How do some people experience work as meaningful? Organizational researcher Rachel Waldo at Lund University argues that one important answer has been largely overlooked: the brand itself.

from linked paper

These findings extend existing research about meaningful work by positioning the brand as an underexplored source of meaningfulness. Specifically, they demonstrate how brands function at a symbolic level and provide new insights into the ways they intersect with other sources of meaningfulness, including work itself, the self, and interpersonal and material relations, in the construction of meaningful work. My findings imply, for example, that meaningful work is not only shaped by employees’ work tasks and practices, but also by ideals that brands communicate and represent (Holt, 2002; Arvidsson, 2005, 2006).

What if… instead of improving the meaningfulness of work through simple material quality of life improvements for workers including especially a voice on what their work place looks like and how it functions… we just leverage the brand-meaningfulness of our employees to increase their work-meaningfulness indirectly without having to actually change anything material?