Mary John will be rewarded for loyalty to her job at an award ceremony next Friday at the Hilton Hotel. For her almost two decades of service and then some, she will receive applause.  A plaque.  And a Hilton dinner befit for a queen. 

My generation would probably scoff hysterically at Mary’s notion of long service. “Five years tops at one place,” is what we tell ourselves. And organisations are lucky to get us for even that!  We’d consider Mary a relic from the past, a sort of dinosauric representation of what corporate loyalty is supposed to mean. A characteristic to be admired,  perhaps, but certainly not to be emulated.  

But there was something about Mary, the 52-year old accounting professional at an oil and gas plant on the Point Lisas Estate that had me reeling from surprise. As I interviewed her for a DVD on the company’s achievements, Mary spoke about the passion that she felt for her work and the way the company had allowed her to professionally develop. She went on and on about the freedom she enjoyed on the job coupled with the responsibilities that came with it. For Mary reporting day in and day out to a desk stashed in the corner of a windowless office was a personal odyssey toward fulfillment.

Something profound has changed between that Mary’s generation and mine: we reject blind loyalty, a slow and steady climb up the corporate ladder in return for unwavering commitment is unheard of. Additionally, retirement nirvana means going on a world cruise at forty-five, not collecting a gold plated plaque at age sixty-five.

But with all my generation’s bravado, all our talk about finding success an unexpected yearning is being expressed. And it is  clear that through all the career hopping, the job switching, the MBA leave of absences, the job restlessness, all of us are searching for the very thing that Mary found in one place: career fulfillment.

But can work ever be fulfilling, given its mandatory nature? And how do we go about defining fulfilling work? And whose responsibility is it to make it fulfilling- our bosses or ours?

These are the inescapable questions that most of us are asking when we go in and out of jobs and find a similar disconnect in all of them, like my friend, a 38-year-old management professional who possessed a dream job with equally dreamy perks and questioned his decision when she was forced to work another late night at the office with an ailing mother at home.

There are those who take a different trek to fulfillment. For the brave at heart, the entrepreneurs, fulfillment means taking risks, trying new endeavours, striking out when there seems to be no give left in the system? The risktakers  leave and form their   own companies creating opportunities as they go along.

Entrepreneurs figure that there is nothing so wrong with  the economy that prevents them  from pursuing life long dreams. And even if there is, they pursue them anyway. Entrepreneurs see tons of options, all of them involving hard  work but they console themselves by saying its something they do for themselves.

For entrepreneurs, fulfilmment is in the personal stake.

But for those that decide to stick it out in the swampy waters of the corporate world career fulfillment requires a different level of awareness.

 I remember a conversation I once had with a 55-year old mentor who gave me the best advice about finding fulfilment at work. She said it was important to understand what you wanted from life, and work hard at finding a  nexus with a chosen professional path.

“It is necessary,” she said, “because we  all return to our desks and offices day in and out so trying  to understand what it is we like best about our work while performing aspects of  the job that we like and were good at, were probably the best bets to finding fulfillment on the job.”

They were wise words, I thought,  simply because they require reflection about our purpose and the kind of work we set out to do. But more than reflection her words  demand a certain amount of proactivity in finding a definition of career fulfillment.

In the early issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) this year,  there is a terrific article on the three "levers" to good work, which can be used by young professionals in finding the same sense of satisfaction Mary had- no matter if we work in windowless offices or rooms with views of the bay.

HBR states to find fulfillment young professional should have a:

Mission: Define and articulate the mission of your particular profession and whether the institution in which you work and the colleagues with whom you work carry out work that is in accordance with this mission. 

Model: Identify models of admirable workers who exemplify the kind of worker you want to become. Learn from them

Mirror: Reflect on the decisions you make and approaches you take by asking yourself two questions: Am I proud of the kind of worker I am? What actions can I take today that will allow me to truly connect with the wok I do?

No matter how we carve it, work plays an enormous part of our life, we’re at it 8 plus hours a day, we talk abut it with our mates, we complain about in our private moments and it sometimes keeps us up at night. But it can be celebrated, and not just at the end of the month. A paycheck does not necessarily correlate with job happiness.  

Is fulfillment at work necessary? Absolutely. After all, should we not ask as much from it as it asks from us?