‘What do you do?’

I was at a wedding the other week and it was the question I was asked most. Not where I lived. Not whether I had children. Not what I believed in… What do you do?

Nobody needed to add ‘for work’ and they didn’t need to. At some point in time, asking what someone does for a living has become shorthand for understanding who they are.

I read recently that 9 out of 10 Gen Z and Millennial workers consider a sense of purpose important to their job satisfaction and wellbeing. I found that surprising. Not because people want their work to matter, but because of how much we now seem to expect work to provide.

In the past, more of that sense of purpose may have been found elsewhere. Religion offered shared beliefs. Local communities created belonging. Family roles were more clearly defined, even if they were not always better… Many of those structures have weakened.

In England and Wales, the proportion of people identifying as Christian fell from almost six in ten to fewer than half over a decade. Family has not disappeared, of course. It would be ridiculous to suggest people care more about a weekly status meeting than their children.

But work takes up an enormous amount of our time. It introduces us to friends, influences where we live and shapes how we describe ourselves to other people.

This growing expectation of purpose at work is interesting because, elsewhere in business, purpose has been losing credibility. For years, brand purpose was mainly aimed at consumers. Companies were encouraged to explain the higher reason they existed beyond making and selling things.

Sometimes that created distinctive businesses, but it also created a lot of emotional advertising and cringeworthy brand propositions. Banks were unlocking our financial freedom. Energy companies were powering human progress. Every new product seemed to be starting a movement.

The problem was not purpose itself. It was the attempt to make what companies did sound more meaningful than it really was.

Consumers became better at spotting the gap between what companies said and what they actually did. Brand purpose did not disappear, but people became tired of seeing it used in marketing.