I've spent years talking to leaders about purpose. CEOs, VPs, directors. People with big titles and bigger budgets. And the best definition of purposeful work I've ever heard came from someone cleaning a toilet.
Researcher Zach Mercurio was studying custodians at a university when one of them explained her Monday morning routine. "I'm cleaning this bathroom so these kids don't get sick," she said.
Not "I'm cleaning because it's my job." Not "I'm cleaning because my boss told me to." She connected the mop in her hand to the health of students she'd never meet. Two words separated her from every disengaged worker on the planet.
So... (these kids don't get sick.)
The Two-Word Reframe
Mercurio calls this the "so..." mentality. People who experience deep meaning at work do something different from the rest of us. They add two words to every task.
I'm writing this report... so my team has the clarity to move forward.
I'm reviewing this code... so our customers don't hit a wall at 2am.
I'm running this meeting... so 12 people don't waste their Tuesday morning.
These aren't affirmations. They're not motivational posters. They're a cognitive habit. And they separate people who show up from people who show up with intention.
The famous NASA janitor story makes the same point. When President Kennedy asked a custodian what he was doing, the man replied: "I'm helping put a man on the moon." He didn't see a broom. He saw a mission.
Most of us lose this somewhere between our first week and our first reorganisation.
The Epidemic Nobody Talks About
Here's the uncomfortable truth about modern work: 75% of workers feel overlooked. Thirty percent report feeling invisible at work. And global employee engagement hit its lowest point since 2020, costing the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity.
We've spent over a billion dollars on engagement programmes. Surveys. Platforms. Dashboards. And engagement keeps falling.
Mercurio's research suggests we've been solving the wrong problem. The issue isn't engagement. It's significance. People don't need another pizza party or employee-of-the-month certificate. They need to feel like they matter.
And the gap between "my work matters" and "I matter at work" turns out to be enormous. You might love teaching but feel invisible in your school. You might believe in your product but feel replaceable to your company. The work has meaning. The worker doesn't feel meaningful. Those are two different problems, and we keep treating them as one.
You Had a Purpose. Then Work Happened.
Think back to your first week at a job you loved. You knew why you were there. You understood how your work connected to something bigger.
Then six months passed. The meetings piled up. The to-do list grew. And somewhere along the way, the "so..." disappeared. The task became the point. You stopped connecting your daily grind to human impact and started connecting it to... your next meeting.
I've watched it happen to myself. I've built software for decades, and the moments where I felt most alive at work weren't the promotions or the launches. They were the moments someone told me my work changed how their team operated. Or when I saw a customer use something I'd built and it saved them hours of misery.
When those connections dried up, so did my energy.
This is what Mercurio calls "anti-mattering." Research from Gordon Flett at York University shows feeling insignificant at work triggers withdrawal, gossip, and quiet quitting. Not because people are lazy. Because people are desperate to matter and nobody is helping them make the connection.
The response to anti-mattering is telling. People either withdraw their contributions entirely or they engage in what Mercurio calls "acts of desperation." Gossip. Complaining. Stirring drama. We treat these as character problems. They're symptoms of an environment where people feel invisible.
In my own experience building Step It Up HR, I've seen this play out in every organisation I've worked with. The teams with the highest engagement don't have better perks or fancier offices. They have leaders who connect daily work to human outcomes.
Small Moments Beat Grand Gestures
Mercurio asked thousands of workers across 22 industries when they most felt they mattered at work. The answers weren't about bonuses, promotions, or awards.
It was a supervisor remembering their name.
It was someone naming what they did well in a meeting.
It was a three-minute check-in about something personal.
One leader Mercurio studied managed 27 people. Every Friday, she wrote down something personal about each team member in a notebook. Every Monday morning, she scheduled three-minute check-ins to follow up. "How did your daughter's recital go?" "Did your mum's surgery go well?"
The result? Exceptional engagement and loyalty from every person on her team.
Think about the effort involved. A notebook. Three minutes per person. No app. No platform. No annual survey with a 47-page report.
The custodian had a supervisor who once handed her the dictionary definition of her role: a person who has responsibility for or looks after something. He told her everyone in the building depended on her. She never forgot it.
One employee Mercurio interviewed put it bluntly: "Don't give me a free sandwich or certificate. Remember my name."
These aren't leadership programmes. They're not frameworks. They're moments where someone bothered to connect the dots for another human being.
The 99.5% Connection
My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad bosses. And the through line in most of those stories isn't cruelty or incompetence. It's invisibility. The boss who never noticed you. The leader who never connected your work to anything beyond the spreadsheet.
Gallup puts the cost of this at $10 trillion per year. Each percentage point of engagement loss represents approximately 21 million fewer engaged employees globally. And manager engagement itself dropped five points in a single year, meaning the people responsible for making others feel significant don't feel significant themselves.
It's a spiral. And it starts with two words nobody is saying.
Mercurio's framework for fixing this is deceptively simple. He calls it N.A.N.:
Noticed. See people. Not their output. Them.
Affirmed. Tell people what makes their contribution unique. "Good job" is not affirmation. "The way you handled the client's concern showed real patience" is.
Needed. Show people how the team would suffer without them. Not in a manipulative way. In a truthful way.
Your "So..." Exercise
Here's something I'd encourage you to try this week. Write down your five biggest tasks. Next to each one, add "so..." and complete the sentence with a human outcome.
I'm preparing this presentation... so 40 people walk away with one idea they'll use tomorrow.
I'm fixing this bug... so a teacher in Wolverhampton doesn't lose her lesson plan at 8am.
I'm answering these emails... so three people go home tonight feeling heard.
If you lead a team, ask each person to do the same exercise. You might be surprised how many of them struggle to finish the sentence. And the ones who struggle are the ones closest to checking out.
If you're struggling yourself, you're not broken. You've been doing the work without the connection. The "so..." fell away and nobody helped you find it again.
The custodian didn't need a leadership development programme to find purpose. She needed someone to help her see the line between the mop and the students.
Your team needs the same. And it costs nothing. No budget approval. No vendor selection. No six-month rollout.
Notice someone. Affirm them. Show them they're needed.
Two words. "So..."