A previous version of this article stated the online assessment was one- to two-hours; it is actually 10 minutes, the one- to two-hours is the typical full MeaningSphere experience including follow up activities. The price of the Builder has also been updated.
MORE BUSINESS FOR GOOD